***Coming Soon***
Art of Humaning is making a creative turn!
Five years ago when I finished my master’s thesis, I was proud of myself for having made a heroic introduction to the world of phenomenology all by myself, but I also felt left with so much unresolved business with the distant echoes between the new conceptual insights that resulted from the epoché in the West and the long-overdue landing of the East’s ancient words on the mysteries of my embodied experience.
Almost as if creating an abstract painting, a primordial ontological map of the human being was born in my mind as I let the different systems in my headspace freely converge according to their natural harmony. This map is not entirely novel to the scene. Similar ideas have been suggested on various fronts.
My primary inspirations came from Heidegger’s Fourfold, ancient Chinese’s concept of Heaven-Earth-Man and John Welwood’s personal-interpersonal-transperson model. Later on, I found an almost exactly the same map as what I came up with in Existential Philosophy, the four-world model initially conceptualized by Ludwig Binswanger and later completed by Emmy van Deurzen: umwelt, eigenwelt, mitwelt and uberwelt.
As my own practice of mindfulness and Buddhist meditation deepens, naturally and without resistance, I recognized that a large portion of the contemporary use of philosophy, including philosophical counselling, belongs to a small sphere in the eigenwelt. Following that, a lot of inquiries I received were from people looking for a debate. That’s not Philosophy in capital P – thinking philosophically is a case of underutilization or even imitation of living philosophically, which should engage the entirety of our being. From this perspective, heavy reliance on thinking may even be a symptom of imbalance, an attempt to escape from feeling emotions, which is a major block to our overall wellbeing.
For this reason, I no longer believe in philosophical counselling as it is defined and promoted by accrediting institutions. Healing, etymologically speaking, means returning to wholeness. I can attest to that with my own ongoing journey. This change in my therapeutic framework is a reflection of my personal healing.
All in all, what I’m announcing is that Art of Humaning is undergoing a drastic revamp. Philosophical counselling will no longer be offered as a standalone practice but as an integrated component of a more holistic approach.
So stay tuned, my fellow humaning beings!
