The seventh strategy for cultivating a connection with conscience is: Seek out opportunities for kindness.

We are living in an age in which we are transitioning slowly but surely away from mind-body separation to mind-body connection. The holistic perspective certainly has an effect on medicine. It also has an effect on psychology.

Viktor Frankl broke the paradigm of separation when he rejected the reductionism of psychodynamic psychology and posited that the most basic and strongest motivation in human beings is the will (primal desire and striving) to find meaning in life. He parted ways with his contemporaries, Freud and Adler, over his assertion that psychodynamic and individual psychology did not go far enough in their understanding of human functioning and their consequent healing modalities. He claimed that psychology was not complete if it did not include the spiritual dimension in man.

The main marker of the spiritual dimension is the search for meaning, and meaning is always found beyond the realm of self-interested survival needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are in the end a me-focus and not a meaning-focus. Self-transcendence is the ‘essence’ of human existence, says Frankl. It is the yearning to reach out in connection with something or someone beyond one’s self.

So when researchers study the brain and find that emotions like love, gratitude, hope and zest for life change the chemistry of the brain and create healing effects, they are observing what the ancients knew all along: We find ourselves most when we lose ourselves. We are most ourselves when we are not thinking about ourselves at all, rather we are focused on a person, a community, a project or an ideal that is worth serving, investing in, sacrificing for the sake of and committing ourselves to.

Frankl recalls a certain patient who called him in the middle of the night, and he spoke with her for a few hours to counter her suicidal thoughts. She later recalled that it was not anything he said that had made the most difference to her. It was the fact that someone cared enough to talk to her in the middle of the night, and if there are people like this in the world, then this is a world she wants to live in.

If the body and spirit are separate entities that have no influence over one another, then they can go their separate ways. Medicine takes care of the body, psychology takes care of the brain and religion takes care of the spirit. However, if mind, body and spirit are intricately connected then psychology has no choice but to deal with matters of conscience, as logotherapy does.

Seeking out opportunities for kindness is one of the most important ways to cultivate a relationship with conscience, because seeking to hear the unheard cry for meaning sharpens the capacity to hear.