Psychology Today: How to Understand and Reach Self-Actualization

"What is self-actualization?

Self-actualization, according to the fathers of the human potential movement, Abraham Maslow, Kurt Goldstein, and Carl Rogers, is the complete realization of a person’s potential and the full development of their abilities, including a full appreciation for life.

Self-actualized people have an acceptance of who they are, despite their faults and limitations, and have the drive to be creative in all aspects of their being.

Victor Frankl said that one “who has a why can deal with any ‘how.’” In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl demonstrated that a sense of meaning could carry a person through the most difficult of circumstances.

Meaning is about knowing why a person does what they do. The subjective experience of joy arises when one discovers what one loves to do and when that meets the needs of the world.

Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. It involves being tough and skillful in times of change and danger. To be resilient also means to be directed, to be able to discern what is important, and to follow one's heart’s intention.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is often defined as moment-by-moment, non-judgmental awareness.

This skill allows a person to be self-aware, to notice when they are in balance with the flow of who they are, and to recognize when they have gotten off track. Mindfulness also leads to improved meta-cognition, which is an awareness and understanding of one’s own internal thoughts and feeling process.

With deep or effortless mindfulness, a related practice translated from the Tibetan tradition, a person can tap into a flow state or the field quality of awareness.

This practice is not about finding and “owning” a thing but about aligning with what is already there.It is possible to get a glimpse of this experience with the following brief practice.

• Settle into the sensations of your body, solid like a mountain, yet alert and relaxed.
• Be aware of your entire body and ground yourself in the sensations and movement of your breath.
• Remember a time when you had an extraordinary experience, an experience when you felt a sense of timelessness, presence, clarity, calm, and when you experienced reality as somehow slightly different.
• Remember the environment, what the light was like, the space around you, maybe the colors, the feeling tone.
• Describe this experience to yourself with as many particulars as possible, but don’t worry if you remember only a vague impression.

As a person taps into the flow of life, they have more energy than they would have had if they were constrained by a personal, narrow sense of self. With that, a person has more access to creativity, resourcefulness, and open heartedness, as they are not limited anymore by personal hesitancies and trepidations. Resting in this field of awareness, one is now able to tap into what is everywhere, which is timeless, formless, unhooked from the “managing mind.”"

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Reflection:

Would you consider yourself to be a mindful person? Why or why not?

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