How to Find Meaning In Your Life | Viktor E Frankl | How to Stop Being Reactive

Your search for meaning is one of the noblest pursuits you can ever undertake!

How to find Meaning in your Life is what we are talking about in this video shot in Universal Broadcasting Network and in what you read below! At minute 25, I answer Ocea’s question about “How to Stop Being Reactive”!

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” — Nietzsche

In the video below,  Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor happily quoting a German writer about seeing the best in others – that’s beautiful.

“If we take man as he is, we make him worse. But if we take him as he should be, then we make him capable of becoming what he can be.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Viktor Frankl, a brilliant Psychiatrist, and neurologist who wrote more
than 30 books in 26 languages!

Dr. Frankl says of his qualifications to write the book: “As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps — concentration camps, that is — and as such, I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.”

Viktor Frankl delivers a powerful message about the human search for
meaning — and the most important gift we can give others.

http://www.ted.com/talks/viktor_frankl_youth_in_search_of_meaning#

Viktor Frankl, M.D., Ph.D. (1905-1997)

The U.S. Library of Congress named Dr. Frankl‘s
enlightening masterpiece, *Man’s Search for Meaning,* one of the 10 books
that “made the most difference in people’s lives.”

Dr. Frankl is the founder of logotherapy, which he derived from the words:
*logos* – Greek for *reason* or *meaning*, and *therapy* – Greek, meaning *I
heal. * *Logotherapy*, therefore, means *”Reasons I heal” or “Healing the
Meaning*” (trippy, profound, and enlightening both ways).

“One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”

The main components that are at the heart of Dr. Frankl‘s philosophy:

1.      Each person has a healthy core. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”  This is your healthy core. This is your healthy core.Your ability to choose your attitude.

2. “At such a moment, it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.”  Your primary focus is to enlighten yourself to your own internal resources and provide them with the tools to use their inner core.

3. Life offers you purpose and meaning; it does not owe you a sense of fulfillment. “Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run, I say — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”

4. “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” Viktor Frankl based his approach to healing on his belief in this nobler side of human beings. He saw evidence from his experience as an inmate in four concentration camps that this nobler side of humanity could be accessed.

5. “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

You may be in a situation from which you cannot physically remove yourself. Nevertheless, you are 100% responsible for how you think and how you respond to situations.

It’s easy to be the victim. It’s easy to point fingers and make excuses for things you don’t like about yourself or your life. It’s easier to remain miserable than it is to take responsibility for your life and take the actions necessary to change it.

Dr. Frankl found strength in the knowledge that, despite our circumstances, each of us is alive and on this earth for a purpose. Every life has meaning and significance and every human has a contribution to make to humanity.

We are more than the sum of biology and environment. We are part of something that is much bigger than we are, yet we are significant in it. In fact, we have a responsibility to make our life significant for the benefit of others.

6. “But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.” Tears are not a sign of weakness; they emanate from a soul that is not afraid to break. Tears act as a safety valve by releasing excess stress hormones such as cortisol. If left unchecked, chronic elevated levels of these hormones can cause physical ailments and play havoc with mood. As stress often precedes a good cry, the sense of calm often felt afterward is at least in part due to hormonal release.

7. “It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”

Researchers in Austria recently discovered that funny people have higher IQs than their less funny peers. Researchers argue that it takes both the cognitive and emotional ability to process and produce humor. Their analysis shows that funny people have higher verbal and nonverbal intelligence, and they score lower in mood disturbance and aggressiveness.

Not only are funny people smart, they’re nice to be around. Evidence suggests that having a good sense of humor is linked to high emotional intelligence and is a highly desirable quality in a partner. Evolutionary psychologists describe humor as a “heritable trait” that signals mental fitness and intellectual agility to prospective mates.

8. “Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.”

Just 50 years ago, the idea that the adult brain can change in any way was heretical. Researchers accepted that the immature brain is malleable, but also believed that it gradually hardens, like clay poured into a mold, into a permanently fixed structure by the time childhood has ended. It was also believed that we are born with all the brain cells we will ever have, that the brain is incapable of regenerating itself, and, therefore, that any damage or injuries it sustains cannot be fixed.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The adult brain is not only capable of changing, but it does so continuously throughout life, in response to everything we do and every experience we have. Nervous systems evolved to enable us to adapt to the environment and determine the best course of action in any given situation, based on what has been learned from past experiences. This is the case not just for humans, but for all organisms that have a nervous system. That is to say, nervous systems evolved to change, and so neuroplasticity is an intrinsic and fundamental property of all nervous systems. Your nervous system is wired to see a meaning in your life.

9. “The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”

10. “Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.”

11. “Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.”

12. “Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.”  The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.

In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.'”

I love you so much sweet Miracle Makers and can’t wait to see you!

Love,
Dr. Sarah Larsen

P. S. “The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.” — Walt Disney