Existential Psychology: “What is the meaning of life?”
Adapted from: https://img.buzzfeed.com
“Who am I? Where do I come from? What am I going to do? Where am I going?” That’s what the security asked me.
This is the last time this first time is going to happen: me capturing the last fragments that are fleeting moments of our encounters and putting them into words. So that these moments will die, and live again with every reading of this piece.
Adapted from: https://livingchapters.files.wordpress.com
Moments about understanding love and its paradoxes.
‘How do you love a family you did not choose?’ ‘How do you do you love a spouse who longed for a different paradise?’
Questions of filiality, piety and love, their weights, and the wars they wage on each other. That there are no given answers to these questions, but to love the questions themselves, and trust that we will one day grow and mature into the answers themselves.
Moments about our own moments of isolation and its many forms.
Where we contemplate about our isolation from other beings (interpersonal isolation), isolation from our own essence of being by shutting up our desires and dreams (intrapersonal isolation), and isolation from the rest of the world after confronting death and freedom (existential isolation).
‘It is difficult to talk about the one thing we do absolutely alone, that is death.’
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Death is the one journey that all of us are headed to, yet it is the most lonely one. What do we make of this? How do we rebuild the bridge between the world and our core of being? How do we stop stiffing our ugly parts and trust ourselves again?
Perhaps life is a journey of understanding freedom and death, guided by our own defined purpose. Existential psychology comes in when we lose that in the pursuit for worldly matters: we rediscover our passion for life, reclaim our choices and wishes, and reconnect with the rest of the world.
Moments about pain
Pain, and its value. Along with the things we do to devalue it.
Adapted from: http://isha.sadhguru.org/
We are reminded that pain has its purpose: to orient and direct us towards reality. Pain, sadness and suffering shapes us, and it allows us to appreciate the fleeting joys in the world.
‘There are some things in this world and life worth suffering for.’
Pains makes us happy and content, because it teaches us that we can handle it and endure it.
Moments about talent and identity formation
Every skill is a talent, not every talent is a skill.
Talent is characterized by this sense of predictability and being part of something bigger than the self. But yet talent alone does not always leads us to success.
Adapted from: https://saboteur365.files.wordpress.com
Talent requires clear goals and purpose to blossom, and it requires our own awareness of it to lead to meaning.
‘Meaning means the answer to “so what?” ‘
That answer will become a value to us and shape our identities. We guard it and therefore become more responsible for our own lives. To do so, each of us have to connect to this existence with our own unique patterns, shaped by our different potential, capabilities and personalities.
Moments about boredom and hope
Adapted from: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/
Boredom is when time seems to stop. Where there is apparently no hope, no meaning in looking forward to tomorrow.
‘When boredom develops into a habit and a character trait, a person no longer sees meaning in the life he is engaging with.’
Those who are habitually bored feel empty and devoid of purpose as their past strengths are gone and nothing has come to replaced them.
There is one way out: tying hope to action.
Hope reminds us that tomorrow has to be better than today and keeps us aiming for the future. It is the emotion that tells us that there is something in the future that is worth devoting the present for.
Moments about schizophrenia
‘All of us are schizophrenic to a certain degree. We all have our own small personal delusions.’
And moments on postmodernism and Taoism in therapy
‘Restore life to its original complexity.’
We spend years of training trying to know everything. Trying to grasp at the truths. Trying to be our own gods.
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But what do we do when the rules of the social world changes all the time? What if the truth about the human condition is there is no absolute truth?
Someone is always going to be left out of the party for every ‘truth’ and ‘law’ we posit. It’s time we reevaluate the need for evidence-based, ‘strong’ therapy. It’s time therapists let go for the need of absolute truth and focus on the client’s own narration, to be ‘weak’.
Weak is not a weakness.
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“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.” – Lao Tzu
The best therapy is like water, where the client does not know it’s even there.
A meaningful dialogue with the world
Adapted from: http://www.aljazeera.com/
All of these moments convey one message, that our different worlds are not meant to devour each other, but to connect and be with each other. To feel our beings and walk this speck of rock floating in space, with our flesh, mind and purpose, side-by-side.
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