The Art of Flourishing by Jeffrey B. Rubin PhD

Author:Jeffrey B. Rubin, PhD [Rubin, Jeffrey B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-71891-4
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2011-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

The Scattered Self

Some people face the opposite challenge—their vision is too broad and diffuse. “I could see myself living a thousand different lives,” a client once told me. When we have too many passions and too broad an image of how we want to live, we can be all over the place, too scattered and unfocused. Too many visions can lead to paralysis.

I struggled with this for many years. I wore three professional hats—therapist, professor, and writer—and my interests ranged from Western psychoanalysis to Eastern meditative disciplines. Over nearly three decades I had worked with several different exceptional psychotherapeutic, meditative, yogic, and martial arts teachers. These studies were enormously illuminating and nurturing. I passionately filled my nonwork and nonfamily hours with exercise, and studying and writing about psychoanalysis, meditation, and yoga.

Even though I found each activity profoundly enriching, I was too scattered and had difficulty reconciling my different passions and aspects of myself. Aspiring to being a healer and scholar, contemplative and athlete, left me feeling pulled in different, often opposite directions. And my capacity to deepen my understanding and practice of each passion was probably compromised by my not having a cohesive vision. It was as if I knew I wanted to play music, but could never choose an instrument, so I tried to play them all simultaneously. The challenge for me was how to make a coherent life out of varied passions and a wide vision.

The danger of a scattered self is that we never manage to unite our different passions and interests into a coherent whole; we feel directionless. When we focus our vision—prioritizing our different interests and passions and weaving them into a harmonious composition—we not only waste less emotional energy, we operate more effectively.

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