“When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution…then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need.” Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death One of the oldest […]

“Adventure shatters the oppressive, insistent reality as if it were a piece of glass. It is the unforeseen, the unthought-of, the new. Each adventure is a new birth of the world, a unique process. How can it fail to be interesting?”   José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote As creatures of habit we derive comfort from our […]

“In such epochs where the highest values of life—our peace, our independence, our basic rights, all that makes our existence more pure, more beautiful, all that justifies it—are sacrificed to the demon inhabiting a dozen fanatics and ideologues, all the problems of the man who fears for his humanity come down to the same question: […]

“Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty.” John Finley To trigger a nervous breakdown in someone you could apply the following steps: Force your victim into an atomized existence, forbid them from participating in the activities that imbue their life with joy, rid them of their job, destroy their daily routines, and tell them not […]

Friedrich Nietzsche believed himself to be a philosophical physician. One of his missions in life was to help others understand the sickness into which modern society was falling and to offer a cure to the poison of a corrupted value system. “To be a physician here to be inexorable here, to wield the knife here […]

“Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed. The shadow is very much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no shadows exist.” Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion Carl Jung stressed that an individual’s proper […]

“How can a man come to know himself? Never by thinking, but by doing. Try to do your duty and you will know at once what you are worth.” Goethe Reflection and introspection can teach us who we are, other people can teach us what is possible, but only through action can we create a […]

“Do not die of another person’s misery.” Baltasar Gracián While there are countless ways that we sabotage ourselves, sometimes our problems are not generated by us, but by the people who surround us. “A single joyless person is enough to create constant discouragement and cloudy skies for a whole household, and it is a miracle […]

“If body structure and temperament are related, as anyone who studies human nature can determine, the question then is: Can one change the character of an individual without some change in the body structure and in its functional motility?” Alexander Lowen, The Language of the Body In our previous video we explored how our character […]

“. . .the living organism expresses itself in movement more clearly than in words. But not alone in movement! In pose, in posture, in attitude and in every gesture, the organism speaks a language which antedates and transcends its verbal expression.” Alexander Lowen, The Language of the Body The connection between mind and body has […]