How to Understand and Reach Self-Actualization

Recently a group of graduate students announced that they were joining a weekly meditation evening. I was asked to speak about mindfulness and self-actualization. We are living in a time that is confusing and painful. It is especially hard for young people to know how to fully become themselves when it is so uncertain how the future will unfold.

What is self-actualization?

Self-actualization, according to the fathers of the human potential movement, Abraham Maslow, Kurt Goldstein, and Carl Rogers, is the complete realization of a person’s potential and the full development of their abilities, including a full appreciation for life. Self-actualized people have an acceptance of who they are, despite their faults and limitations, and have the drive to be creative in all aspects of their being. But how can one become self-actualized when there is so much pressure to fit in and to survive in an angst-ridden society, a world drenched with dread, where a person often does not have the luxury to listen to the longings of their heart and soul?

Victor Frankl said that one “who has a why can deal with any ‘how.’” In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl demonstrated that a sense of meaning could carry a person through the most difficult of circumstances.

Meaning is about knowing why a person does what they do. The subjective experience of joy arises when one discovers what one loves to do and when that meets the needs of the world. That intersection between doing what “makes one’s heart sing” and contributing to the welfare and health of the world gives the subjective experience of being in the flow of life.

Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. It involves being tough and skillful in times of change and danger. To be resilient also means to be directed, to be able to discern what is important, and to follow one's heart’s intention. In some ways, one learns to “breathe underwater,” which means to find a way to stay connected with oneself and the world while being in the midst of it all.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is often defined as moment-by-moment, non-judgmental awareness. This skill allows a person to be self-aware, to notice when they are in balance with the flow of who they are, and to recognize when they have gotten off track. Mindfulness also leads to improved meta-cognition, which is an awareness and understanding of one’s own internal thoughts and feeling process. Mindful awareness allows a person to catch the moment right when they have gotten distracted or reactive. Then they can halt, take a mindful pause, and swiftly find their way forward. The lucky side effect of mindfulness is a sense of calm, ease, and alert concentration.

With deep or effortless mindfulness, a related practice translated from the Tibetan tradition, a person can tap into a flow state or the field quality of awareness. With the help of pointing out instructions, one taps into this “source of renewable energy” by connecting to the direct experience of being in the flow of life. From that place, a person can be mindful, purposeful, and creative while tapping into the source of creativity and meaning itself. This practice is not about finding and “owning” a thing but about aligning with what is already there.

It is possible to get a glimpse of this experience with the following brief practice. Many have had brief moments of being in this wider perspective without having recognized it as the special state it is.

• Settle into the sensations of your body, solid like a mountain, yet alert and relaxed.
• Be aware of your entire body and ground yourself in the sensations and movement of your breath.
• Remember a time when you had an extraordinary experience, an experience when you felt a sense of timelessness, presence, clarity, calm, and when you experienced reality as somehow slightly different.
• Remember the environment, what the light was like, the space around you, maybe the colors, the feeling tone.
• Describe this experience to yourself with as many particulars as possible, but don’t worry if you remember only a vague impression.
• Let yourself enter the quality of this experience as if you were there right now. Maybe a mood arises, something shifts slightly. Maybe you feel your heart.
• If you are tempted to go to your thoughts about this, drop those and return to body feeling.
• Let yourself hover in the felt sense of this experience for a little while.

As a person taps into the flow of life, they have more energy than they would have had if they were constrained by a personal, narrow sense of self. With that, a person has more access to creativity, resourcefulness, and open-heartedness, as they are not limited anymore by personal hesitancies and trepidations. Now, one belongs to the web of life, recognizing that one is held in something bigger, like a fish that recognizes it is swimming in water.

Resting in this field of awareness, one is now able to tap into what is everywhere, which is timeless, formless, unhooked from the “managing mind.” Now, one can go “full circle” and bring living from this quality generously back into a hurting world. This wider perspective allows all of us to be engaged from a place of meaning, resilience, and mindfully awake awareness.