What is the meaning of your life? Existential Hypnotherapy could help you to find it and live it
I often sit down with a client and as they begin to explain their reasons for coming it becomes increasingly clear that their life has lost a sense of meaning. ‘Why am I here?’, ‘what’s my purpose now that my marriage / career / has ended or my children gone from home?’
Often, in midlife, people review what has gone before and compare it to what they’d hoped would come. Our midlife realities can sometimes fall short of the youthful ideal and as we sense youth slipping away we can launch into one final bid to recapture that sense of permanence, vitality and energy. This is the ‘midlife crisis’.
It’s what many people call an ‘existential crisis’. As we move from one stage of life to another we can often encounter crises when such questions arise. Even teenagers (as mothers of such types will understand) will go through such phases as they crash up against the tide of oncoming adulthood and struggle to adjust to their emerging independence.
Is there meant to be a point to anything in life?
Meursault, hero of Camus’ novel “The Stranger” is unjustly condemned to death. As he awaits his execution he realises how absurd, how meaningless the universe truly is.
He finds in this fact a comfort, for the universe’s very meaninglessness grants us the freedom through which to find our own truth. We are masters of our own meaning. Make of your existence what you will! As for how Meursault faces his own inescapable doom, you’ll have to read the book for yourself.
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
Some of my clients find that hypnotherapy in Wallingford, Reading, London, Thame and Oxford can help them to find that meaning to life which motivates, invigorates and gives purpose to their existence.
Perhaps I could help you to find a why. You can then learn to cope with the ‘how’. In time you’ll learn to take back control and so create your own ‘how’.
Meet with me, work with me and we’ll find a way. Keep on doing what you’re doing and nothing will change.
Mussolini said that it is better to live a day as a lion than a year as a lamb. Perhaps, if you live as a lion you’ll use your strength to live longer than a day. Take back control. Hypnotherapy could help you.
Are you simply drifting through life?
Most people, perhaps, pass through life without giving it too much thought. For some, however, the meaning of life acquires a significance which money, success, power doesn’t fill. Sometimes this comes quite early or late in life. For others it can take the form of the dreaded ‘midlife crisis’. It’s here where hypnotherapy could step in and help fill a void.
Have you reached the end of a career, only to find that the rest of your life stretches before you and feels empty of purpose? Have you hit your forties and wonder what you’ve done (and will do) with your life? Has a divorce or the empty-nest syndrome knocked you for six? If so hypnotherapy could help.
Some will find the absence of a God, of an ultimate truth, a catastrophe. If life is finite, if life has no meaning, what’s the point? Why bother getting up in the morning?
Well, if you have no God then you have ultimate freedom. You can decide for yourself. What is important to you? Is it money, power, sex?
Is it a sense of vocation, helping others, writing, art or love?
Is family and its happiness the object which will motivate you to get up each and every morning?
Is it this, or another motivation which will help you to see your way through each hardship and incidence of adversity which would otherwise cause you to cash your chips and fail?
Whatever it may be, you can construct your own meaning of life. You can take responsibility for your own happiness and contentment. It can be, perhaps, more of a liberation than a sentence.
Take back control.
Step by step and day by day you could learn to discover and harness your strengths.
Step by step and day by day you could begin to build a life which you’ll recognise as being a life worth living.
Begin by discovering the ‘why’ and you’ll then begin to find you very own ‘how’.
Viktor Frankl and logotherapy explains how and why this is all important
Viktor Frankl was a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz. Whilst there he noticed that some people would soldier on and survive the experience whilst others would seemingly give up, sink and succumb to despair. When this happened, he observed, death soon followed.
He established that those people who had some sense of a greater meaning to life had something to cling to when all else had left them. These people survived because they had a greater cause to motivate them. Those who gave up and died did so, he believed, because they had lost this motivating source.
It does make sense, I believe. We have all heard about people who lived to an old age and yet died within days or weeks of their spouse. Their meaning to life had died with this spouse. The Japanese have a word for such a reason to get up and out of bed. It’s called ‘Ikygai’ and if you have it, your life feels purposeful, meaningful and it’s this which helps to keep some of them (particularly in Okinawa) living way beyond their three score and ten.
Publicans and teachers, I once read, used to be well-known for dropping dead soon after retirement. Their sense of vocation meant that retirement robbed them of their whole identity. Having a sense of purpose keeps us alive. Having something to work towards, or even just to nurture, is good for our health.
It would appear, therefore, that we all need – or at least could benefit from – a sense of meaning beyond the mere act of surviving from day to day. Existential hypnotherapy could help you realise what this meaning might be.
What is it which gets you up in the morning?
We all need a reason to get up in the morning, to strive, to live. A divine truth works for a good many people. If it doesn’t work for you, however, it needn’t mean endless existential angst. You can find happiness and meaning in a finite life and in a meaningless universe. If you can’t, you will.
Call me on 07786 123736 to find out more. Alternatively you could email me at paul@resolvedhypnotherapy.co.uk or simply use the form below.
Life, when it has a purpose, has a direction. When it has a direction then we can know our goals and we can break them into achievable bite-sized chunks. We can then make progress towards achieving, consolidating or simply enjoying the full pleasure of our existence. Together we can help you to rediscover your sense of purpose, your direction and the energy with which to pursue your goals.
You deserve better than to suffer the depression and anxiety of simply drifting through life without drive, purpose and ambition. You deserve, just as much as everybody else, to have the best possible chance of achieving contentment and peace in this life. Renew your zest for life with hypnotherapy!
Best wishes
