06/01/2025
🌞 A Moment of Meaning
“Laugh at yourself.” – Viktor Frankl
This simple quote contains profound medicine. In humanity’s search for psychological security, we often forget that the more we try to feel safe, the more unsafe we become. When we anxiously grip the need for certainty, we inadvertently create the very insecurity we hope to avoid.
To put it simply: the desire for security is the same thing as the feeling of insecurity. Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure, as Alan Watts insightfully noted.
Anxiety and fear arise from the fundamental human desire to live and thrive. We worry because we feel unsafe and we want to feel safe. And yet emotional freedom and sanity lie in the radical acceptance that we have no way of saving ourselves.
Like something out of Alice in Wonderland, we find ourselves in a world turned upside down.
The contradiction lies in the conflict between the desire for security to ensure our survival and the fact that life is always changing. Trying to defend ourselves against the change is to separate from life itself and that separation is what makes us feel insecure.
Paradoxically, the more we allow life to be uncertain, the more grounded we become.
🧠 Practice This: Paradoxical Intention
This week, experiment with Paradoxical Intention, a core technique in logotherapy and one of Frankl’s greatest contributions.
Try this: Notice one anxiety this week, and for a moment, instead of avoiding the fear or habit, try leaning into it on purpose. “Prescribe the symptom” and see what shifts when you stop resisting and start engaging with it from a place of curiosity or even laughter.
The idea is this: instead of resisting or avoiding a symptom, you’re invited to intentionally exaggerate it. Say “yes” to it fully, as if it were exactly what you’d been hoping for. For example, someone afraid of blushing in public might try to blush as hard as possible on purpose.
In doing so, the absurdity becomes clear, self-detachment grows, and the fear loosens its grip. This approach interrupts the vicious cycle of fear-resistance-fear, replacing it with playful acceptance.
Instead of trying to fix feelings, we can change our attitude toward them—choosing to live in spite of them.
🍃 The Deeper Why
Life is living paradox. As Suzuki Roshi said, “If it’s not a paradox, it’s not the truth.” The divine paradox is not a riddle to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
Grief and joy, fear and freedom, longing and letting go—they all belong. To be “cured” does not mean eliminating discomfort, in fact the opposite, it means engagement with life and taking meaningful action even in the presence of difficult emotions, without being ruled by them.
The situation may be difficult, but the inner power to carry it through is there. Maybe a good laugh is all it takes.
In saying Yes to Life—exactly as it is—with all its uncertainty and unpredictability, we begin to rediscover our wholeness. When we stop needing life to be different, we begin to live it more fully.
"Paradox as it may seem, we likewise find life meaningful only when we are convinced that we know nothing about it."
To affirm life, even in its absurdity, is the most courageous and creative act of all.
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