Twenty-one people have just begun training to meet people in a place our culture is increasingly familiar with but still has remarkably little language for: the place where the old answers no longer work.
Some of the people they will eventually sit with will have left religion and discovered that losing belief is not the same as knowing how to live without it. Others will find themselves inside a crisis of meaning with no obvious explanation for why a life that appears perfectly functional no longer feels like their own. All of this is happening within a wider culture increasingly marked by distrust, fragmentation, loneliness, and a kind of ambient nihilism—the suspicion that beneath all our striving, consuming, performing, and scrolling, nothing finally means very much.
This is the human territory for which Existential Health Practitioners are being formed. Their task will not be to replace one set of answers with another or become authorities over other people’s lives. It will be to meet another person where certainty has run out and the deeper questions have become unavoidable, without rushing to diagnose the experience, explain it away, or rescue them from it.
And that raises a surprisingly difficult question for anyone attempting to train them:
What do you ask them to read?
Choosing thirteen books for the core reading of an ** Existential Health Practitioner training program** is an impossible exercise. The questions gathered under the name
What makes a life meaningful? How do we live knowing that we will die, or find our footing when the beliefs that once organized our world cease to be credible? We struggle with identity and belonging, suffering and uncertainty, freedom and limitation. We wonder how much of what we call the self is actually ours, how deeply culture, power, language, community, and history participate in shaping the person we become, and what it means to accompany another human being without assuming authority over their life.
There are entire libraries devoted to each of these questions. Philosophy, anthropology, psychology, sociology, religious studies, neuroscience, ecology, literature, gender studies, trauma studies, African philosophy, existentialism, humanistic psychology, spiritual direction, and countless indigenous wisdom traditions all illuminate different dimensions of the human predicament. Any serious reading list could easily contain fifty books and still leave enormous territories unexplored.
But a training program requires boundaries. Reading must eventually serve formation rather than become an endless accumulation of knowledge. The task, then, was not to identify the thirteen most important books about human existence, as though such a ranking were possible. It was to assemble a small library capable of opening several essential windows onto what it means to be human.
These books do not agree with one another, nor are students expected to agree with everything in them. They come from different disciplines, cultures, philosophical commitments, and historical moments. Some will resonate immediately. Others will provoke resistance. A few may fundamentally alter how a student understands human beings.
That is precisely the point.
Existential Health Practitioners are not being trained into a single worldview. They are developing the capacity to encounter human beings whose lives cannot be understood through any single worldview. The reading has to widen the practitioner’s field of vision before it can sharpen their practice.
What emerges from these thirteen books is not a doctrine of existential health. It is a richer picture of the creature whose existential health concerns us.
These books also represent only one dimension of the training. Existential Health Practitioner formation takes place within a curriculum I have developed and curated specifically for this work, bringing together the concepts, frameworks, practices, and forms of discernment that constitute existential health as an emerging field. Participants engage that curriculum through group training sessions, individual one-to-one training, assignments, dialogue, practice, and reflection, guided by a diverse faculty and training team who bring different professional backgrounds, lived experiences, perspectives, and areas of expertise to the work.
Just as importantly, the training is structured as a learning community. Participants are not simply receiving information from instructors; they are learning with and from faculty, trainers, and one another, bringing their own histories, questions, experiences, perspectives, and developing practice into a shared process of formation. The books widen the intellectual landscape. The curriculum, training relationships, diverse voices, and learning community are where that landscape becomes practice.
Barbara J. King’s ** Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion **provides an important place to begin because religion has occupied such an enormous role in human attempts to understand existence. Yet King approaches religion anthropologically rather than theologically. Instead of beginning with the question of whether God exists, she asks what kinds of creatures human beings are that gods, religions, rituals, and sacred worlds emerge at all.
Her exploration situates religion within capacities that precede theology: attachment, relationship, imagination, empathy, belonging, and meaning-making. This shift is especially important for Existential Health Practitioners. Religious beliefs do not exist merely as propositions inside people’s heads. They become woven into identity, family, morality, community, memory, fear, hope, and belonging. Understanding religion as a human phenomenon allows practitioners to take religious experience seriously without requiring them to affirm or deny its metaphysical claims.
Dimitris Xygalatas carries this inquiry from belief into ritual. In ** Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living**, seemingly irrational human behaviors become intelligible when viewed through their social and existential functions. Human beings ritualize births and deaths, marriages and separations, victories and losses, beginnings and endings. We gather, repeat, synchronize, commemorate, mourn, celebrate, and mark thresholds together.
Ritual reveals something fundamental about human existence. Meaning is not merely an idea we possess. It is something we enact. Our bodies participate in creating the worlds our minds inhabit. Ritual can regulate uncertainty, strengthen social bonds, embody values, create continuity, and locate individuals within a shared reality. Organized religion has historically been one of the great repositories of ritual, but the human need for meaningful practices does not disappear when religious belief disappears.
Irvin Yalom’s ** Existential Psychotherapy** moves the inquiry toward several realities that no ritual, religion, philosophy, or psychological framework can ultimately remove. Yalom organizes existential psychotherapy around death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Whatever one’s metaphysical commitments, these conditions remain stubbornly present in human life.
Mortality shadows a life that remains, despite all our efforts, only partly within our control. Freedom exists, but always inside circumstances we did not entirely choose. Other people become indispensable to who we are, yet no relationship can relieve us of the strange solitude of having to inhabit our own existence. And through it all runs the persistent human hunger for meaning, even when reality refuses to tell us clearly what any of it means.
For Existential Health, these are not problems waiting to be solved. They are conditions requiring capacity. Psychological treatment may address anxiety, depression, trauma, compulsions, and other forms of distress, but there are dimensions of human suffering that arise simply because we are conscious creatures attempting to inhabit uncertain lives.
Ernest Becker’s ** The Denial of Death **presses one of these realities further. Mortality is easily imagined as something relevant primarily to aging, illness, grief, or end-of-life care. Becker demonstrates how deeply awareness of death may penetrate ordinary life. Our ambitions, identities, institutions, cultural systems, religious beliefs, heroic projects, and desires for significance can all become ways of negotiating the intolerable knowledge that our individual existence will end.
Whether or not one accepts every dimension of Becker’s argument, his work makes mortality difficult to relegate to the edges of human experience. Death is not merely waiting at the end of life. Awareness of death participates in shaping the life that precedes it.
Nolen Gertz’s ** Nihilism** brings this first movement of the reading into the contemporary world. Modern people frequently inherit fragments of meaning systems that no longer possess the authority they once did. Religion may have lost credibility. Traditional institutions may inspire suspicion rather than trust. Technology increasingly mediates our relationship with ourselves, others, and reality. Old answers disappear more quickly than new capacities for living without them develop.
Nihilism, in this context, is more interesting than simply declaring that life is meaningless. It raises questions about what happens when inherited structures of value collapse and responsibility for living can no longer be comfortably outsourced to them. For practitioners working with people after religious deconstruction, ideological disillusionment, identity disruption, or other forms of meaning collapse, this terrain is unavoidable.
Together, King, Xygalatas, Yalom, Becker, and Gertz introduce a peculiar animal: a creature capable of imagining gods, creating rituals, anticipating death, questioning meaning, and becoming destabilized by the failure of the worlds it has constructed.
But this creature never exists in isolation.
David Abram’s ** The Spell of the Sensuous **interrupts one of the most persistent assumptions of modern Western thought: that the meaningful human self resides primarily somewhere inside the mind.
Abram draws attention outward and downward, toward embodiment, perception, language, place, ecology, and the more-than-human world. We do not encounter reality as detached consciousnesses observing existence from somewhere outside it. We encounter it through bodies breathing air, touching surfaces, hearing sounds, inhabiting landscapes, responding to weather, moving among animals, plants, objects, and other people.
This matters profoundly for existential health. Meaning can become excessively cognitive, as though a meaningful life depends upon discovering the correct explanation for existence. Abram offers another possibility. Perhaps part of our difficulty is not that we have failed to explain reality adequately but that we have forgotten how fully we belong to it.
Motsamai Molefe’s ** Ubuntu Ethics: Human Dignity, Moral Perfectionism, and Needs **challenges another assumption that easily passes unnoticed: the idea that the individual is the fundamental unit of human existence.
Western cultures often imagine personhood as something contained within the boundaries of the autonomous self. Ubuntu traditions offer a different starting point. Personhood emerges relationally. Human dignity, flourishing, moral life, and identity cannot be understood apart from the web of relationships through which people become persons.
This does not require dissolving individuality into community. It does require reconsidering the fantasy of the self-made human being. Every person arrives in a world already populated by language, relationships, obligations, histories, dependencies, and forms of belonging. We become ourselves with and through others.
Judith Butler’s ** Gender Trouble **complicates the picture further by asking how identity itself becomes intelligible. Categories that feel natural and inevitable are shaped through language, norms, expectations, power, and repeated social practices. Whatever conclusions a reader reaches about Butler’s larger philosophical project, the challenge is indispensable for practitioners: learn to notice the cultural architecture inside apparently private identities.
People do not invent themselves from nothing. They inherit categories through which they become recognizable to themselves and others. Families, religions, cultures, institutions, gender systems, economic arrangements, racial histories, and communities all participate in producing the available vocabulary of personhood.
This creates one of the central tensions of self-authorship. Human beings must become authors of lives they did not begin writing. We inherit languages we did not create, bodies we did not choose, histories we did not initiate, and social worlds already assigning meanings to us before we develop the capacity to question them. Agency is real, but it is always situated.
Howard Thurman’s ** Jesus and the Disinherited** brings this situated self into direct contact with power. Thurman writes from the existential interior of those whose lives are shaped by domination and exclusion. His attention to fear, deception, hatred, dignity, and spiritual freedom demonstrates why existential questions can never be separated entirely from social conditions.
It is one thing to discuss freedom philosophically. It is another to consider freedom from the standpoint of someone whose possibilities have been systematically constrained. Meaning, agency, dignity, and selfhood are experienced differently when a person inhabits a world structured by racial hierarchy, poverty, violence, marginalization, or exclusion.
Thurman guards existential work against becoming an abstraction practiced by people privileged enough to imagine that every human problem occurs inside the individual. Sometimes suffering emerges from the unavoidable conditions of existence. Sometimes it emerges from what human beings have done to one another. Often the two become entangled.
Abram, Molefe, Butler, and Thurman substantially enlarge the person we first encountered. The meaning-making animal is also embodied, ecological, relational, culturally constructed, historically situated, and embedded within structures of power.
Any practice concerned with human flourishing must learn to see all of this at once.
Marlene Winell’s ** Leaving the Fold** brings these broad questions into a particular experience that many Existential Health Practitioners will encounter: what happens when a religious world ceases to hold.
Leaving religion is often described as a change of beliefs. That description rarely captures the magnitude of the experience. Religious systems can organize identity, morality, sexuality, family relationships, community, authority, mortality, purpose, belonging, and a person’s understanding of reality itself. When such a system becomes untenable, the disruption may reach far beyond theology.
Winell helps practitioners recognize the depth of religious conditioning and the complexity involved in disentangling oneself from it. Someone may intellectually reject a doctrine while continuing to experience its emotional consequences. A person may cease believing in divine judgment while remaining terrified of disapproval. Religious authority can disappear while the habits of outsourced authority remain. A theology may be dismantled years before the person learns to trust their own perceptions.
This is where deconstruction reveals its limits. Discovering that an inherited structure no longer deserves one’s allegiance is significant. Learning how to inhabit life without that structure is another developmental task entirely.
George Bonanno’s ** The End of Trauma** introduces an important corrective into contemporary understandings of disruption and suffering. Trauma language has become one of the dominant voca…
