Become Phenomenal

‘People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive’ Joseph Campbell

When I was researching spirituality for my MSc, I choose a qualitative research method which is based on phenomenology. In simple terms, phenomenology is the philosophy and study of direct experience. Phenomenology recognises the true source of meaning in life is the lived experience of each human being. As a researcher, I didn’t want to try and ‘define’ anything, rather I wanted to be a witness to the personal experiences of the research participants in a particular area of their life; in this case spirituality. I asked them to talk to me about their experiences of spirituality rather than explain it to me.

Experiencing Life

Why is this important I hear you ask? One of the major challenges of modern life is that we live in our heads. We describe our lives rather than experience life. We narrate our lives rather than be present to sensing and feeling our lived experience more deeply through our bodies. By living life in this manner, we create a distance; slightly disconnected from who we are and life as it is.

Staying in our minds, simply narrating our life dampens our experience of being alive. When we engage with personal development in any manner, we don’t simply want more goals to achieve or purpose to strive for, we want to feel and experience life in a fuller, more meaningful way. This is why we talk about the importance of being ‘present’. We must be present to what we are feeling and sensing to experience life in a new way.

Become Phenomenal

The word phenomenal comes from the same root as phenomenology. When we use the word phenomenal in a colloquial way, we are often referring to an event; something amazing or remarkable that happened. You go to a concert; someone asks you how it was and you say ‘It was phenomenal!’. To describe something as phenomenal is to recognise you had an experience that made you feel something, that was worth remembering.

While we use phenomenal most commonly as an adjective, the word itself also means ‘perceptible by the senses or through immediate experience’. To experience life more fully, you must become phenomenal; connecting to and acknowledging what you feel, what you desire, what you sense, making real and tangible what you know is the experience of life you want for yourself.

Too often, we shy away from allowing life to be an experience like this because we fear it will overwhelm us. The sensory experience of really living, of experiencing life, of taking bigger risks, of allowing life to be remarkable feels too much. We recoil, afraid it will hurt. We believe if we allow the experience of that high, the cost may be the low to come. Truthfully, it may come. To really experience life, we must allow ourselves to become a bigger container for who we can be and the entire spectrum of what we will feel and encounter as a result. We must take risks to allow the experience of truly being alive.