Yãy Hã Miy: To Imitate Oneself to Transcend Oneself
Yãy Hã Miy: To Imitate Oneself to Transcend Oneself
By Jackson Cionek – Brain Bee Ideas / Inosciência
Introduction – When the body learns before thought
When I observe human learning, I notice that before understanding, the body imitates.
Before the word, there is gesture. Before theory, there is movement.
Learning is, above all, mirroring the world — and only afterward, reflecting on it.
Among the Maxakali, this principle is called Yãy Hã Miy:
“to imitate oneself in order to transcend oneself.”
It is the way the body transforms inwardly while representing something outwardly.
Modern neuroscience has begun to rediscover this ancestral truth: imitation is not mere mimicry — it is the biological foundation of empathy, faith, and creativity.
1. The brain that learns through imitation
Imitation is one of the mind’s oldest functions.
Mirror neurons, discovered in the late 20th century, show that observing an action activates the same neural networks responsible for performing it.
In other words, to watch is to rehearse.
The body learns before the intellect does.
In ancestral cultures, this was obvious:
children were not instructed through explanation but through presence and repetition.
Wisdom was embodied.
Language came later — as the echo of practice.
This process relates deeply to what I call neural faith —
the physiological trust that allows the body to repeat until mastery without requiring conceptual belief.
Faith, in this sense, is an electrical disposition — the brain trusting its own capacity to learn.
2. Neural faith: bioelectrical confidence in doing
Faith is not belief in the invisible but confidence that the gesture will complete itself.
Every instance of high performance emerges from this neural faith: the body acts without hesitation.
During learning, dopaminergic circuits strengthen synaptic connections;
once mastery is reached, dopamine decreases — and action becomes pure.
At that point, fruição (flowful enjoyment) appears.
Action unfolds without expectation, without calculation.
Electrical synapses, faster and more direct, replace dopaminergic motivation.
The individual acts without thinking, and thought returns only afterward — as memory of something sacred.
3. Yãy Hã Miy and the transcendence of the self
When a Maxakali says “to imitate oneself,” it does not mean to copy — it means to embody.
The hunter does not imitate the animal — he becomes the animal before the hunt.
Imitation is the portal of transcendence.
Neuroscience describes this as embodied simulation:
by simulating the other, the brain reorganizes its perception of the self.
The boundary between “I” and “world” dissolves, and consciousness expands.
This is what I call existential metabolism —
the body reorganizing energy, emotion, and meaning to act in resonance with the whole.
4. Zone 2 – the space of active transcendence
In my research, I interpret Yãy Hã Miy as a physiological mechanism for moving between Zone 1 and Zone 2:
Zone 1: the body in intentional action, guided by executive attention;
Zone 2: the body in fruição — acting without expectation.
In Zone 2, dopamine yields to electrical synchrony.
Action becomes pure, silent, precise.
It is the moment when the body itself becomes knowledge.
Performance ceases to be conquest and becomes communion.
This is the transcendence described by the Maxakali — the instant when the individual is no longer the author of the action, but the conduit through which the collective — ancestral, natural, spiritual — acts.
5. The Extended Yãy Hã Miy – from individual faith to collective intelligence
If each body is an energetic field that learns through imitation, an entire society can synchronize its learning.
This is what I call the Extended Yãy Hã Miy:
imitation as a mechanism of social coherence that transmits values, gestures, and ways of being in the world.
When a group synchronizes — a dance circle, a hunting tribe, a choir breathing together — the phenomenon known as inter-brain coupling emerges:
brains align their rhythms, waves, and emotions.
In that state, belonging is not ideological — it is physiological.
The entire group functions as a single conscious body, and each individual becomes a Zone 2 nested within the whole.
Observation – On Soul and Spirit
In my framework, Soul and Spirit express different layers of the same continuum between body, memory, and emotion.
Inspired by the Yanomami worldview:
Spirit (Utupe or Xapiri) represents semantic memory — the invisible record of knowledge and form, the structure of lived experience.
Soul (Pei Utupe) is the embodied spirit, when those memories unite with emotion and become living experience.
Within the context of Yãy Hã Miy, imitation is the process through which spirit becomes soul —
the passage from idea to gesture, from image to body, from memory to action.
Transcendence, therefore, is not abandoning the body but living the spirit through the body.
Every conscious gesture is a moment in which spirit breathes through flesh, and the soul recognizes itself as presence.
Conclusion – To transcend is to remember the collective body
To imitate oneself is to remember that knowledge is born from the body.
To transcend oneself is to return to the body the right to act without fear.
Yãy Hã Miy is the path of neural faith, electrical synchrony, and the communion of gesture and spirit.
When the body relearns as the ancestors did — through listening, doing, and surrender —
consciousness rediscovers what it has always been:
the dance between self and whole, between feeling and being.
Post-2020 References
Rizzolatti G. & Sinigaglia C. (2021). The Mirror Mechanism: A Basic Principle of Brain Function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 22(8), 557–566.*
→ Updates the role of mirror neurons as the foundation of empathy and learning through imitation.Gallese V. (2020). Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal Experience. Neuropsychologia, 149, 107645.*
→ Proposes embodied simulation as the basis of feeling and intersubjective consciousness.Northoff G. (2022). The Spontaneous Brain: From Mind–Body to World–Brain Relation. Cambridge University Press.
→ Explores self-transcendence as a reorganization of bodily and neural flows.Hari R. & Kujala M.V. (2021). Brain Basis of Human Social Interaction: From Imitation to Empathy. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 44, 55–77.*
→ Demonstrates the role of imitation and neural synchrony in the emergence of empathy.Czeszumski A. et al. (2022). Hyper-Brain Networks in Joint Action: Coupled Brains Create Collective Intelligence. Nature Human Behaviour, 6, 1128–1140.*
→ Shows that synchronized brains generate collective intelligence.Hogeveen J. et al. (2023). Dopamine, Learning, and the Mirror System. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(2), 118–134.*
→ Links dopaminergic systems and imitation in regulating motivation and social learning.
Brain Bee Synthesis:
Yãy Hã Miy is the bridge between doing and being.
Neural faith is the energy sustaining action without hesitation.
The soul is spirit vibrating through the body.
And high performance is simply the body remembering — with ancestral love —
how to act as what it has always been.
