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IKIGAI | SELF-HELP | LIFE-LESSONS| FACILITATION
The Art of Teaching Ikigai
(a systemic approach to providing meaning to ikigai workshops)
[if you are not yet a Medium member, continue reading here)
Largely unknown in Japan until 1966, and in the rest of the world known for only about ten years, ikigai¹ seems to have developed into an unavoidable self-help, feel-good, and corporate well-being phenomenon of sorts. But does it all really make sense? And if so, how can it be taught in a meaningful way?
I am half a lifetime into this now. I wrote tens of articles, co-authored a book (ready for publication), and facilitated hundreds of workshops. Here is my current take on matters of ikigai.
Although in modern popular business and self-help books, ikigai is often presented as an age-old Japanese approach to living a meaningful life, the concept (and even the word) is largely absent from anything earlier than 1966, when Kamiya Mieko, 神谷 美恵子 (1914–1979), who was the director and chief psychiatrist at an island sanatorium for victims of Hansen Disease (leprosy), published her seminal…
