Lecture 9:00am-11:00am | Happiness: Find What You Love and Let It Kill You…
We are enjoined to be happy. But what is happiness? Does it ever fall under our control, or are we at the mercy of the unknown forces within and without us? This talk explores our expectations regarding happiness and the role that not being happy plays in our experiencing happiness.
Workshop 12:30pm-4:30pm | The Broken Mirror: the Difficulty of Knowing Oneself
I: Fear, Skepticism, Lassitude: The Recovery of an Inner Life
Resistance is always in due proportion to the anxiety generated by some invitation or challenge. Inside of each of us is continuing civil conflict, and typically our protective instincts are easily intimidated by the magnitude of the tasks life brings us. Moreover, we are often flooded with skepticism regarding our inherent resources for the trial, and an internal aversion to the struggle. These engagements, these battles of outer and inner worlds, are only resolved when we are led to a change of attitude, a risker but more considered intent, and a consistent, daily showing up to tilt the balance between regression and progression.
II: Necessary Fictions: Therapy as the Critique of “Stories”
We are creatures who need to understand, at any cost. And so we “story” our experiences, and those stories, provisional, localized, and often created at an early stage of our history, become defining narratives. The disarray of our histories nevertheless can be a powerful clue to the “meta-stories” to which we have been in service for many years. Therapy can be understood as the identification of and critical analysis of our operative or “meta-stories.” Until these “narrative interpretations” can be smoked out, we remain their captive. In a series of questions, we will be invited to examine the stories.
