Hello, welcome to emotional badass where Moxie meets Mindful.

I'm your host, Nikki Eisenhower, life coach and psychotherapist, and on today's episode,

I'm exploring existentialism and finding courage, meaning, and absurdity in life.

Okay. Hello, y'all. It's never one thing that heals a life, right? It's all the things.

But if I had to pick the one thing that gave me the solid framework to do my healing it,

I would say a big part of that is existentialism. I am a strong existentialist. So let's explore some ideas.

These are not all of the ideas, but we're going to explore some of the ideas together.

And long-time listeners, I think y'all will absolutely be able to hear these principles, these themes, these threads that run throughout

my work. So those of you who are kind of ride or die listeners and listen to all the episodes,

you might learn that you might be more of an existentialist and you didn't even know it.

Okay. So existentialism doesn't have a clear definition, which,

believe it or not, is kind of the point, and I hope that'll make more sense as I continue.

The biggest themes are about owning personal choice and making meaning. So a big theme in existentialism is

freedom of choice. And this is the idea that no matter what, we have the power of choice.

There is a book called How Yoga Works, I read many, many years ago. And I kind of don't recommend it because

the translation I found not very inspiring to read. The translation kind of fell flat, but the story

is really golden. And it's a very existentialist story. It's about a man. He's a yogi, and he becomes confined to a prison cell.

And it's a story of how he makes the choice to be positive.

He makes the choice every single day to make the best of his experience.

Existentialism accepts that radical free choice is our personal power. I find it fascinating to think about that every moment we can choose

something. We can. We can speak or we can be quiet. We can run or we can stand still.

We can think something positive or we can think something self-deprecating. We can think something

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