EHNW 2025 Annual Workshop – In Person at George Fox University: Portland Center – Portland, OR

Awakening Life-Enhancing Anxiety in our Profession and the World:

An Existential-Depth Appropach

Presented and Facilitated by Kirk Schneider, Ph.D.

This hybrid workshop will explore how anxiety is hitting the roof in our practices and the world precisely because we so often fail to address the underlying or primal anxiety that fuels greater and more destructive anxiety. That which I term “life-enhancing anxiety,” is a level of anxiety that enables us to live with and make the best of the depth and mystery of existence. Or to put it more concretely, it fosters our capacity to live more on the edge of wonder and discovery rather than terror and overwhelm.

In this presentation, I will elaborate on the above and provide a series of exercises that can optimize our capacity for life-enhancing anxiety both in our practices and in the communities in which we live.

This approach aims at humanizing difficult encounters between people from conflicting cultural and political backgrounds. Time-permitting, I will guide the audience in a one-on-one practice session with the Experiential Democracy Dialogue, and elaborate on ways they might use the format to work with their clients and/or willing/interested people in their communities.

In sum, I will raise and address the fraught problem of how to really “meet” each other and ourselves in the encounter with differences, fostering in turn a more presence-based, awe-based world.

KIRK J. SCHNEIDER, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and leading
spokesperson for contemporary existential-humanistic and existential-
integrative psychology. Dr. Schneider is a past editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, adjunct faculty at Saybrook University and Teachers College, Columbia University, and president of the Existential-Humanistic Institute (EHI).

*Note: 6 Clinical CE’s are available through NASW for those interested. See more below.

** If you’d like to learn more about becoming an affiliate please go here: https://www.ehnwpdx.org/ehnw-affiliation-opportunities/