Essential Oils of Meaning: Vetiver.Rose.Bergamot
The search for meaning in life, a question that is forever lingering in the back of all of our minds. Well the short answer is as follows:
Meaning is found by complete presence in any moment.
How does one cultivate such a mindset?
(Mind)Set and (environmental)Setting are key. Please join me on a deep-dive into both of these.
How to nurture the (mind)Set?
Regular mindfulness-meditation practice. This will allow us to enhance the quality of our attention and increase our presence in any given moment. This is key as it will facilitate us to extract (or more likely recognise) the meaning in every moment and re-calibrate our thoughts & actions to what is actually important to us. I started off on Headspace and my current daily app is Waking up by Sam Harris.
And now you ask where do I find what is actually meaningful to me?. Well the answer lies in your (environmental)Setting.
The 3 streams of meaning in your environment. I will present these to you as the 3 essential oils of meaning, the triplet which blend together through time and space to make a unique and personal fragrance… One’s essence to life. Something one can call their own, through which on their death-bed one can take a deep inhalation and exclaim ‘aahhh…my life was indeed deeply meaningful’.
Before we proceed I owe a sense of gratitude to Victor Frankl and he truly deserves a brief primer. Take a deep breath, this is a long sentence… He was a holocaust surviver and Psychiatrist who formulated ‘meanings based psychotherapy’ as a direct result of his lived experience & memoire’s of his psychological state that allowed him to live through the ghastly Nazi death-camp, and on the other side helped people live a meaningful life through his logos based psychotherapy.
Essential Oil 1: Multi-purpose Vetiver.
Creative ventures with a fulfilling vocation
The lack of either of these is indicated if we feel any sense of boredom through the week (stat nugget: a high number of suicide’s occur on a Sunday) .. then the vocation is either not challenging enough nor fulfilling to us as dictated by our internal value system. If one’s vocation is good enough but in their downtime one feels despondent, then they ought to explore active hobbies over passive ones. The active hobby doesn’t always have to be grand (like learning a new language) but it could simply be watching the football with a group of friends rather than alone. In this way you’re all actively connecting on a commonality together. Which takes us sweetly into the next essential oil of meaning.
Essential Oil 2: Sweet Sweet Rose.
Love and inter-connection
Through self-transcendence can one find self-actualisation. True love involves letting oneself go … for the sake of the other. Putting the other (and their gratification) before ours. Allow them to feel joy, as a consequent of which we feel delight. In short, service towards something or someone greater than oneself. This interconnection can be found in our familial, friends and romantic relationships. In romantic relationships sex is one mode of expression of this love but not the only. It heightens connection and accentuates intimacy… the feeling of being in synchrony, two parts coming together to make a greater third.
Unfortunately current day lack of meaning, can partially be explained by this diversion from meaningful sex to meaningless, and at times extremely casual sex. When sex becomes meaningless, we see each others as a means to an end. Can you see the chasm in difference between the two?
In the former sex is for the others pleasure which results in synchrony and creation of a shared greater moment. A climax to be treasured by both and atomised in each others hippocampus. Whereas meaningless sex, the memory of which is still present after the act but each person is lost, lost as to where they should encode this in their maps of meaning. I am not saying that all casual sex phases or fleeting one night stands are bad, if anything some can be quite eye opening…and also mind opening. But that is what they should be seen as, a novel infrequent event, a taster .. let’s put it another way, if on every night you treated yourself to a 3* Michelin meal at Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck then you will be pretty miserable because 1. Your bank account is drained/could be put to better use 2. What did you actually do to achieve this rather than simply consuming (inherent fact: it feels s**t to simply be a user without offering value in some form) 3. You learnt what you had to learn the 1st time around (the novelty and excitement factor), the 2nd evening was probably not as spectacular and by the 3rd you are pretty bored of the nitrogen based ice cream and shellfish soufflé.
Essential Oil 3. Bitter Bergamot.
Unsolvable suffering
The last is finding meaning in the suffering.
This is by no means my go-to essential oil but it is an extremely potent one. It is a fact of life that there will be suffering, most of them minor in nature that we will overcome and build what psychologists call resilience (bulletproofness towards future adversity).
An incurable disease.... this is unsolvable but there still remains one thing within our control. It is our mindset.
For Victor his will-power to publish and present his first book, a book that encapsulated his contributions to Psychiatry. This book was snatched off him the moment he arrived at the death-camp, but the goal kept him going, and he was one of the lucky few that survived to tell the tale. Eventually life chucks at us a screwball with no way out… an incurable disease.. disseminated late stage metastatic cancer.. this is unsolvable but there still remains one thing within our control. It is our mindset. It is our will to live.
One can’t change the situation but one can change one’s mindset about the situation.
This could be (waning) hope, putting one’s affairs in order to leave a legacy (something of sentimental or social worth) or simply offering gratefulness for the time that has been allocated to the self on this planet, for the memories crystallised and the moments cherished that have made the self, who the self is, on it’s last day.
A final word …
As a concluding note when I write such articles on the biggest questions of life, I need to confess, and I hope the reader realises, I am also working out my journey and really do not know it all. I equally fall prey to boredom and have for many weeks and at points in my life months questioned if it is even worth existing. I find meaning in such a creative venture and hope to interact with yourselves, either through the comments Ad Ali Physician • Psychotherapist • Philosopher or Instagram direct message (ad_ali) so we can collaborate to understand the world together and each of our will’s to live.
I suppose this is the paradox of life, by the time we do know it all (or are the most wise), we are also most certainly close to R.I.P.
