The Good Life

Over the years that he served clients Rogers began to notice patterns of movement in their process as they improved in therapy. As a general rule, clients began to move from a defensive, rigid, ego structure to one more aware, open, flexible, and accepting of ambiguity. In his notes on “A therapist’s view of the good life” Rogers proposed what he called four “Characteristics of the Process”:

Increasing Openness to Experience

As clients progress, they begin to relax their defensiveness to internal and external experience. They become more relaxed and open to parts of themselves and the world that they find new or difficult without feeling the need to run from them or to distort them in awareness.

Increasingly Existential Living

Clients become more comfortable with the uncertainty of living moment to moment. They are more accepting of ambiguity and increasingly comfortable experiencing each new situation for itself.

Increasing trust is his/her own organism

Because they have become more fully aware of their feelings, and more flexible in their responses, clients are increasingly comfortable trusting their ability to respond to life openly and spontaneously. Defensiveness forces us to respond to life situations based on habits and principals. Openness enables us to respond to life based on present needs, values, and true, moment to moment experience.
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Yoga psychology proposes a similar process. Over time, the practitioner of Yoga:

Learns to relax their defensive clinging to personal identity in order to protect themselves from pain and uncertainty.

Develops equanimity and tolerance for internal and external experiences that are uncomfortable.

Becomes to be open and compassionate to the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that make up the experience of being.

Lives more fully in the present moment and is able to receive experience for what it is, and react effectively.

Two Buddhist principals have particular bearing on the topic of living with open awareness, and living spontaneously in the real world of moment to moment change, these are Sati and Upaya.

Sati (Open Awareness)
The original meaning of sati is literally “memory” or “to remember”. The commonly used translation in the west has been “mindfulness”, but sati refers more specifically to the activity of being present with the fullness of experience as opposed to rumination or activity of the mind. When we are resting in the space of open awareness, we rest fully in the present moment of life experience.

Upaya (Skillful Means)
Upaya comes from the root word upa (up) and refers to action that brings you up to something. Upaya is often used with the word kaushalya or “cleverness” as in upaya-kaushalya which translates as “skill in means.” Skillful means is the process of living practice. Resting in open awareness, with our defensiveness and distortions relaxed, we have full access to our experience and can make effective choices based on a fuller and richer awareness of the factors involved.
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“Since all things are naked, clear and free from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realize. The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions. And to all people-experiencing everything totally without reservations and blockages, so that one never with...draws or centralizes onto oneself." -Vidyadhara Venerable Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.


“If a person could be fully open to his experience, every stimulus would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism…whether the stimulus was the impact of a configuration of form, color, or sound in the environment on the sensory nerves or a memory trace from the past, or a visceral sensation of fear or pleasure or disgust, the person would be ‘living’ it, would have it completely available to awareness.”
“Thus, one aspect of this process which I am naming “the good life” appears to be a movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience. The individual is becoming more able to listen to himself, to experience what is going on within himself. He is more open to his feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. He is also more open to his feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe.” -Carl Rogers

"If we see things as they are, then we do not have to interpret or analyze them further; we do not need to try to understand things by imposing spiritual experience or philosophical ideas upon them. As a famous Zen master said 'When I eat, I eat; when I sleep, I sleep.' Just do what you do, completely, fully." -Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

“A second characteristic of the process which for me is the good life, is that it involves an increasingly tendency to live fully in each moment. I believe it would be evident that for the person who was fully open to his new experience, completely without defensiveness, each moment would be new. One way of expressing the fluidity which is present in such existential living is to say that the self and personality emerge from experience rather than experience being translated or twisted to fit pre-conceived self-structure. It means that one becomes a participant in and an observer of the ongoing process of organismic experience, rather than being in control of it. It means a maximum of adaptability, a discovery of structure in experience, a flowing, changing organization of self and personality. It involves discovering the structure of experience in the process of living the experience.”- Carl Rogers