Ikigai makes you strong and helps you to live regardless of what may happen.
Viktor Frankl, the founder of logo-therapy and the author of the book “Night and Fog ” arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp carrying a manuscript of his life’s work. When it was confiscated, he felt compelled to write it all over again. This purpose made him persevere and he became an Holocaust survivor. We can say that it was his ikigai.
Another book about ikigai was written by psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya, who worked in a leprosy community on a small island in Japan.
Being diagnosed with Hansen disease at that time, which was more than 60 years ago meant facing a gradual death sentence, and intense discrimination and expulsion. They were often ostensibly considered to be dead in order to protect the family against also becoming a target of discrimination, so they had to leave their loved ones never to return. Most of them once contemplated suicide.
Kamiya’s question was, what gives them courage to keep going on even in such a situation?
You can also do a thought experiment. Imagine you are in the same situation. What do you think would motivate you to live further? The answer is your ikigai.
Let me talk about their case now: The community was supported by paid or volunteer work by the patients themselves. So, once they arrived there, they accepted a role that they were still able to do, or inspired to do for the community. Their feeling of being still useful to others was one of the most empowering urge for them to live further.
In Japan, people who feel ikigai in helping others often say, “I am the one who is helped!” That means “the joy of helping you makes me feel so good and alive. I appreciate that! ”We feel ikigai when doing things for others really pleases us.
There is a beautiful English idiom you use when somebody says, “Thank you” to you. That’s ”My pleasure”! If you say so and really mean it, it is likely that you feel ikigai.
Beside the sense of purpose Frankl discovered, this mutual joy we feel in helping others is a life giving forth inherent in our work. If we don’t lose touch with this life giving forth, we work naturally intrinsically motivated, energized by our ikigai.
In this climate of capitalism, work is generally considered to be necessary to make a living, but is not desired. Many Japanese people think that way, too. Everybody has ikigai, but just it is often obscured by too many things that we have to do.
However, if we don’t lose touch with ikigai, work can make you feel happy.