Desire For Life : The Practitioner’s Introduction to Morita Therapy

While MOP starts with the question of “What are you feeling and experiencing?” in its therapeutic endeavor, MT starts with “What tasks are needed now, and how can you improve your action and outcome?” . . .

Increasing self-awareness and creating a subjective shift in clients in MOP could develop into increased affective self-focus and self-preoccupations from a Moritian perspective.

The therapist helps patients realize that it is possible to coexist with anxiety instead of avoiding it.

are not to have clients necessarily feel less anxious or less stressed but to make progress toward fulfilling the personal aspirations that stressors indicate are meaningful.

Morita suggested that if one’s “HT” was dealt with satisfactorily and the patient would begin to behave naturally while facing life as it is, Nature would adequately address any remaining fear, within the context of purposeful living…

Patients, that is, suffer more from discomfort with their own reactions to anxiety than from a primal fear. The principal target of intervention should, therefore, “concern the hypersensitivity to symptoms and not the putative object of fear”:

You cannot know the foot if you abolish the ground… It is because of this that our contact with Nature enriches us so much. The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground. (Zen Dictionary, 1990)

Neurosis is not a sickness but is a phase of growth leading to a fuller use of capacities.