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Existential Health: Being Available, Engaged and Present

Existential Health: Being Available, Engaged and Present

Last updated on: October 29, 2026 at 6:49 am by Larry Jordan

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Existential Health: Being Available, Engaged and Present 2026-10-29T06:49:10-05:00 Larry Jordan

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Sometimes we need help carrying reality. And as author Jim Palmer explains, “We often assume that the purpose of relationships is to provide answers, remove suffering, or fix what is wrong. Much of the time, that is not what we need. What we need is help carrying reality.”

My friends at Grokkist Press just published The Practice of Being Alive by my friend Jim Palmer, who wrote the foreword to The Way. Jim is a former pastor at an Evangelical megachurch who founded the Center for Nonreligious Spirituality (CNRS). This is a very personal and practical book that emphasizes a way of life, rather than a system of beliefs.

Jim Palmer says, "One of the signs that something is beginning to return is a growing willingness to risk being met rather than merely liked." Image from Gemini/AI-generated, in the public domain

One of the signs that something is beginning to return is a growing willingness to risk being met rather than merely liked. Image from Gemini/AI-generated, in the public domain

What is Existential Health?

Recently, Jim has become interested in existential health, which he defines as “the health of your relationship to your own existence.” This differs from physical, mental, or emotional health. Palmer writes, “The practice of being alive starts there: recognizing when you are functioning without inhabiting your life, and allowing yourself to come back into contact with it.”

At the beginning of the book, he defines some terms. “Contact is what happens when an experience is allowed to register—felt, met, let in—before it gets explained, judged, or turned into a task…. Ground is a footing—the felt sense of being steady enough to stay in your experiences without bracing against it.”

And Palmer identifies the four dimensions of existential health. Inner Orientation is “your footing in relation to yourself”. Relational Integrity is “being substantially present with others”. Communal Belonging is “being carried by something you didn’t have to build”. And Cosmic Grounding is “your footing before the largeness of things”.

Posture, according to Jim, is “a way of meeting your life, as opposed to a technique for improving it.” Coming back does not mean traveling back to a place you left or to an earlier version…. Coming back means closing that distance—not holding yourself at arm’s length from the life you’re already inside.” Trust means “to keep showing up for a life that has made no promises.”

In the foreword to Jim’s book, Prof. Dr. Jessica Böhme writes, “And our individual problems are remarkably sticky. We will not think or optimize our way out of them. Nor will becoming more ‘whole ‘ somehow exempt us from grief, political conflict, mortality, or loss.”

Eastern Spirituality and Existential Philosophy

Jim describes a feeling that most of us have experienced ourselves or witnessed in others, the feeling that “Something feels off. I’m fine, but I’m not really here. I’m just getting through my days.” He believes we tell ourselves stories that, “…with enough insight, enough regulation, enough disciplined attention to your inner life…,” something will settle. But that doesn’t always happen.

And Palmer explains that existential scaffolding—“Stable communities, intergenerational continuity, common moral languages, shared rituals, durable belonging…” has disappeared or weakened. (This is why we both write about spirituality.) Jim writes that the absence of ground changes the question. “Not what is wrong with me, but what makes a life inhabitable from the inside…”

I wrote about “finding a place to stand” here. Jim Palmer has said similar things in this book and elsewhere, and his consistent emphasis on contact, footing, and grounding resonates with me. When I wrote, “I never intended to dismantle my old, speculative, uncertain belief system to erect a new, equally speculative, equally uncertain system,” I was talking about grounding, too.

The book also resonates with my Zen practice. William Berry wrote about the similarities between Eastern spirituality and existential philosophy here. Both concern the importance of mindfulness, the inevitability of suffering and the power to reduce suffering. Both point to the importance of living in the moment. And both urge us to recognize reality as it is, NOT as we want it to be.

Years ago, I went to Ghana on a cultural exchange program. I taught in a junior high school while participating in programs where we learned about the challenges facing the country, including child slavery, the HIV epidemic, and primitive tribal practices. At the end, a young African man asked, “Now that you know, what will you do?” The question haunted me. It still haunts me.

Sometimes We Need Help Carrying Reality

There is NOT a one-size-fits-all prescription for existential health. Our footing with ourselves, others, our communities and the cosmos is always necessarily personal, relational, and situational. Still, Palmer diagnoses the problem and points to some workable solutions.

Jim admits, “The chapters that follow are not techniques to master or a better self to construct. Approached like that, they would harden into one more standard to measure yourself against—and the effort to become more alive turns into another way of standing outside your life….

“But some realities do not answer to effort. Love does not deepen through efficiency; belonging does not arrive because we finally earned it; grief keeps no timetable; trust cannot be manufactured by determination; presence resists every attempt to force it into existence. These ask something other than achievement. They ask us to become not more capable, but more available.”

When I think about my own life, I see I became more existentially healthy when I became more available. I often say my journey transformed me from a single-minded investment banker to an open-hearted and open-minded spiritual seeker. Are “open-hearted” and “open-minded” simply other ways of saying available, engaged, and present? I think so.

Likewise, Jim says, “One of the signs that something is beginning to return is a growing willingness to risk being met rather than merely liked.”

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About Larry Jordan

Larry Jordan is a follower of Jesus with a Zen practice. He wrote “The Way,” informed by the Eastern religions, the mystics, and the quantum physicists. "The Way" won a 2024 Nautilus Book Award. You can read more about the author here.

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