Ikigai : the Japanese secret to a long and happy life pdfdrive com

Naikan meditation

Morita was a great Zen master of Naikan introspective meditation. Much of his therapy draws on his knowledge and mastery of this school, which centers on three questions the individual must ask him-or herself:

1. 
   What have I received from person X ?
   
2. 
   What have I given to person X ?
   
3. 
   What problems have I caused person X ?
   

Through these reflections, we stop identifying others as the cause of our problems and deepen our own sense of responsibility. As Morita said, “If you are angry and want to fight, think about it for three days before coming to blows. After three days, the intense desire to fight will pass on its own.”⁷

And now, ikigai

L ogotherapy and Morita therapy are both grounded in a personal, unique experience that you can access without therapists or spiritual retreats: the mission of finding your ikigai, your existential fuel. Once you find it, it is only a matter of having the courage and making the effort to stay on the right path.
In the following chapters, we’ll take a look at the basic tools you’ll need to get moving along that path: finding flow in the tasks you’ve chosen to do, eating in a balanced and mindful way, doing low-intensity exercise, and learning not to give in when difficulties arise. In order to do this, you have to accept that the world— like the people who live in it—is imperfect, but that it is still full of opportunities for growth and achievement.
Are you ready to throw yourself into your passion as if it were the most important thing in the world?

IV

FIND FLOW IN EVERYTHING YOU DO

How to turn work and free time into spaces for growth

We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
—Aristotle

Going with the flow

Imagine you are skiing down one of your favorite slopes. Powdery snow flies up on both sides of you like white sand. Conditions are perfect.
Y ou are entirely focused on skiing as well as you can. Y ou know exactly how to move at each moment. There is no future, no past. There is only the present. Y ou feel the snow, your skis, your body, and your consciousness united as a single entity. You are completely immersed in the experience, not thinking about or distracted by anything else. Y our ego dissolves, and you become part of what you are doing.
This is the kind of experience Bruce L ee described with his famous “Be water, my friend.”
We’ve all felt our sense of time vanish when we lose ourselves in an activity we enjoy. We start cooking and before we know it, several hours have passed. We spend an afternoon with a book and forget about the world going by until we notice the sunset and realize we haven’t eaten dinner. We go surfing and don’t realize how many hours we have spent in the water until the next day, when our muscles ache.
The opposite can also happen. When we have to complete a task we don’t want to do, every minute feels like a lifetime and we can’t stop looking at our watch. As the quip attributed to Einstein goes, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That is relativity.”
The funny thing is that someone else might really enjoy the same task, but we want to finish as quickly as possible.
What makes us enjoy doing something so much that we forget about whatever worries we might have while we do it? When are we happiest? These questions can help us discover our ikigai.