This is a 15 – minute “Deep Dive” audio on a really deep subject:
One of the many avocations I’ve had over my 80 years was serving as the assistant funeral home director at Kilpatrick’s Funeral Homes in West Monroe, Louisiana, in 1966.
Amidst the heavy silence of grieving families and the stillness of the departed, one word surfaced more than any other. Whether the deceased had endured a grueling illness or a life of hardship, the survivors always whispered the same hope for the deceased:
Peace.
That stayed with me.
Which is why I’ve come to this conclusion:
The purpose of life isn’t meaning. It’s peace.
The first living person I ever met who radiated real peace was a 28-year-old paraplegic living in a nursing home.
What struck me wasn’t optimism or philosophy. It was the absence of inner agitation.
Because he was paralyzed from the neck down, he wasn’t feeling the constant kinesthetic emotional signals most people live inside of – tension, urgency, bracing. Without that bodily emotional noise, something unexpected remained.
Peace.
Not purpose. Not meaning. Just quiet.
https://clintmatheny.com/the-happiest-man-in-the-nursing-home/
Years later, in 1988, I experienced the same state during a deep hypnosis exercise at an Ericksonian workshop in New Orleans. As the nervous system dropped out of threat, the search stopped.
No striving. No questions. No need to explain existence.
https://clintmatheny.com/just-what-is-peace-2/
That experience didn’t just shape my philosophy – it changed how I work clinically.
Over the years, I’ve found that peace is one of the most effective resources a client can access in a session. In my “Back to the Future” intervention, peace isn’t something we aim for at the end. It’s a state the nervous system can access before the trauma.
When a client contacts that pre-threat state and then revisits the original event from there, the emotional learning collapses. Not because we reframed the story – but because the nervous system finally encounters the memory without danger.
Peace turns out to be a powerful solvent.
https://clintmatheny.com/back-to-the-future-part-1-healing-anxiety-panic-attacks/
This is also where Viktor Frankl is often misunderstood.
Frankl showed that meaning can help human beings survive extreme, inescapable suffering. In that context, meaning isn’t healing – it’s a lifeline.
But survival and healing are not the same thing.
Meaning does not calm a threat-organized nervous system. It does not undo emotional learning.
People don’t search for meaning when they feel calm and safe. They search when something feels wrong.
When the nervous system concludes the world is dangerous, it issues commands that feel like purpose: • Stay alert • Be useful • Don’t relax • Don’t fail
Those aren’t values. They’re threat responses.
Meaning helps people endure a life organized around danger. Peace ends the need to justify existence.
Peace isn’t a reward you earn. It’s the baseline that remains when the nervous system stops predicting threat.
When emotional turmoil resolves, life doesn’t need a purpose.
It finally feels livable.
More:
Clint77090@gmail.Com