Salon: Our Life’s Narrative and Meaning Making

With Sonja Saltman, MFT – EHI Core Instructor, and Joshua Diliberto, LCHC, NCC, RYT- EHI Teaching Assistant

Date/Time:  Tuesday, August 26th, 2025 at 11am-1pm Pacific | 2pm-4pm Eastern 
Location: Online Via Zoom 
Registration fee: $25 for General tickets. To promote effective discussion we are limiting registration to 30 people. We do not want cost to be an issue. We offer economic inequality/hardship tickets for $10. Please contact Michelle via the form to get a code for reduced ticket. 
Host: Existential-Humanistic Institute (EHI)

On August 26th, EHI is hosting a two-hour virtual community space for exploring “Our Life’s Narrative and Meaning Making.” Personal, relational, and cosmological aspects are considered in group discussion, practical demonstration, possible dyad or small group engagement—we will be flexible to follow emergent wishes from the group. 

EHI is excited to be continuing the series of experiential salons and to hold one more before the EHI team takes their summer break. The intention for these salons is to honor EHI’s commitment to experiential learning as well as the time honored group process of discussion and integration.

General Outline (2 hours): 

● Welcome Introduction and check-in 

● Conceptual frames for Our Life’s Narrative and Meaning Making:  The concept of self calls for the person to transform the pronoun I into a recognition of essential qualities with which the person may be identified. Real self, nuclear self, narcissistic self and false self all refer to essential qualities of the person.
They are representative of the person and this patterning process organizes personal characteristics into coherent clusters from which we form our inner sense of self. Based on this sense of inner self we form our “life stories”. They are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and that are sometimes small work of fictions we believe to be true. Any new experience then might be filtered through this belief about our coherent self, might therefore be distorted.
Meaning making can be the process of restructuring of the patterns of the self and thus confronting myths that were created by parts of ourselves. The person is invited to examine incoming new information without filtering it through already preexisting faulty assumptions to reemerge with a new sense of meaning for ourselves.

● Demo on Our Life’s Narrative and Meaning Making 

● Group Discussion, Attendee/EHI Demo, or Experiential Dyad Exercise: we will decide in the moment as a group

● Final Large Group Process

 As we acknowledge that the word “salon” implies a more free flowing structure this is a flexible outline that will be modified by Sonja and Josh to work with what is happening in the moment.