This workshop will explore how anxiety is hitting the roof in our practices and world precisely because we so often fail to address the underlying or primal anxiety that fuels greater and more destructive anxiety.  That which I term “life-enhancing anxiety,” is a level of anxiety that enables us to live with and make the best of the depth and mystery of existence. Or to put it more concretely, it fosters our capacity to live more on the edge of wonder and discovery rather than terror and overwhelm.  In this presentation, I will elaborate on the above and provide a series of exercises that can optimize our capacity for life-enhancing anxiety both in our practices and in the communities in which we live. Specifically, I will provide an overview of how life-enhancing anxiety emerges from the primal terror of the unknown or “difference” which, in the absence of supportive relationships, so often leads to what I call the “polarized mind.” I will then propose that the cultivation of presence provides a counterbalance to the polarized mind, and is the basis for life-enhancing anxiety.  I will also propose that such presence—and, by implication, life-enhancing anxiety–is the ground and aim of a more vital and fulfilling life.  In the balance of the workshop, I will provide a demonstration of such optimization both at the level of therapy and bridge-building dialogue between people who are culturally or politically estranged from one another. These demonstrations will entail a “live” engagement with an individual volunteer from the audience that draws from my work as an existential-humanistic and existential-integrative therapist.  I will then facilitate a one-on-one conflict mediation process, which I call the “Experiential Democracy Dialogue,” again with a volunteer from the audience. This approach aims at humanizing difficult encounters between people from conflicting cultural and political backgrounds.  Time-permitting, I will guide the audience in a one-on-one practice session with the Experiential Democracy Dialogue, and elaborate on ways they might use the format to work with their patients and/or willing/interested people in their communities.  In sum, I will raise and address the fraught problem of how to really “meet” each other and ourselves in the encounter with differences, fostering in turn a more presence-based, awe-based world.

6 CEUs pending

Registration will open this spring.

For further information contact Beth Swain at beth@ehnwpdx.org

KIRK J. SCHNEIDER, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and leading
spokesperson for contemporary existential-humanistic and existential-
integrative psychology. Dr. Schneider is past editor of the Journal of
Humanistic Psychology, adjunct faculty at Saybrook University and
Teachers College, Columbia University, and president of the Existential-
Humanistic Institute (EHI).