There is a point at which a field has to answer a question its most elegant language will not settle: What does someone actually do with this? A person reads about self-authorship, recognizes the importance of belonging, and understands that uncertainty belongs to the human condition. Then Tuesday arrives with a difficult conversation, an unwelcome decision, and the familiar temptation to let someone else determine what their life should mean.
I have spent years developing language for existential health because important dimensions of human experience remain poorly understood. Meaning, identity, mortality, freedom, and belonging shape how we inhabit our lives, including lives that appear successful from the outside. Giving these dimensions serious attention has been central to my writing, the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, practitioner training, and the development of the Institute for Existential Health.
But I want this field to reach the kitchen, the appointment, the strained friendship, and the patch of ground outside the door. Someone should leave an encounter with existential health knowing something they could undertake that afternoon. Its ideas need a practical life.
I want to begin a commons of existential health practices, organized around the capacities the field seeks to cultivate. It would include individual and shared practices in our relationship with ourselves, with other people, and with the more-than-human world. What follows is an opening contribution: a small collection of actions that people could try, adapt, and help develop further.
My own history gives me little reason to confuse understanding with transformation. I once possessed an elaborate account of existence, supported by theological education and institutional authority. Being able to explain the world did not necessarily make me honest about my experience of living in it.
Leaving that world required more than changing my beliefs. I had to make decisions without familiar forms of permission and remain in relationship when agreement no longer supplied the ground. Much of that learning happened through attempts I would not have described as spiritual practices: saying what I meant, admitting what I did not know, and accepting responsibility for choices I had previously assigned to an authority.
This is the distance practices would address. We understand boundaries and still agree to commitments we resent. We value connection while leaving every invitation for someone else to initiate. The work begins when an insight acquires an action, and that action brings us into contact with something our understanding alone has not changed.
A practice gives a capacity an occasion to develop. It involves doing something intentionally, returning to it where useful, and adapting it through experience. Reflection helps us learn from the activity, but the activity must be clear enough to undertake.
Existential health concerns how we engage the realities of being alive. Its capacities include reality contact, self-authorship, participation in meaning, and belonging without self-betrayal. They also concern how we encounter uncertainty, freedom, suffering, and mortality, and how we remain available to a world we do not control.
These capacities provide the organizing foundation of the practices. The relationship areas describe where they are exercised. An action undertaken with another person might strengthen self-authorship; caring for a place might deepen reality contact, belonging, and responsibility. The categories overlap because life does.
The connection must be specific. Making something without knowing how it will turn out exercises our ability to act amid uncertainty. Receiving help gives us an experience of dependence within relationship. Repairing harm asks us to acknowledge reality and take responsibility for our participation in it.
No activity guarantees a particular result. The same action takes on different meanings in different circumstances, and completing it does not prove that a capacity has developed. These are proposed opportunities for cultivation, whose value we will learn about through use.
Our relationship with ourselves takes shape through how we attend, choose, act, and respond to our limits. Practices here give us opportunities to exercise agency in manageable situations. Some are private, while others bring our choices into contact with people and commitments beyond us.
Choose one action you have been postponing because you want to feel more certain before taking it. Begin the conversation, send the proposal, sign up for the class, make the invitation, submit the work, or take the first irreversible step toward something that matters. Choose something consequential enough that you feel the uncertainty, but not something reckless.
Then notice what happens when preparation ends and participation begins. You will not know exactly how the other person will respond or what the decision will set in motion. That is the practice. Self-authorship develops when we act without requiring certainty to arrive first and discover that we are capable of responding to what follows.
Think of a relationship in which you have been rehearsing an imaginary conversation instead of having a real one. Decide what actually needs to be said, then create an appropriate opportunity to say it. Speak from your own experience rather than trying to control the other person’s response.
The practice is not successful because the conversation goes well. It is successful because reality replaces rehearsal. Relationship develops through contact with another person who remains outside our control. Their response becomes something to encounter rather than something we endlessly predict.
Go somewhere the human world is not the main event: a forest, shoreline, mountain, river, field, or dark place where you can see the night sky. Leave the headphones behind. Resist turning the experience into content. Give yourself enough time for your attention to move beyond your own concerns.
Notice what happens when the world stops functioning as scenery for your life. Other creatures are pursuing lives of their own. Water is moving without your permission. Trees are participating in timescales that exceed you. The practice is not finding a spiritual message in nature. It is experiencing yourself as one participant in a world that was never organized around you.
Choose something you already know is over but continue carrying because you have not consented to its ending. It might be an identity, expectation, project, role, relationship pattern, ambition, or version of yourself. Name what has ended and what you keep doing to prevent yourself from acknowledging it.
Then make one concrete gesture that corresponds to reality. Remove something, cancel something, give something away, change the routine, write the final page, or tell someone what you have finally admitted to yourself. Finitude becomes practice when endings are allowed to reorganize a life rather than remaining intellectually acknowledged but existentially refused.
Create something that has no guaranteed audience, market, grade, applause, or measurable return. Write the essay, plant the garden, compose the song, build the table, photograph the neighborhood, cook the meal, start the gathering. Give it enough effort that some part of you cares what becomes of it.
This is participatory meaning. Instead of waiting for life to announce what matters, you place something into the world because you have decided it is worth making. Meaning becomes less a conclusion you reach about existence and more a relationship you enter through participation.
Relational capacities develop through encounters in which other people bring needs, preferences, and experiences of their own. The practices in this area involve participation with consent and attention to circumstance. Several begin with modest actions because even a small change in a familiar relationship sometimes asks a great deal of us.
Identify a relationship in which you routinely edit yourself to preserve harmony, approval, or belonging. Find one thing you genuinely want, believe, need, or prefer that you have been reluctant to make visible. Say it clearly without turning it into a demand that the other person agree.
Self-authorship becomes real when another person is present. It is relatively easy to know yourself privately; the harder practice is allowing yourself to become known while remaining capable of relationship. The aim is neither getting your way nor proving your independence. It is discovering whether you can belong without disappearing.
Ask someone you trust for help with something you would normally carry alone. Choose something substantial enough that receiving assistance exposes your dependence rather than merely improving your efficiency. Resist apologizing excessively, minimizing the need, or immediately searching for a way to repay the debt.
Interdependence is easy to affirm philosophically and harder to inhabit. Many of us are comfortable being needed because usefulness gives us control over our place in a relationship. Needing another person reverses the arrangement. The practice is allowing yourself to experience dependence without translating it into weakness or obligation.
Invite someone into a part of your life that is normally private rather than waiting for a social occasion to create the conditions for connection. Cook together, walk somewhere that matters to you, sit on the porch after dark, work beside each other, or share a place connected to your history. Let the encounter have enough unstructured time that neither of you has to perform.
Belonging develops through repeated experiences of being present and known, not through an abstract conviction that human beings need community. Hospitality gives relationship a physical location. We make room in our schedules, homes, routines, and attention for another life to exist alongside our own.
Spend time with someone whose suffering you cannot solve. Do not arrive with an explanation, lesson, silver lining, or strategy unless they ask for one. Listen closely enough to discover what kind of presence they actually want, and remain willing to encounter pain without requiring it to become meaningful before you can tolerate being near it.
Some of the deepest forms of human accompaniment begin where usefulness ends. Another person’s grief, illness, disappointment, or uncertainty confronts us with the limits of our power. Existential resilience includes developing the capacity to remain present when reality cannot be repaired and love has to take the form of staying.
Choose a situation in which your actions have affected another person and notice the explanation you instinctively reach for. Set it aside long enough to name what happened from the standpoint of its consequences rather than your intentions. Ask what repair would look like, then undertake what is appropriately yours without demanding forgiveness, reassurance, or immediate restoration of the relationship.
Responsibility requires more than possessing the correct interpretation of ourselves. Reality includes effects we did not intend and versions of events we do not control. Repair exercises the capacity to remain in contact with those realities without collapsing into shame or escaping into self-justification.
Choose a situation in which maintaining another person’s approval requires you to violate a limit you know you need. Say no, renegotiate the expectation, leave when you said you would leave, or stop performing a role you no longer consent to occupy. Do it clearly and respectfully, without constructing an elaborate case for why you are entitled to the boundary.
Freedom becomes existentially significant when exercising it costs something. A boundary reveals whether belonging depends upon self-erasure and whether we can tolerate another person’s disappointment without immediately abandoning ourselves. In relationships shaped by coercion, dependence, or unequal power, the practice must include attention to safety and support rather than treating refusal as equally available to everyone.
Join work whose meaning exceeds your ownership of it. Contribute to a neighborhood effort, mutual-aid network, ecological restoration project, community organization, or another shared undertaking where other people will influence the priorities and receive part of the credit. Stay long enough to become accountable to the work rather than treating participation as a single experience.
Participatory meaning asks us to move beyond the question of what gives my life meaning. We enter undertakings already in progress, contribute something finite, negotiate with people we did not choose, and accept that the outcome will never be entirely ours. Meaning becomes participation in a world we share rather than another possession of the individual self.
The more-than-human world should not become another resource for human self-improvement. The practice is learning that we belong to a world that is not ours.
Existential health becomes too narrow if the world appears chiefly as a setting for human development. Our lives depend upon soil, water, plants, animals, weather, and ecological processes that exceed our purposes. Practices in this area bring that dependence into attention and care.
Living in the mountains of Costa Rica keeps the larger world close to my daily experience. Yet access to a forest or an expansive landscape is unnecessary for this work. A household plant, an urban tree, the water from a tap, or a shared patch of ground offers a place to begin.
Take responsibility for the flourishing of something living that is not human. Care for an animal, cultivate plants, restore a damaged patch of ground, maintain habitat for pollinators, or participate in an existing ecological project. Learn what that life actually requires rather than assuming that affection or good intentions amount to care. Commit long enough for the responsibility to inconvenience you.
The practice begins when another life interrupts your preferences. A plant needs water when you are busy. An animal has rhythms that do not conform to your schedule. Soil, weather, illness, growth, decay, and season impose conditions you did not choose. Care moves us from appreciation of life to accountability before it.
Something significant happens when another creature’s well-being becomes partly dependent upon our attention. We encounter agency without sovereignty: our actions matter enormously, yet we remain unable to control the outcome. Things become sick. Weather changes. Creatures die. Care therefore exercises responsibility alongside humility, attachment alongside finitude, and participation without mastery.
Choose one place in the more-than-human world and return to it repeatedly across several months. It does not need to be spectacular. A patch of woods, creek, city park, shoreline, field, neighborhood tree, vacant lot, or hillside will do. Visit often enough that the place begins to lose its generic quality.
Learn what lives there. Find out the names of several trees, birds, insects, fungi, or plants. Notice where water collects, which creatures appear at different hours, what flowers and what disappears, where human activity has altered the land, and how the place changes after rain, drought, heat, or cold. Learn something about what was there before you arrived and what pressures now shape its future.
Repeated attention changes the relationship. The place gradually ceases to be “nature,” an abstraction existing somewhere beyond ordinary human life. It becomes this place, inhabited by particular lives and histories that continue when you leave.
Eventually, ask what participation requires of you. That might mean removing litter, joining restoration work, supporting people already protecting the place, changing something about you…
