To understand Oliver’s insight more fully, it helps to ask how people lose contact with that center in the first place. Often, suffering does not only wound the body or mind; it also disorients identity. Grief, trauma, overwork, and social pressure can leave a person living reactively, shaped more by survival than by essence. As a result, one may feel productive or functional while remaining inwardly estranged.
In this light, healing requires more than symptom relief. It asks for a reorientation. Carl Jung’s reflections on individuation in works like Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) similarly suggest that wholeness comes from becoming aligned with the deeper self rather than merely adapting to outer demands. [...]
