Photo by David Roseborough. It’s 2.57am, and I find myself wide awake, yet again, for the third consecutive night. Apart from the constant trips to the bathroom throughout the night (and day, for that matter), I found out that these midnight awakenings are just another one of those uncontrollable “perks” one gets to enjoy during… Read more »
“The way to value life, the way to feel compassion for others, the way to love anything with greatest depth is to be aware that these experiences are destined to be lost” — Yalom, 2008 It has been three months since I returned from the Bay Area. In some ways, it still feels surreal, to… Read more »
Over the course of the past seven months, I have been asked countless times by loved ones, friends, co-workers and strangers, “So what have you learned?” (by moving to the Bay Area). While most may be expecting some concrete answers on theories and concepts of therapy, and useful therapeutic skills or tools, I find that… Read more »
Edmund Leighton’s 1919 “Sweet Solitude.” Isolation vs. Relation As I began to make conscious efforts to be more present with myself and how I live my life, my heightened sense of self-awareness also led to the increased awareness of my sense of aloneness—the life anxiety that Otto Rank (cited in Yalom, 2008) warned us about…. Read more »
As I immerse myself in “the work” and struggle to seek a new way of experiencing and being, I was able to appreciate the meaning of the four important paradoxical concepts of our human existence Irvin Yalom described in his book Existential Psychology (1980) from a whole new perspective. Freedom vs. Responsibility I flew many… Read more »
Photo by David Yu. [Editor’s Note: I am honored and delighted to be able to write this brief introduction to a series of blogs written by a courageous Malaysian student and her journey into her own existence. The person that I’d like to introduce to you is JoAnn Loo who I met during one of… Read more »
