Meaningseekers is a course designed to accompany you in your life journey. It is a learning group, which supports personal growth.
What are we searching for? We want our lives to have meaning. We want to have a sense of purpose. We want to have hope, even when we seem to have lost our way.
From dissonance to meaning
We experience dissonance when our hopes, dreams and expectations of life don’t match reality.
When this happens, there are two ways to look at life:
a) Me against the world
b) There’s a place for us.
The first way forces you to constantly try to prove yourself. The second way connects you to life.
How do you go from dissonance to meaning?
You can feel alienated from people because they’ve hurt you or ignored you or worse. Alternatively, you can feel alienated from yourself because of fears, anxieties and depression or because of a self-image or a habitual pattern that isn’t useful to you anymore and holds you back from getting ahead in life. Thirdly, you can feel alienated from life itself, because of chronic pain, disabilities or experiences that have left you feeling like a helpless victim.
Why not just continue to be disconnected and alienated from people and from things that challenge you?
Someone who is alienated is not a happy person.
The beginning of the path to healing is to stop fighting reality and stop running away from people and from life events, and instead, embrace them as’ teachers of meaning.’
You can find a way to connect to the situation or to someone you’re angry with by asking yourself what you can learn from it. This search for what you can learn, this attempt to attune yourself to the message, is what Frankl, the creator of logotherapy calls “meaning.”
Meaning is “what is meant”
Focusing on meaning takes away the sense of dissonance. Even when the going gets rough, life is on your side.
Rather than dividing life events between those that are “meaningful” and those that are meaningless,” everything becomes meaningful! Each and every moment of life, as sure as your breath coming in and going out, has meaning to it. When you turn your attention to looking for meaning, you embrace the situation for the meaning it gives you.
To find meaning, you have to hear yourself being personally addressed by life.
To reflect the way life engages us with questions to answer, Frankl defines meaning as “what is meant, be it by a person who asks me a question, or by a situation which, too, implies a question and calls for an answer…I must try hard to find out the true meaning of the question which I am asked.” (Will to Meaning, Frankl, p. 62)
Notice that Frankl writes about hearing “a question,” detecting the “true meaning” of the question, and understanding that the question “calls for an answer.”
Therefore, if you want to find a way to connect when you’re feeling alienated you’ll need to listen in order to hear.
1) What was said
2) The true meaning of what was said, or the message it carries.
3) How you are called/personally addressed by this message
4) Your response to the question in the form of attitudes or actions
Change comes through answering life’s questions
For example, if someone wants the window opened and I want it closed, the reality carries a message: someone is hot and I am cold. I am personally addressed by this message: someone is making a request of me.
In a broader sense, not only the person but the “situation” is addressing me, and asking me a series of questions. To what extent do I need to take care of myself and to what extent do I need and to take care of the other? Does this pose a value conflict for me? What is that conflict about exactly? What makes me prefer one response over another? What makes it challenging for me? What would I like to be able to do? What am I capable of doing? What will be the effect of one course of action or another – on myself, on others, on the world? Will I feel good about myself? Will I feel resentful? All things considered, what do I think is the best course of action?
The questions are numerous. The answer is unique, and depends on the nature of the challenge and my willingness to meet it.
Insights and positive change come through the creative process of grappling with and solving the puzzles life gives us.
We identify situations in which life “questions” us using a variety of words. We call them problems, challenges, opportunities or obstacles or tests to name a few. One of the most positive words is “invitations,” although we don’t often use it.
Our encounter with life confronts us with facts we cannot deny, and by doing so reality engages, stimulates, challenges, questions, summons, and provokes us. Finally, situations demand/require a response from us. The process of responding evokes our strengths and actualizes our potential.
I may or may not open the window in response to someone’s request. I may find a compromise.
Whatever my response may be, if I have heard the question, and done what the situation has required of me, I will have done something meaningful.
Three Sources of Meaning
The course meaningseekers integrates three rich sources of meaning to learn from: texts, life experience and other group members.
When we are fully present, we are fully aware. We can access our feelings, thoughts, and sensations, while remaining attuned to what is going on around us. We are aware of the other’s need and of our responsibility towards it. We are engaged with life.
You listen to hear the message, what it implies, how it personally addresses you and your response to being personally addressed by this message. Usually it is offering an opportunity to fulfill values you care about, through certain tasks or attitudes.
Therefore meaning is discovered:
1) In textual passages
a) By clarifying what is being said
b) By revealing its messages and values
c) By hearing how you are personally addressed.questioned/challenged/summoned/invited by this message
d) By contemplating which values the text is calling you to fulfill and what kind of response, in the form of a specific task or attitude this awareness brings in answer to the call
2) In group members own life experience
a) By listening to each member in turn, relate an experience that directly relates to the topic
b) By listening for the messages/potential values there
c) By listening to how each group member is cognizant of being addressed/questioned/challenged/summoned/invited by this message
d) By listening to each person relate their aware response, in the form of specific tasks or attitudes in answer to the call
3) In the interactions between group members
a) By listening to and affirming others in their experience
b) By checking for accurate understanding of the speaker’s intention and by sharing insights into meanings and values
c) By hearing yourself personally addressed/questioned/challenged/summoned/invited by each of the other group members
d) By sharing your aware response, in the form of specific tasks or attitudes in answer to the call
These three sources of meaning should not be seen as distinct and separate but rather as three tributaries funneling into the same great sea of meaning.
Any one of these sources on its own is incomplete without the other. Experiential understanding only comes with real-life application of the theory. Textual messages, addressing us personally and calling upon us to respond, carry only a partial meaning if life experience has not yet had its say.
Similarly, the personal call of life experience is more fully understood when it is reflected on in the context of theoretical concepts that formalize the meaning of that experience.
By being present in the moment and listening to all three sources of meaning, we can fine tune the message that comes through their symphony and sharpen our awareness of the meaning of the message as well as awareness of how we need to respond to it.
Learning to listen
A meaningseekers group is a place of learning to listen, and a place where learning happens only because we’re listening. The atmosphere is one of confidentiality and utmost respect, with no interrupting and no one person hogging the conversation. These things should go without saying; nevertheless, they need to be said anyway.
Group members are guided to listen and seek accurate understanding of the text and of each other. Beyond being accepting and nonjudgmental, they are curious and feel something is missing for them as long as they have not yet heard all the perspectives in the room. Each person has something unique to offer. They need each other. Everyone believes there is something important for them to learn from each other and they eager to learn it.
Therefore, no one group member’s comment is ignored and allowed to drift off into space. Each person’s words are related to by each of the other people in the room.
There will be those who perceive listening and affirming in a learning framework as counterproductive and out of place, claiming that this turns it into a “support group.”
To the contrary, listening to hear how each person is called by life through their dreams and struggles redefines the meaning of learning: head knowledge turned into heart knowledge and awareness that prompts personal growth.
‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ is our motto. Interactive discussions designed to stimulate creative thinking clarify each group member’s unique perspective and strengths and bring new insights to light. Each member is a piece of the puzzle that fits together to make a beautiful picture.
Meanings and values defy definition, for two reasons: a) until they are played out in reality they remain abstract and b) their value-content is bound up with the details of the situation in which they manifest themselves. This “specificity” makes them as numerous as the circumstances in which they are actualized.
In the meaningseekers logoeducation model, the specific circumstance of each individual’s unique experience highlights the values and meanings that life has extended to them. The discussion revolves around the search for meanings and values that start out as abstract and hidden, and gradually become revealed and tangible in their real life manifestations.
The perspective of equality and mutual learning between all of the group members generates insights each of the individual members could not have come to on his or her own. Each of them is a piece of the mosaic that makes up the whole, which is greater than the sum of its parts. The discovery of meaning in a group is a creative process that is a powerful stimulus for change
Hearing the text address you
Imagine going to your mailbox and finding a special delivery letter personally addressed to you. You open it up and start to read. Who is sending you this message? What does it mean?
In the course meaningseekers, you will study passages from Logotherapeutic and other texts and ask yourself: If this was a special-delivery message, what would it be saying to me?
How do we listen for textual meaning in a meaningseekers course?
Objective meaning: We come into it clean, as unbiased as we can possibly be, listening to the nuances of language, the tone, and the plain meaning of the words. What does it sound like the author is trying to say? What makes the author say this? What seem to be the underlying beliefs and assumptions? Can you see from the author’s perspective?
In other words, listening to hear what a book has to say to you is very much like listening to hear what another person has to say to you. Most of the selections are from Viktor Frankl, who was my teacher’s teacher. So the person behind the words in the book is not so far removed from us. If you want to say something is implied in the author’s words that even the author was not aware of, that’s okay too. The meaning is still objective, since it is not my own invention.
Personal meaning: How do we listen to hear how the text is addressing us personally? In other words: Why is it important that I’m hearing this? How does it relate to what’s going on in my life?
The text addresses us by
- Value clarification: Do I agree or disagree with the message? What does that tell me about my values?
- Challenge: Am I living by my values? Does the meaning reflect a tension between who I am and who I want to be? Does this give me meaningful goals?
- Inspiration: Does this meaning give me hope, put things into a meaningful context or put things in a new perspective?
Learning is the discovery of meaning
Carl Rogers, the originator of person-centered psychology, created an educational model that stimulated my own ideas. He says the following about real learning:
a) “It has a quality of personal involvement – the whole person in both his feeling and cognitive aspects being in the learning event.”
b) “It is self-initiated. Even when the impetus or stimulus comes from the outside, the sense of discovery, of reaching out, of grasping and comprehending, comes from within.”
c) “It is pervasive. It makes a difference in the behavior, the attitudes, perhaps even the personality of the learner.”
d) “It is evaluated by the learner. He knows whether it is meeting his need, whether it leads toward what he wants to know, whether it illuminates the dark area of ignorance he is experiencing. The locus of evaluation, we might say, resides definitely in the learner.”
e) “Its essence is meaning. When such learning takes place the element of meaning to the learner is built into the whole experience.” (Freedom to Learn, Rogers, p. 5)
Facilitator Role
I see myself not as a teacher but a facilitator of meaning. I want to give you the tools for your search to find out the meaning of everything that you encounter in life. Books, other people, your emotions, events and news are among the many sources where meaning can be found.
Since answers can only come in response to questions, and insights come in response to grappling with challenges, the teacher has nothing to teach. Group members are challenged and invited to answer the questions presented to them by a) the text, b) their life experience and c) the other group members.
It is a process of mutual awareness-stimulation and response-ability.
The facilitator cannot know the questions or the answers in advance and cannot guess what meanings will be birthed in the process.
The role of the meaning-facilitator is to stimulate awareness, curiosity, response-ability and genuine listening.
Rules of discussion
1) Confidentiality: What we say does not go out of the room – not because of deep dark secrets from the psyche but because of vast, bright secrets of the spirit shining through each precious singular soul. As meanings are revealed we’ll want to tenderly and sensitively cultivate and nurture them.
2) Respect: No interrupting. Each group member has a two-minute limit for one speaking-expression. All are interconnected, each contributing a piece of the mosaic of beautiful picture, as we accompanying each other on our respective journeys.
3) Listening: Each group member listens to hear ‘what is meant,’ without mixing personal bias into it. Everyone checks for accuracy of understanding. The most important questions are:
a) What did the author mean?
b) How is this meaning addressing me personally?
4) Relevancy:
Those who are unfamiliar with the meaningseekers learning model mistakenly think that discussion of life experience distracts attention from the text. They insist that they have only come to hear and learn from the teacher, and are not interested in listening to any of the other students.
However, the method of engaging group members in discussion, particularly of their life experience, is not a distraction.
Actually, their contribution of life circumstances to illustrate theoretical concepts is essential to absorbing the concepts and to the personal change that learning brings. This assumption that shared experience is a critical component to learning is based on the following teaching:
Wisdom that consists only of abstract knowledge is not true wisdom. Practical applications must be found for theoretical ideas, and real-life experience must have a conceptual counterpart. Therefore, for learning to take place there has to be an emotional expression to intellectual understanding and a rational formulation of emotions. The reason this is true is because we are not made up of dangling entities of body and spirit but are one integral whole. Consciousness is the glue that binds together the physical and spiritual planes of existence. This requires that we bring all aspects of meaning, including mind, body and spirit, to awareness. (Pirkei Kinyan Da’at, p. 22)
Based on the above idea, in a meaningseekers learning group life experience informs the text and the text informs the meaning of life experience.
On the other hand, group members who do not understand this concept think that an interactive discussion model means that the learning is not serious, and it’s a free-for-all, a chance to make irrelevant comments.
One of the most important rules in a meaningseeker learning group is to only make relevant comments, and not irrelevant ones. However, unlike a traditional classroom setting, what separates “irrelevant” from “relevant” is not the assigning of life experience as irrelevant, but rather what is not meaningful is irrelevant.
The following two questions are designed to help guide you in determining whether or not your comment is relevant to the discussion
1) How will this comment you are about to make contribute to a deeper understanding of the meaning and value-messages that came through the text?
2) Are you interested in finding out how this situation is calling you to certain tasks or attitudes, or are you using the group as a platform for complaining?
Comments that are off-topic are designed to draw attention to one member in a victim-mode. Comments that are on topic serve to reveal meaning, expand awareness and stimulate growth for everyone involved.
Course Structure
‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ is our motto. Interactive discussions designed to stimulate creative thinking clarify each participant’s unique perspective and strengths and bring new insights to light.
Values and meanings are explored through Logotherapeutic texts and real-life applications.
Meetings alternate between:
a) the theory and practice of logotherapy
b) open-ended discussion of personal meaning.
Each meeting is structured as follows:
(10 minutes) Setting the scene to create a sacred space for presence and listening
(1 hour) Textual discussion (on the “theory and practice” week) and meaning-sharing of how the texts address us personally (on the “personal meaning” week)
(20 minutes) Concluding summary of insights
List of courses
The course “Basics of meaning-filled living” explores basic Logotherapeutic assumptions about what it means to be human and the process by which spiritual and emotional healing takes place. Discussion is designed to facilitate self-reflection on what makes life meaningful.
The course “How to feel good about yourself” looks at six of the many strengths Frankl refers to as “powers of the human spirit” and how they empower us in specific situations. Discussion will touch on how we view ourselves and how our self-concept impacts our feelings about ourselves. We will investigate the impact perspective has and how a meaningful relationship to self makes it possible for you to be your own best friend. Required: Completion of “Basics of meaning-filled living.”
The course “How to feel life is good and people are terrific!” seeks a path towards a healthy and meaningful relationship with life and with other people. A particular focus is placed on values and creative ways of finding them. We will explore the capacity to have patience and flexibility and to maintain an open attitude on the way to finding our place in the world. Required: Completion of “Basics of meaning-filled living.”
The course “How to welcome change” goes into the existential vacuum and how to get out of it. Topics include happiness, noodynamic tension, ultimate meaning and meaning of the moment. We will discuss such issues as synchronicity and the dynamic nature of our relationship with life. Participants for this course will be hand-picked to create a group membership representing a variety of faith-perspectives. Required: Completion of “Basics of meaning-filled living.”
Meaning Seekers Jewish is based on the same structure as Meaning Seekers, with the addition of Jewish texts. It takes a close look at the philosophical and religious parallels to of logotherapy.
How are the juxtaposed religious and Logotherapeutic texts addressing each other? How are both of them together addressing us? Finally, what is the meaning we can discover through our response? As in the regular Meaning Seekers course, the focus is on the meaning we draw from the texts and its application to life. Each course runs for eight weeks.