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And to recover the freedom to go back to those realms is what will make you feel really good about your life.

So the term I like to use is that in existential therapy we try to connect to a person's Anto dynamics, which means, of course, the dynamics of life, of being, of existence, rather than psycho dynamics. And we help them to figure out what it is that is most meaningful to them and how they can make progress towards creating more meaning and more understanding in their lives as well.

So it is very much what I like to think of as an evolutionary project. But that means it's also about learning. It's about learning new ways of thinking about themselves and about the world, about interacting and communicating, about planning things and wanting things and abandoning things. And it is always about dialogue. It's always about a search for truth. It's always about finding your passion, finding your inner authority, and learning to value your own voice and thinking for yourself.

Don't let anybody tell you what you believe or what you think. Allow yourself the space to hear yourself and listen and communicate with yourself. So important. And out of that, you will know what your overriding purpose in life has got to be.

We have many small purposes in life. There are many tasks and duties we need to accomplish. But beyond that, there is a wider purpose. There is what it is you want to have done with your life. When it's the last day of your life, how do you want to look back? What do you want to have achieved with it?

And in order to make sense of it, we have to use all these things I've said before. We have to understand the paradoxes that function in life and the dialectics at work. We have to think about oppositions like freedom and responsibility, and life and death. We have to think both about our talents and our vulnerabilities. We have to think about the whole range of time, not just about one.

And of course, existential therapists don't abandon the facts in psychology. They still learn about Piaget and Jung and Freud and Skinner and William James and Watson and Pavlov and all of that, because these were the pioneers who came up with ideas about how things do work out. And it's important to know about it and to be critical about it and engage with it critically, so that you can rethink it.

And now a more sensitive issue: yes, we also accept positive psychology, because it is useful to know some of the scientific data about what makes a person feel better and what makes a person feel worse.

So let me take you through this quickly. These are all scientifically proven facts. If you practice smiling, you will report greater happiness in your life. If you sleep more, you will say your well-being has improved. If you practice gratitude, thinking what was good today, what are the gifts I have received today, what has life offered me today, you will feel better. Most religions do this, you know. It wasn't positive psychologists who invented it.

If you help others, back to religion, most religions do this too. If you help others two hours a week, it's got to be two hours a week, it can't just be setting somebody across to a zebra crossing, you will feel much better about yourself. If you exercise at least seven minutes every day — I do 15 minutes of yoga every morning — it makes a hell of a difference. You open yourself up to the day instead of going, "Another day." It's really important to do these things.

If you go outside more often for walks, especially when it is thirteen point nine degrees, you will really thrive on that. I try to walk as often as I can. I go on a hill walk every week at least. If you move closer to work, you will also feel better. Yes, I can see a lot of people going, "One day, one day."

If you spend more time with family and friends, you will feel much better too. If you plan a trip, but please don't take it, you will increase your well-being. You understand how that works: it's the idea of opening up your universe, seeing new places, looking at the pictures, imagining it — that gets your imagination creative, that makes you happy. But when you're on the trip, there are too many difficulties and too many challenges, and many people come back home from holiday saying, "Never again," or, "Now I need a holiday." So that's how that works.

And finally, if you meditate and rewrite your brain, that will affect your sense of well-being. So these things are proven to be the case.

But think for a moment what happens when I work with a woman who comes to me who says, "In the last six months, I have lost both my mother and my father, and my husband has just left me, and my son has just died in a car accident." Do you think I tell her to practice smiling or to sleep more, when she is in such shock and she can't sleep at all anymore? Or do I tell her, "Just go for a walk and you'll feel better"? Of course not. It's complete nonsense.

These things are useful, but they are not what existential therapy is about. Existential therapy is about exploring those huge challenges that life puts to us, those difficulties that we think, "I can't cope with anymore." But you will find a way to understand and cope with — that's what it's about.

And in order to do that, you need to have some understanding of how things affect us. You need to think about how we are all resonating all the time with these things and people and situations and ideas that are all around us, and that are hammering away at us the whole time, and that we resonate with.

But we can learn to either pick up these things and let them affect us, or we can change these things. We can alter them when they hit us. We can interpret and reinterpret meanings. We can transform what happens to us or what comes to us. We can transform it into something productive or creative.

We can reflect on it, and therefore mull it over internally, not in a worrying way but in a receptive way, with a trust that we can find a place for it somewhere — that we can receive whatever happens to us.

And that's what the session before this was about. It gives you a shortcut to how you might actually stop going over the same thing over and over again and find a space in yourself to just receive it alongside other things that are important too.

We can either choose to absorb things and really take the meat out of it, or we can reject it. We can even stop it. Some people get very good at warding things off or sending things back to other people. You know, some people in business are extremely good at this. I've had to learn to do that myself, because otherwise I can't be in therapy with them. I have to be able to give as good as I get with every single individual.

So when I work with somebody who, when I say, "Mmhmm, you sounded a bit angry there," he says, "Anger? That's nothing by comparison to what you'll see in me if you keep telling me what my feelings are." And he's right. That is his way of protecting himself.

People find different ways of protecting themselves. The objective, however, of existential therapy is to learn how not to just protect ourselves, but get good at taking all the grist into our mill, no matter what it is, and do something with it.

So we can learn to magnify things. We can learn to illuminate things. We can learn to refract its many different facets, as we would do through phenomenology. We can transform meanings as well as receiving them.

And now I'm going to take you through a little bit of Western philosophy, because this is what Western philosophy was all about, and all of the different brands of psychotherapy were there in ancient Athens already.

Plato said, Socrates said, bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live. Because we may well want to do both those things. Socrates was the first philosopher, really, who said the unreflective life is not worth living. But that's something you will find everywhere, all over the place. You'll find it in Taoism, you'll find it in Islam, you'll find it in every world religion.

The challenge to human beings is to learn to receive life, reflect on it, and make something of it.

You know Plato's cave. You know how that works. That is absolutely the epitome of what existential therapy is about, as far as I'm concerned. You know these guys here are sitting chained up to a wall, with their backs to the wall. They're watching these shadows on the wall of the cave on the other side.

And you know what they're doing? They're sitting there their whole lives arguing with each other, saying, "This means this, and that means that," and they're competing with each other and getting into all sorts of problems.

What's actually happening is there's some other guys here that are marching up and down that wall with these images in their heads, and that is reflected on the wall because there's a fire here.

A strange situation, quite a lot like how we live a lot of the time, where we watch our screens and our televisions and we get very worked up about all sorts of things, and we think we know better than the others, and we get so in a huff about it all.

Well, said Plato, what really needs to happen is that one day the philosopher needs to come into the cave and set these guys free, take away their chains, allow them to get behind this wall, see what's happening with this fire, and then encourage them to climb out from that cave to the sunlight and discover that not only is there a different world here, but there's an entirely different world out there that these poor guys have been completely alienated from.

Well, that's existential therapy. When people come to me, they're like in chains. They're going round in their heads with all sorts of things that really ought not to be the problem.

And when they start to think about the big issues, about the things that truly matter to them — that will matter to them by the time they die, hopefully at the age of 90 after a long productive life — then these problems are insignificant. Suddenly they start to think about what their purpose is, what their direction is, what they want to do.

Of course, there's another way to look at it, which is that they should explore the cave, because the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. And that's true too.

So you can play with meanings in all directions, and as usual everything is true, but everything needs to be set in proportion and in perspective with everything else.

So after Socrates came Plato, and after Plato came Aristotle. Plato taught Aristotle.