Last week I talked about ‘perspectival knowing’, developed as we exercise autonomy, in its guise of situational awareness.

The basis for most psychotherapy involves helping people to separate the meaning they make of events from the events themselves. This is another expression of perspectival knowing and, if well developed in young people, could well avoid the later need for therapy (either formally or as self-medication with alcohol or drugs).

Read More

I have mentioned John Vervaeke and his outstanding 50-hour series (Awakening From The Meaning Crisis)* in an earlier post. John talks about four types of knowing. The first two are:

• Propositional Knowing – knowing facts and figures, etc. – “knowledge”

• Procedural Knowing – fluently able to perform a task – “skills”

Which correspond to the traditional focus of schools via curriculum and pedagogy.

Read More

To be healthy, functioning people, we need to feel good about ourselves. We need to feel that our time and energy is spent in meaningful ways. Meaning nourishes us. When we run out of meaning, everything else slows and stops. We get depressed.

We generate meaning primarily through relationships. The most meaningful tend to be relationships with other people, but we also have relationships with our inner selves, our career, our community and religious, political or other groups with which we identify, as well as with ideas and activities we engage in. Any or all of these relationships can give our lives meaning and, therefore, make us feel good about ourselves.

Read More

I have just finished a 50-hour series entitled Awakening From The Meaning Crisis* created by John Vervaeke, an assistant Professor at Toronto University. The first half is about how we got to where we are today from a historical perspective and the second half is about what we can do to rebuild meaning into our collective lives.

He proposes that the maladaptive responses we see to the meaning crisis range from ‘pure suicide’ through depressive suicide and the mental health crisis, loneliness, addiction …

Read More