Being & Becoming an Existential-Humanistic Psychotherapist

Being & Becoming an Existential-Humanistic Psychotherapist

Guidelights of Wisdom

I adore the transmissions of wisdom passed down through the ages as guide lights toward the fullest human experience possible. Wish, limits, inspiration, death, passion, sorrow, vision, imagination, intentionality, liberation, contingency, will, and cataclysm are in direct relationship with what actually matters about living life; one’s own presence is always involved in the process of working with these subjective-growth-objects—what I deem the personal accent upon which one acts to shape the material and spiritual aspects of reality.

To exist in communion with the miracle of conscious awareness entails directed responsive participation with lived experience. There is a vast range of ways to exist in sublime state of nature—where inevitable cycles of creativity and destruction, untold and told, unfold in the world toward the paradox of infinite possibility within finitude, within worldly matters and personality alike, what Rollo May (1975) posits as the daemon. The latter correlates to what has throughout time been understood to be that existence is an expansive-constrictive continuum, for everything and everyone.

Deep reservoirs of human genius persist, from the mouths of babes to the words of sages, etched into mountain caves and modern literature alike. Across time, humans have nourished and restored fellow seekers with pathways toward a well-lived life. The courage to live life entails facing and responding to the mutually contingent evocative world which is both given and made. Even in the final analysis, voices like Seneca (65 AD) and Viktor Frankl (1946) remind us that freedom as a way of existing persists unconditionally.

Arts, Myth, and the Poetic Body

The practice of self-reflective writing, coupled with open-hearted communion around the most pressing matters of what it means to be alive offers renewed vision for vibrant living. Mythology and the arts carry ancestral wisdom, activating the body–mind bridge and evoking a poetic resonance—the kinetic understanding of what it means to be alive. Through story, dance, song, and contemplative presence, modes of being well and free reveal.

Through attunement with the music and drama of life’s penetrating play, a searching soul creatively re-images new depths of reality—drawing from within the seeds of what is and what is possible to come. The Nietzsche’s Apollonian spirit of order and reason, and Dionysian spirit of ecstasy and preconscious live side by side in paradox on groundless terrain; the muse of art dissolves all frames. Choosing to remain in contact with the over-world of light and reason, and the underworld of unconsciousness and hidden is perhaps a, if not the most, prescient stance.

Interdependence and the Paradox of Existence

Truthfulness beckons an awareness of the relationally interdependent nature of existence—a paradox where all emerge from and return to each other, and thus, in theory, none are exiled. We live to die and die to live. There is always both separation and connection with each other and with everything. The choice to remain attuned to both spirit and form, light and shadow, is vitalizing.

I ask and intend to find out: can we meet each other through benevolent eyes of the heart, stilled beyond egoism, held by the observant oneness—the infinitely free being in and of the world, enlivened simultaneously by wonder and terror? I ask also: how do we focus on the “thou art” of aesthetic revelation in an interdependent world? Through attunement and responsiveness to the constructive and destructive forces present in all of life, I—and thus we—may become more experientially free, as anxiously aware beings responsible for personal and collective presence in creation.

The Path to Becoming

Another question: how did I arrive here, asking and answering questions such as these? To engage in present-moment awareness through participation with self and world is a philosophical endeavor. The act of describing the experience of meaning-making along the way is how one lives into such questions. To know what it means to be and become an existential-humanistic psychotherapist is to live it.

The choice I made to become an existential therapist—to inquire and make contact with the ground of being—is possible because of the paths laid down by teachers and students before me, and it is a choice continually remade through the ever deepening process of presence. Hardships brought me here, as did a longing for transcendence from suffering that once felt unending. Some of what is unresolved may always be so—life continues, always moving ahead of itself, casting shadows while reaching toward the light.

Facing the Crises of Living

The existential-humanistic orientation is about facing the crises of living that all inherit. There will never be a shortage of problems—but this does not mean that joy is forbidden. Quite the contrary. I want to know—deeply—my part in the play of life, to face and move through what is and can no longer be. I want to become one with destiny, to act out my part as I journey through.

To become aware of what is most alive in me—emotionally, aesthetically, relationally—and to face how I am actually being, in truth, is freeing. Then, I can attune to the joy of living, become aware of rising and descending currents, and be with what psychologist Kirk Schneider (2004, 2008, 2017) refers to as the fluid center—an immediate, profound sense of relatedness and adaptiveness with all of existence. Thus may I, in turn, offer up sincere incantations of appreciation to worlds and lives of all.

Creativity and Cultural Renewal

In The Courage to Create, Rollo May presents humanness of the daemonic as creative capacity: the intentionality to wish and will into existence values that are inherently interwoven in and out of human nature. These values give ground to and shape cultural norms which evolve adaptively—until they do not, as life is constant flux.

When change is suppressed, values rigidify into maladaptive systems. Like a fever or infection, the emergence of discord can either catalyze renewal, or become a harbinger of collapse—unless harmonized, healed, and integrated into the paradoxical renewal of temporary homeostasis.

Socially, May (1953) warns against the numbing dangers of automaton conformity. Nietzsche similarly critiques the “herd animal”—numbed of natural vitality through the inheritance of power to directly affect, and therefore be affected by, the world. Both thinkers expose a neurotic anxiety deeply embedded in the modern human condition, marked by identity crises, geopolitical unrest, ecological collapse, and existential threat.

And paradoxically, this collapse may also become a bridge to the highest possibility of human becoming—if focus is sufficiently poised upon the sources and revelation of intentional, co-creative actions in healing renewal.

Alienation and the Spirit of Awe

Alienation from the world and estrangement from the self have reigned at least since the rise of authoritarianism—a profound mythology only amplified in the enlightenment period that is about the dangers of basing human life on knowledge alone which has become a dogmatic system of blind faith that can on its destructive, over reaching aspect, flatten the heights and depths of human spirit. This tension is echoed today in transhumanism, as Kirk Schneider describes in The Spirituality of Awe: a movement both hopeful and cautionary, urging the reawakening of our most sublime humanity in daily life.

Learning My Place

I am still learning my place in the vast play of life—as son, intimate partner, neighbor, human animal, and so-called existential therapist. The latter role makes viable my economic survival while providing a vocation that weaves together passions for art, science, psychology, and philosophy.

These realms of human spirit support me in facing the shared reality of being born into an already-existing, increasingly global community of interconnected cultures, minds, and experiences. The vast differences in how personality expresses across humanity are both humbling and terrifying—also a profound invitation.

I aspire to be emotionally present in working through the paradox of sameness and difference in human development. I trust in humanities potential for harmonic resonance within shared difference. This is an attitude born of necessity, given the long history of domination, land theft, and exploitation of free beings by ruling or private-enterprising classes.

Responding with Care

I choose to face reality with the intentionality of being free and freeing all who are willing to transcend the human-made hellscapes. (Thankfully, there are many of us.) 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, an open heart, and a wiser mind and body—willing to feel into the best ways to respond with care to whatever arises within or around me. This includes resisting the spirit of hubris and narcissism represented by the calcified creed that “might makes right.” The exception, then, is when a life is directly and dangerously threatened; then, intervention may be permissible—though discerning how and when is not always clear, and paradoxically wider and simpler than commonly imagined. Existential philosophy provides keys to wise discernment about what is good for one and the whole of life. So, too, does yoga—and a myriad of human technologies for healing, health, and restoration.

Toward Liberating Truths

I intend be self-aware enough to choose beneficence and safety whenever possible—or at least to hold a clear boundary that does not perpetuate conflict beyond what is absolutely necessary for well-being. I have much to learn and grow into as I join others in facing the world of magnificence, where all have in their turn a part to play in every moment of every day.

Beneath my limited perceptions lie deep, liberating truths still to be explored—truths I believe are ultimately uniting and undividing.

References

Schneider, K. J., & Krug, O. T. (2017). Existential–Humanistic Therapy (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association.

Schneider, K. J. (2008). Existential-integrative psychotherapy: Guideposts to the core of practice. Routledge.

May, R. (1953). Man’s search for himself. W. W. Norton.

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)

May, R. (1994). The courage to create. W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1975)

Nietzsche, F. (2002). Beyond good and evil (J. Norman, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1886)

Schneider, K. J. (2016). The spirituality of awe: Challenges to the robotic revolution (Rev. ed.). University Professors Press.

Seneca. (2018). How to die: An ancient guide to the end of life (J. Romm, Trans.). Princeton University Press.