Focus on Meaning: Your Key to Health and Wellbeing

Is your life driven by your obsessions with pleasure or power? (Viktor Frankel) Is your life focused exclusively on daily survival and materialistic concerns? This blog offers you an opportunity to ponder your life’s purpose through different directional lenses. Can we penetrate the illusive faux veneer of our cultural materialistic surface and discover how its promises disappoint and ultimately fail us?

If we penetrate to richer depths within, we may discover that a meaningful life may be the most critical puzzle piece to establishing good health, longevity, higher quality of life and absence of depression or other symptoms – results correlated by research psychologists to a meaningful life. What are the components of a life of meaning? The answer is uniquely personal, yet the topic, studied by psychologists and influential thinkers, offer us important considerations.

The key areas of relationship and meaningful occupation (creativity, rich pursuits or hobbies) are the mainstays of meaning. “Almost every problem that’s brought into therapy,” states Clara Hill, PhD, author of “Meaning in Life: a Therapist’s Guide (APA, 2018) “is implicitly about the meaning of life.” (p. 40)

In a recent edition of Monitor on Psychology, a publication of the American Psychological Association, an article entitled “The Search for Meaning” (October 2018), provides us with expert consensus. Most psychologists believe that when these three components are in place we can experience meaning:

• That you feel your life makes sense and has continuity.
• That you are directed and motivated toward meaningful goals.
• That you believe your existence matters to others. (p.40)

When crisis thwacks hard and loudly at our door, we are catapulted dramatically toward re-evaluation. If our lives have been threatened by illness, loss — calamities of all sorts — we are forced to re-evaluate how we have been living. We may look with horror at the meaninglessness and emptiness of our historic focus.

Even without a literal crisis, we may have an existential awakening and realize we must choose differently or risk a debilitating ennui reflective of our soulless life.  Does our preoccupation with others, deferring out of intimidation or underlying abandonment fears result in a contactless relationship to our life’s purpose? We end up dried out as we have sacrificed our juice to others, because deep down we were afraid.

The writing of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and author of “Man’s Search for Meaning” (1946) has been influential in the conversation about meaning. He was in four Nazi concentration camps and lived to write on the topic. He emphasizes the importance of finding meaning over societally idealized illusions of pleasure or power. He encouraged his clients to focus less on themselves and more on higher level goals such as helping others. (p. 41) I want to emphasize this aspect – the gratification of giving back, taking responsibility for our larger community concerns and finding concrete ways to contribute, that in a circular fashion gives so much back to you. This way of life has heart and soul in it.

Paul T.P. Wong, PhD, Trent University, Ontario, Canada, has written extensively on the question of meaning. Wong helps people balance the positive and negative elements of life by “helping them assume personal responsibility and encouraging pursuit of goals or activities that are greater than themselves.” (p.41)

What can you do to bring your life into alignment with your true Self that insists on meaning and purpose beyond day-to-day survival considerations? Your true Self has whispered or shouted at you since you very young showing you what you loved, gravitated toward, were talented in and inclined to do. You may not have been allowed or encouraged to listen. If parents didn’t model purpose, it would be harder to place value on a meaningful life.

Remember though you must create this opportunity by handling your affairs responsibly so you are actually able to move up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

The take-home messages are to develop insight and take action:

• Understand your life story, the unique twists and turns that brought you to where you are now. Your honest appraisal can clarify the things that need to change, while compassionately reckoning with how you got to where you are. Initiate your life review NOW.
• Learn to see the opportunities afforded by difficult situations and develop resilience toward suffering.
• As you look honestly at yourself, consider making critical shifts in both your internal and external landscape. Ask yourself open-ended questions to uncover meaning-related aspirations. (Frankel, p.41)
• Make bigger and bolder decisions about your life.

If you want to help politically: make a difference with climate change, help children in need – DO IT IMMEDIATELY. If you know your current relationship is dying, make significant changes or end it. Engage actively in what matters to you.

• If you know you need and want to change careers or start a business – “back yourself” and move forward.
• If you have longed to paint, sculpt, write, sing and create – take it seriously. You can sign up for classes, find a mentor, buy supplies and begin NOW.
• Allow your heart’s desires to take a central role in your life.
• Become the person you are proud to be.
• Take all opportunities to be kind to another. Mindfully cultivate a loving attitude as a daily moment-by-moment practice. Anyone, anytime, anyplace — implement kindness and generosity.
• Realize that simple tasks and simple events done mindfully create meaning and purpose. Do not impose overly lofty goals.

It is important to step back and view the bigger picture of your life. Explore your options in a deeply feeling way so you can gain insight and connect with what really matters. Set up a structure for implementation.

This process may bring hot tears, painful humility and sweet compassion for yourself and others. Don’t live with regrets — the time is now.