Being & becoming as an Existential-Humanistic psychotherapist
Being & becoming as an Existential-Humanistic psychotherapist
I adore transmissions of wisdom down through the ages as guidance toward the fullest human journey possible. Intentionality plus will power gets into the actual matters of life subjectively in the face of growth objects.
To exist in communion with the miracle of being consciously aware entails responsive participation with experiences of living. There is an expansive breadth of choices for how to exist in the sublime state of nature which is moving through inevitable and ultimate creativity and destruction.
Deep reservoirs of human genius persist in the mouths of babes to the sages and scriptures etched in the mountain cave. In ageless and modern literary works humans have nourished and restored tireless seekers with informed ways toward a well lived full life. Courageousness is to face and respond actively in this mutually contingent evocative world which is simultaneously given and made. Even in the last analysis voices like Seneca, or Viktor Frankl reveal how freedom as an attitude toward life persist.
Self-reflected conscious awareness writing, combined with open-hearted communion around matters most pressing about what it means to be alive is creative of renewed vision for thriving living. Arts such as mythology provide ancestral heritage wisdom. Such original, natural world life sources activate and elevate the body-mind bridge into poetic vision and kinetic resonance of intimate, innate, embodied understanding evocatively and emotively presently available for self-realization and self-transcendence. In descriptive language, story, dance, song, and temporal contemplation exist ways of being well and free.
Through attunement with the drama and music of the penetrating play of living and being a searching soul creatively re-images how life actually is, drawing from within outwardly what is possible to become. On the proverbial procrustean bed Nietzsche presents the Apollonian spirit for reason and restraint juxtaposed with the Dionysus spirit of ecstasy and exhilaration, on a groundless beyond. A muse: art dissolves all frames. The choice to stay in contact with the over world of light and reason and the underworld of the hidden and pre/unconscious is prescient.
Truthfulness as an exercise calls forth into awareness the relationally interdependent presentation of an existentially paradoxical situation in which all are in and of, emerging from each other as one, and thus theoretically none are exiled. We live to die and die to live. At once there is separation & connection with each other and everything whatsoever. The choice to stay in contact with the over world of spirit and light and the underworld of matter and form is prescient.
Can we meet in benevolent eyes beyond egoism, stilled in and by the one watching, seeing us as an infinitely free being in the world, terrifically so with thoroughgoing terror?
How to focus on thou art of aesthetic revelation for how to exist simultaneous within an interdependent world? It is through careful attunement and responsiveness to constructive and destructive forces given to all life that I, and thus we may become more experientially free as an anxiously aware human being responsible for personal and collective presence in creation.
How did I get here in the first place to ask and answer questions such as these? To engage with in the moment awareness through participation of being present with thou-self and thou-world as much as is possible to comes by describing the experience of meaning made along the way of living life is a philosophical endeavor. A question is in part an answer in that in order to know what being and becoming an E-H psychotherapist is about it must be experienced first. The choice I made to become one is possible due to the pre-existenting pathways laid down by teachers and students is still being made by all involved now. Hardships have brought me here inasmuch as my searching for transcendence from what at the time felt unending, the would be of what is unresolved, and some always will as life is continuous, moving ahead of itself, seeking light and casting shadows over the hidden.
E-H orientation is about facing the crises of living in the world to which all are heir. There will be no shortage of problems but this is not to make joy verboten. Quite the contrary. I want to penetratingly know my part in the whole play of life. To become one with destiny and act my life out as I go along on the journey. To be become aware of what is alive in me aesthetically, relationally, and with clarity of how actually I am in reality being in truth is freeing. Then I can be attuned to how joyous living is, in what and where the feeling resides, offering in earnest incantations to enjoy the world.
In the ‘Courage to Create’ Rollo May posits a human capacity for daemonic and creative power through the intentionality of wishing and willing into existence values which are inherently part of a human nature always as an entire life force being founded in the world. The valuable parts of living and being in the world for humans inform cultural norms of an epoch, each period adaptively, and eventually maladaptively when change is restricted. An infection can be death defying, or harbinger of death if not harmonized, healed, and integrated into homeostasis.
On the social level May warns of the dangers in automaton conformity. So does Friedrich Nietzsche’s description of human herd animal. Both posit an existential variety of neurotic anxiety about the fact of being alive in the time of postmodernity, when rapid changes occur in geopolitics, identity, and annihilation in nuclear threat, or ecological collapse through human activity. Collapsing from within, the herd animal and automaton are leveled down to the lowest ontological status—from which is also a bridge to the brightest alive taken from the angle of focusing on collective healing and growth. Both philosophers point out the deepest pillars in which the human spirit of ubermench remains deeply resolved. Alienation from the world and deep contact with the state of humanities sublime nature has reined since the dawn of the Christian theology—a kind of mythology that still threatens to level the rising and depths of spirit today, so too in the movement of transhumanism outlined by Kirk J. Schneider in the Spirituality of Awe.
I am still learning my part is this whole play of life as a son, intimate partner, neighbor, human animal, and an existential therapist. The latter role makes viable my economic survival, a creative profession in the application of arts, science, psychology, and philosophy. These realms of inquiry are assistive in confronting the sameness of being born into a preexisting community within the increasingly global interconnections across innumerable cultures, minds, and lived experience with differences in personality expression, all of which is at once wonderfully profound, humbling, disorienting, and a terrifically terrifying experience.
I aspire to be emotionally available for working through to understand paradox in sameness and difference in human development. I trust there is a greater capacity for harmonic human resonance within shared difference. This attitude is needed considering the long history of conflict between the ruling class take over of free minded bodies and land through vicious restrictions of natural resources necessary for survival, and driving competitiveness of a type that is genocidal and warring. I face these stark realities as an attempt to free all willing to transcended human made hellscapes (thank heaven there are many).
Every choice I make not to contribute to further destruction of our biological and sociological world matters. I am learning how to meet the world anew with virgin eyes, open heart, wiser mind and body willing to feel how best to respond with care toward every phenomena encountered within and outside me.
This entails active forestall of the spirit of hubris and narcissus represented in calcified attitudes such as “might is right”. The exception is when a life is dangerously threatened. To intervene may be permissible, not always clear when and how though. In the cannon of existentialism there are keys for wise discernment. So too yoga! And a myriad of other bonafide human technologies for healing. I hope to be self-aware enough to choose beneficence and safety whenever possible, or at least to hold solid a boundary to not participate in conflict beyond what absolutely is necessary to create well-being. I have much to learn and grow into for facing together more fully a capricious world where all have a part in turn, each moment of every day. Beneath my limited perceptions lay deep liberating truths to be explored which I believe are uniting and undividing.
