Existential Creativity and Mindfulness
We are becoming ever more aware of how our inner lives and our mental health, often negatively programmed by our childhood experiences, affect our outer lives – and viceversa – and how we can improve them both by developing our existential creativity through holistic therapeutic approaches and mindfulness practices.
Over the last couple centuries, humanity has become ever more acutely aware of the importance of what happens in our early years. When we are children, we are like sponges, absorbing all kinds of information coming from both the external environment – our parents/caregivers, families, social environments, etc. – and from our inner selves – the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that we experience in our own minds and bodies.
The human journey is a complex and fascinating one, perhaps especially because each of us has an incredibly unique experience of it. Even though there are many things that we have in common with others, there is no “one size fits all” human experience.
This means that two children who grow up in the same home can have very different perceptions and experiences of that family, both because of how they are perceived by the others, and how they themselves experience and perceive their family members.
Whereas the current medical/psychological paradigm would like to be able to reduce all of our inner suffering to neurological processes, and thus easily solve our problems with pills, a holistic attitude goes beyond the purely physiological reality of our lives, and looks at the broader picture.
(Added note: It sounds like there is a big change coming in the general mindset around what mental illness actually is and how to treat it: I just heard today – January 29 , 2026 – that the newly revised edition of the DSM, the diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals and insurance companies to diagnose mental illnesses and establish treatment protocols, will include information on the potential causes of the various diagnoses described, including environmental ones such as family/cultural/socioeconomic environment and physical, psychological and emotional trauma. While there is no question that it is not easy to understand the causes behind the various types of suffering people can experience, there is also no question that to completely ignore the effects of childhood trauma and other environmental factors that clearly have lasting, and often extremely debilitating, effects, is absurd. But that is what mainstream mental health approaches have been doing for decades, which has only reinforced an incredibly myopic view of how we consider mental health, and of general wellness of our complex makeup which is an integrated reality of mental/emotional, physiological, existential/spiritual and environmental factors. Taking into account each of these factors is fundamental if we are to understand how to truly improve our overall health and ability to enjoy the experience of being alive. What a relief that finally the mainstream healthcare community here in the USA is beginning to change, and embrace the wisdom that those of us in the alternative and holistic healthcare sectors have been championing for decades!)
There is no question that when we are under emotional and even physical stress and pressure our brain chemistry can end up being altered, and cause us immense suffering, added onto the pain we experienced during the traumatic experiences themselves. All of this can become a vicious cycle, where our wounds from the past continue to live in the present, due to our own inner mechanisms that were originally designed to help us get through the trauma, but eventually keep us trapped within it.
This can happen at any time during our lifespan, although during childhood we are particularly malleable and vulnerable to the effects of stress, and the effects often don’t show up until much later (check out some of the emerging wisdom around CPTSD for more info on this: I find it fascinating that even just over these past couple years more and more healthcare practitioners are getting on board with the recognition that many mental health issues can be attributed to being exposed to traumatic experiences over time during childhood, and even the NHS has now published a “PTSD and CPTSD Self-Help Guide” , something unheard of even just a few years ago!).
But what are the solutions? It is actually pretty incredible to think that today, 128 years since the publication of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”, which opened the door to an entirely new way of looking at the incredibly complex inner life of human beings, we have a vast “toolbox” that we can turn to, when we are trying to understand why we are suffering and what to do about it.
We often focus on the incredible technological discoveries humanity has made in these 130 years that have completely transformed how we live (the train-automobile-jet-spaceship, the radio-television-internet and now AI, etc. etc.); at the same time, there has been an incredible revolution regarding how we see our possibilities and limitations as human beings, within ourselves.
At the same time Freud was exploring his unconscious and opening the door to the inner life in the West, other kinds of inner explorers were creating new syntheses between Eastern and Western religious thought and experience. During the 20th century not only did the development of psychology, psychotherapy and neuroscience bring us tools for self-understanding and development that we could not have imagined earlier, but the merging of Eastern philosophies with Western ones brought about new ways of considering not only our own inner lives, but our connection to the greater life beyond our individual selves.
This emerging synthesis has brought about, for example, the practice of “Mindfulness”; the awareness that meditation and guided visualization, even when detached from any kind of religious dogma, are things we can learn to do that greatly enhance first of all the functioning of our brains, which then can lead to new decisions that bring us to better outcomes in our personal and professional lives, relationships and all the rest. More and more researchers and practitioners across many disciplines are delving into this increasing awareness, and offering up new “proofs” for insights that have been present within some religious traditions for millennia, and are just now reaching a more mainstream kind of recognition, across the globe. (One of the pioneering researchers in this area is Prof Richard Davidson at the University of Madison – go here to listen to an interesting talk that he gave on the Neuroscience of Mindfulness).
One of the most important findings that Professor Davidson points out is that we can learn to increase our wellbeing, and that indeed, if we learn tools that will help us and practice them, over time our wellbeing increases.
This idea dovetails perfectly with the idea of Life as a Work of Art as conceived of by Antonio Mercurio, and which is at the basis of my holistic LifeArt counseling and coaching approach. This approach affirms that while we may come out of highly traumatic experiences, environments and situations that have left deep wounds within our psyches and our souls, and these wounds most definitely leave their marks on us, we do have the power to choose to learn new ways of thinking, acting and Being that will help us move into both feeling and living better, over time.
Any Art takes practice, and healing from our deep conditioning, that can be truly debilitating sometimes, and show up in persistent depression, anxiety and all kinds of problems, does often require that we look at many different types of support to get to a place where we can become increasingly autonomous and skilled in how we gradually learn how to give ourselves the love we so sorely lack. It is often a long, lifelong process.
But if we can embrace this process as an evolutionary journey, rather than as a kind of condemnation from an unjust universe, we can see that we are actually taking part in an incredible shift in the consciousness of humanity. Whereas even only a few decades ago we had few options at our disposal if we were suffering internally, today we have a vast array of practitioners, theories, techniques and approaches to help us along. Not only do we need to remain shuttered within our pain, feeling ashamed for our suffering, but we can find incredible opportunities for connection and reconnection with others who are also looking for – and finding – new ways not only of healing our early traumas, but of developing healthier, more vibrant and sustainable lives for ourselves, our children, and the opening the door for the generations to come.
Every time we make a decision to do something new, to face our pain with more loving kindness, getting some help in overcoming old patterns of thinking and acting that sometimes have been transmitted to us through the generations (check out my page on Family Constellations work for some insights on that), we are being existentially creative.
The term “existential” comes from the idea that our lives have meaning, but that it is up to us choose the meaning we want to give to it. We actually do have that freedom today, and as the great existentialist philosopher Sartre pointed out, this kind of freedom itself brings with it a certain kind of anguish.
But if we are brave enough to recognize that we actually do have this kind of freedom, however small it may feel to us, due to our circumstances and the kind of familial and/or cultural conditioning we may have been subjected to in the course of our lives, we also can soon discover that while many of our choices seem small indeed, each one we make that brings us more towards love of ourselves and others, rather than towards desperation, or resignation, or outright destructive judgment and abuse, helps us practice wellbeing, wellness and love.
For example, every time we manage to choose to notice when we are berating ourselves over a mistake we have made, and shift that inner voice to instead be kind and supportive; or every time we manage to see that after a disappointment we are attacking our spouse, rather than sitting with the pain of it, and stop before we do so, we are exercising our existential creativity. We are doing something new. We are practicing new ways of both connecting with our inner selves, that can lead us to new ways of interacting with others.
Becoming masters of our own lives is not something that happens over night, and even if we were raised in ideal families and circumstances, life has a way of throwing challenges and pain at us, that we are all called to address, sooner or later.
Rather than seeing these challenges as punishments, and seeing ourselves as helpless victims or martyrs, or feeling we have to instead figure out how to wield even more power over ourselves and others in an attempt to control everything, we can shift into a completely new way of seeing ourselves and life: as existentially creative beings, who can make new choices and even create great love and harmony out of our painful, and sometimes completely loveless, beginnings.
We can become Artists of life, and experience new ways of being, of interacting, of creating beauty, wellbeing and even prosperity for ourselves and others.
The old model of control and dominance is no longer necessary for our survival.
There is enough love and prosperity for everyone, and by learning how to develop our own ability to create the life we are longing for, we are contributing to the birth of a new human era.
Starting in February, I will be offering a workshop series, Life as a Work of Art Laboratories, where together we will explore a variety of tools to help us along in developing our own wellbeing, in alignment with the deeper purposes of life, and in awareness of how our own increased inner harmony and connectedness can contribute to the wellbeing of those around us. I hope to see you there, and if you have any questions about it, please feel free to contact me today for a free chat.
