A Life of Meaning

Exploring Our Deepest Questions and Motivations

By: James Hollis PhD

Narrated by: James Hollis PhD

A Masterful Author and Jungian Analyst Examines the Qualities that Bring Meaning to Our Human Journey

What is it that brings meaning to your life? Our culture tells us to seek wealth, power, prestige, or even enrollment in someone else’s idea of a worthy cause—yet where do we turn when these myths fail to fulfill our need for purpose? “When the old stories and beliefs that once defined us have played out and grown exhausted,” teaches Dr. James Hollis, “our task is to access our inner compass, the promptings of the psyche that help us find our way through the complex thickets of choice.”

A Life of Meaning is a profound audio exploration of the nature of meaning and how we can orient toward it or away from it with the choices we make. Through examination of myth, literature, historical figures, and the wisdom of depth psychology, Hollis provides penetrating insight into the search for purpose. Here you’ll explore:

• How our story-seeking mind forms our sense of meaning from early experience
• Why these early stories inevitably fail as we are called to our own path
• Skillfully accessing the inner oracle of your dreams
• Shadow work—where we fear to tread, yet where our greatest treasures may be found
• Missing the mark—examining the archetype of the Seven Deadly Sins through a psychological lens
• Dispelling the “ghosts” that haunt our memories and possess our psyche
• Finding personal resilience in times of internal and external change
• Living more fully in the presence of our mortality

In A Life of Meaning, James Hollis offers no easy answers or feel-good certainties—instead, he shares his most valuable questions and reflections to help you find the courage, persistence, and inspiration to navigate your own odyssey. “It’s humbling work, this process of getting our lives back,” he teaches. “Yet I submit to you that's worth the price of the ticket, for in the journey our lives become ever more luminous.”

Soulful and wise

James Hollis brings his years of depth psychology experience to listeners in an accessible manner through stories, poetry and wisdom.

Mind-blowing and resonant

Dr. Hollis’ presentations have been life-affirmative and necessarily provocative. Thank you; I look forward to reading this treasure again soon.

Insightful, thought provoking, and relevant

This is the second audiobook from Dr. Hollis in my collection, the other which is Through the Dark Wood which I have listened to many many times over the years. I really enjoy hearing him speak, his eloquent use of words and way of framing concepts which touch on the mysteries of life. Every time I listen I find inspiration and learn something new, and this lecture is no exception.

Being now in my mid forties I find Dr. Hollis' sage view points relevant to my own life, as well as reaffirming to my choices thus far and revealing areas I still have to grow. While someone younger could certainly gain wisdom and insight from listening to this, I have found in my own experience that I relate to his words more the older I get. I do not think that Through the Dark Wood, although powerful when I listened to it 10 years ago, landed as much as it did hearing it again recently. And I have a notion that A Life of Meaning may still yet reveal new significance to me in the years to come.

Regardless of age, I recommend this for anyone with an open mind that has a disposition for thoughtful reflection. Dr. Hollis does not provide the answers, but certainly asks meaningful questions with insightful anecdotes and brings light whereby one may find their own path. I'm sure I'll be listening to this one again.

One of the most meaningful helpful audio books

I’ll mark this as one of just and select number of psychological self-help that have been most transformative and meaningful and genuinely helpful to me in my life. I have a PhD in Couple and Family Therapy and have been a therapist since 1998. This kind of depth psychological personal work is somewhat new to me and is showing up in many areas of my life for which I’m wanderingly grateful. And there’s a strong part of me that does wish I would have journeyed into this sooner.
I’m recognizing a transformative process in my life that is circumscribing into one great whole the works of: Jung and Hollis, the forefront of non-dogmatic biblical and religious studies scholars, the most transformative and moving (for me) approaches to psychotherapy including Narrative Therapy, Internal Family Systems, trauma-informed and affective focused approaches, along with the generative unifying power of the best in social justice thought, activism, and community, and undergirded within the meditative contemplative spirituality of the mystic traditions past and present.

Deeply moving, deeply profound,

James Hollis at his most meaningful, very personal and totally relational at the same time.