It was a strange week.
I traveled to the United States and back to Central America, got sick, and ended up having minor surgery. The week I imagined having was replaced by the week that actually happened. I published less than I normally do, spent more time dealing with the limits and unpredictability of a body, and was reminded that life has very little interest in the plans we make for it.
This is part of what I mean by the practice of being alive. To inhabit your life is not to become skilled at arranging reality according to your preferences. It is learning to remain present to the life that is actually happening, including the parts you would not have chosen. Illness, uncertainty, vulnerability, and interrupted plans belong to human existence as surely as joy, possibility, and the moments when everything seems to be going our way.
There is a difference between resigning ourselves to what happens and refusing to abandon our own lives when they become difficult. This week asked something of me that I have spent a great deal of time writing about: to stop negotiating with the life I wished I were having and inhabit the one that was here.
In an unexpected way, that interruption belonged to the writing itself.
The four pieces I published this week kept returning to a similar question: What remains when we begin separating our actual lives from the structures we inherited for understanding them?
I began with ** You Don’t Hate Your Life. But Is It Yours?**, an exploration of a form of estrangement that can be difficult to recognize because nothing is obviously wrong. A person can build a competent, respectable, even successful life and eventually discover that much of it was assembled from expectations they never consciously chose. The problem is not necessarily unhappiness. It is authorship. You can become extraordinarily good at living a life that does not feel entirely your own.
That question of authorship led naturally into ** The Last Place Religion Hides**. Leaving religion does not necessarily mean religion has finished leaving us. Long after doctrines have been rejected and institutions abandoned, the inherited world can remain embedded in language: the words through which we interpret desire, doubt, morality, worth, failure, the body, and ourselves. We can stop believing the theology while continuing to speak its assumptions inside our own heads.
But reconstruction cannot consist only of identifying what we inherited and removing it. Eventually another question appears: What was underneath all of this before we were told what it meant?
That question took me into an unexpected conversation with Vedanta in ** The Place We Never Left**. One of the insights I encountered in Eastern spirituality after leaving Christianity was the possibility that our most fundamental condition is not separation but participation. We spend enormous energy trying to earn belonging, achieve transcendence, find our way to God, or become worthy of existence, when our existence itself already places us inside a reality from which we were never actually separate.
That exploration brought me back, once again, to Jesus.
In ** The Jesus Beneath Christianity**, I tried to distinguish the first-century Jewish teacher from the immense theological structure constructed around him. After decades of dismantling my own Christianity, I remain interested in what happens when Jesus is no longer required to carry two thousand years of doctrine. Beneath the metaphysical claims, institutional authority, creeds, and systems of salvation, there is still a human being confronting questions of power, belonging, compassion, freedom, and what it means to become fully alive.
Looking back, I can see that these four articles were tracing a movement.
From the life we inherited, to the language we inherited, to the metaphysics we inherited, to the religious figure we inherited.
The work is not simply to reject what was handed to us. It is to become capable of examining it without fear, keeping what remains true, relinquishing what does not, and recovering our own participation in the making of a life.
That is why this strange week belongs here too. I did not get the week I planned. My body interrupted the schedule, certainty narrowed, and life became considerably more immediate than the ideas I was writing about.
Sometimes inhabiting your life means discovering what is underneath everything you thought it was supposed to be.
This week also marked an important moment in work that has occupied an increasing part of my life over the past several years.
We welcomed a new cohort of 21 people into the Existential Health Practitioner Training and Certification Course, a year of study, formation, practice, and engagement with some of the fundamental dimensions of human life: meaning, identity, mortality, belonging, freedom, suffering, purpose, and self-trust. At the same time, another cohort that began in February is well into its training, while our earliest cohort is approaching completion and preparing to carry this work into the world.
There is something moving about having three cohorts at different points in the process at the same time. One is preparing to step into the work professionally. Another is deepening its formation and practice. And 21 people are just beginning. Together, they represent something larger than three training groups. They are part of the early formation of a field and a growing community of people learning how to accompany the existential dimensions of human life.
For those who are newer to my writing, Existential Health is the name I have given to a domain of human health concerned with our capacity to navigate the existential realities of being alive.
Just as physical, psychological, and social health describe important dimensions of human well-being, existential health attends to our relationship with the fundamental realities of being human: identity and self-understanding, the creation of a life worth living, uncertainty and the limits of knowing, belonging, mortality and loss, freedom and responsibility, change, and the challenge of finding or creating meaning when the structures that once organized our lives no longer hold.
Much of my work now involves establishing the intellectual and practical foundations for this emerging field. My ** first peer-reviewed academic work** on Existential Health has been published, and
** The Practice of Being Alive**, my forthcoming book, approaches much of this territory from another direction. It is less concerned with establishing a professional field than with the human experience underneath it: what it means to inhabit our lives rather than continually stand outside them, how we develop the capacity to remain in contact with reality, and how we recover participation, belonging, self-trust, and authorship in a world where many inherited structures of meaning are losing their authority.
The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality is where much of this becomes lived community. CNRS creates spaces for people who may no longer belong within traditional religion but have not stopped taking the deeper questions of existence seriously. The Existential Health Daily Reader brings these questions into everyday life through short readings, reflections, and practices, while our Reader Discussion Group gives us a place to explore them together rather than leaving them on the page.
The ** practitioner training** represents another step entirely. We are forming people who can accompany others through deconstruction, major life transitions, grief and mortality, crises of meaning and identity, and the difficult work of constructing a life beyond inherited answers. Graduates are trained to offer non-religious spiritual direction and existential health support without supplying people with another ideology to adopt or another authority to surrender themselves to.
This is why these early cohorts matter so much to me. We are not simply running a training program. We are building a field and forming the people who will practice it. The academic work, white papers, training, CNRS community, Daily Reader, discussion groups, and The Practice of Being Alive are different expressions of the same larger undertaking: developing better language, practices, communities, and forms of support for the existential dimension of human life.
Years from now, I suspect we will look back on these early cohorts and recognize that something was taking shape through them. To those nearing completion, I celebrate what you have become equipped to offer. To the 21 people beginning this week, welcome. You are not simply entering a course. You are participating in the early formation of something I believe has an important contribution to make.
There is still a very small window to join this new cohort. Learn more about the Existential Health Practitioner Training and Certification Course
I spend a fair amount of time in Substack Notes during the week. It is a different kind of writing for me - closer to the movement of thought itself. An observation, a question, a sentence that catches something I have been trying to understand. Some eventually find their way into longer essays or other work; others remain exactly what they were when I wrote them: a thought worth putting into the world. Here are a few from this week that I wanted to gather in one place.
There are experiences that do not fit the language we inherited for them.
Nando Parrado describes one of these in, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home’. After surviving the 1972 Andes plane crash and eventually making the extraordinary journey through the mountains that led to rescue, Parrado reflected on what he encountered there:
“I did not feel God as most people. I did feel something larger than myself, something in the mountains and the glaciers and the glowing sky that, in rare moments, reassured me, and made me feel that the world was orderly and loving and good. If this was God, it was not God as a being or a spirit or some omnipotent, superhuman mind. It was not a God who would choose to save us or abandon us, or change in any way. It was simply a silence, a wholeness, an awe-inspiring simplicity. It seemed to reach me through my own feelings of love, and I have often thought that when we feel what we call love, we are really feeling our connection to this awesome presence. I feel this presence still when my mind quiets and I really pay attention.”
What strikes me about Parrado’s account is that his experience contained both an absence and a presence.
The absence was the God he had been given through religion: God as a separate supernatural being, an omnipotent mind somewhere beyond the world, intervening in human affairs, deciding whom to save and whom to abandon. In the extremity of the Andes, that conception no longer corresponded to what Parrado actually experienced.
But the disappearance of that God did not leave him with nothing.
There was still the mountain. The glaciers. The glowing sky. There was silence and wholeness, love and an almost unbearable simplicity. There remained an intuition that beneath the terror and contingency of existence was something larger than the isolated self, something in which he was somehow participating.
One day you will realize you were waiting for permission that never had to come.
Maybe you have spent more of your life waiting than you realize.
Waiting for someone to understand. For someone to approve. For the people you love to be comfortable with the choices you need to make. Waiting until you can explain yourself well enough that no one will misunderstand you. Waiting for some unmistakable sign that says you are allowed to change, leave, begin again, want something different, or become someone you have never been before.
Some of us learned very early that belonging came with conditions. You could be yourself, but only within certain boundaries. You could ask questions, but not those questions. You could follow your heart, provided it led somewhere everyone else recognized. So you became skilled at looking outside yourself before moving. You learned to read the room before reading your own life.
“I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self.”
Demian
There is something radical in Hesse’s sentence. Most of us were taught, in one way or another, that the task of life was to become acceptable to something outside ourselves. Family, religion, culture, institutions, success, morality, and belonging all supplied versions of the person we were supposed to become.
Long before we knew how to listen to ourselves, we learned to read the room. We became skilled at detecting expectations, earning approval, avoiding rejection, and constructing a life that made sense according to inherited measures.
A person can become remarkably successful at living a life that is increasingly estranged from themselves. Expectations are fulfilled, roles performed, beliefs maintained, responsibilities carried. From the outside, everything may appear coherent. Yet somewhere within us remains an awareness of the distance between the life we are living and the life that feels genuinely ours.
I do not understand the “true self” as some pure, hidden essence waiting to be discovered beneath all our conditioning. Human beings are more complicated than that. History, relationships, wounds, language, culture, biology, circumstance, and choice all participate in who we become.
If something in this week’s writing has given you a larger place to stand, a question worth carrying, or language for something you have been trying to understand, I invite you to become a paid subscriber ($50 annually). Your support helps sustain this writing and the larger work taking shape through CNRS and the emerging field of Existential Health. Paid subscribers also receive complimentary membership in the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, with access to our growing community, gatherings, discussion groups, workshops, and other offerings. It is a way to support the work while becoming more deeply part of it.
