About Mielenlaulu
Psychologist Service Mielenlaulu equals me, Hilla Väyrynen.
I’m a licensed psychologist living in Toijala, Finland. My professional licence can be verified in JulkiTerhikki. I’m also a theatrical sound designer.
Mielenlaulu is founded on a desire for flexible mental health care that understands non-conforming traits and life paths, resists labels and oversimplification, and looks at life through a multidimensional lens through which the scientific and the experiential worlds can coexist without contradicton.
On this page, I outline my professional approach and background.
Why “Mindsong”?
What really moves me in psychologist’s work is how one-of-a-kind people are. It feels like everyone has their own song, with a completely unique tone, rhythm, story, and emotional quality. I really enjoy listening to those songs.
It can be difficult to recognize beauty and value in your own song through all the pain that’s woven into it. Or to hear it at all. Another person needs to hear it first.
The psychotherapist and author Sheldon B. Kopp writes, “Take from no man his song.”
This is my core value, too.
Everyone has their own (sometimes mysterious to others) ways of growing, moving forward, experiencing meaning and inspiration, connecting, and belonging. Our songs are delicate. Cherishing them is so important.
Every song can be heard.
Everyone belongs in this world.
My professional approach and philosophy
As a psychologist, I’m calm, empathetic, analytical, and philosophical. I like to give the client space. I see the human being as a complex whole whose inner world always strives to organize itself purposefully and continues to develop through life.
My perspectives rely on evolutionary, neurocognitive, and phenomenological approaches. In other words, I think that all our experiences have (a vast multitude of) causes, linked not only to our individual development, but also that of the broader, interdependent continuum of life on Earth. Our brains and bodies lay the foundations for our inner world and regulate it, yet our mind is more than the sum of its parts.
We can explore land and sea and even go into space, but we can never visit the world outside our consciousness, ever. It’s always involved. All our perceptions are formed on our mind’s and our environment’s shared surface.
Our innate ability to integrate all kinds of information, try out perspectives, create meaning, and give value (my favourite!), gives rise to the reality we can access. That is, the map that we follow when we act in the actual world. Awareness of these processes makes us more flexible and resilient, less trapped and reactive. Our mind feels more familiar, safer. Sometimes messy, but hey, it’s home.
I think that mindfulness skills, embodiment, and practices that help us understand ourselves as part of a bigger picture (for example through spirituality, science, or art), can offer valuable and pragmatic tools for psychological well-being and maturity. And I believe that, by proxy, also the well-being of the world outside, with other living beings whose inner worlds are as rich and sensitive as ours.
This is why getting intimate with consciousness is so meaningful to me. Being touched is powerful. Sticking with wondering for a while, not rushing into knowing too soon, can give much meaningful perspective.
About me
Before becoming a psychologist, I worked as a freelance sound designer and composer in theatre and puppet theatre for over a decade. I’m originally from Oulu, and after that, a graduate of the former puppet theatre department of the Turku Arts Academy.
Art provides an experiential language to understand and model the peculiar creature that is a human being, in ways that words can’t reach. For me as a child, it meant imaginative, dreamlike worlds I tumbled into in art museums or with my Walkman on. They were filled with bottomless, ineffable emotions. They felt arresting, like home, and communicated that the experiential world is shared. This comforted and encouraged me a lot as a teenage oddball. At 14, while spending four hours at a Yoko Ono exhibition at Tennispalatsi, I decided to become a professional artist, too.
After high school, I went to study puppet theatre because I couldn’t choose and reasoned that puppet theatre would have everything. It did, and more; an actively creative gaze with which mundane things got a rich variety of associative meanings, and lifeless objects seemed to have a mind, emotional states and personality traits. It was novel, thrilling, and somewhat rebellious. It still is. The core question was, what makes us intuit inner life and feel empathy.
Over the years, sound design and music became my favourite field within puppet theatre. It fascinates me how sound colours perception, bridges external and internal space, generates shared imagery, and synchronizes people. It’s like an injection of pure emotion.
In my thirties, psychology studies at the University of Turku expanded on the question of what it means to be alive and human with scientific perspectives. Science gave the elusive mind some grounding context and a language to distinguish where different kinds of knowledge come from and what their their limits are. The mind became bounded to the body, the brain, and the nervous system, and revealed laws in its own function, yet it never shrunk. I was (am) delighted by people’s diversity in personality, perception, and information processing. "Normal" was no longer a value judgment but a measure of probability.
Ultimately, I was most swept away by consciousness research, in which cognitive and neuroscience meet phenomenological philosophy. I see consciousness as a natural phenomenon and nature itself as nothing short of wondrous. Mindfulness is important for me both professionally and personally. I practice Zen and regularly attend meditation retreats.
I’m a member of academic research networks of consciousness studies and altered states of consciousness:
The Finnish Association for Psychedelic Research,
The Association For The Scientific Study Of Consciousness, and
Site credits
Photography: Sami Reivinen / Valokuvaamo KLIK
Other materials: Hilla Väyrynen
Quote from Sheldon B. Kopp’s book If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! – The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients (1972)
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