Life Force, A Philip Stutz Idea

Megan Murphy, Expansive Cofounder

Life Force pyramid by Philip Stutz showing three core areas of well-being: relationship with your body, relationship with others, and relationship with yourself.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Life Force and Phil Stutz
The Three-Part Pyramid Explained
Caring for the Body (Foundation of Life Force)
Building Meaningful Relationships with Others
The Importance of Face-to-Face Connection
Developing a Strong Relationship with Yourself

If the name Phil Stutz sounds familiar, you might have seen the documentary he did with Jonah Hill. Jonah was one of his clients, and he was so fascinated with his therapist, Phil, that he made a documentary about him. It's very moving, and I recommend it!

I had the great privilege to meet with Phil many years ago. He is not like any other therapist I've ever worked with, as he was quite opinionated. His books, (The Tools is probably best known) give you a full view into his mind and his thoughts about how one can live life to the fullest. His idea of Life Force is something that I think about often.

So How Do We Cultivate Life Force?

He diagrams it in a three-part pyramid. Your body, your relationship to others, and your relationship to yourself. At the base of the pyramid is caring for one's body. For those who grew up in bodies that felt like the wrong answer to someone else's question, this bottom rung of the pyramid can feel loaded. Caring for a body you were taught to distrust — or that the world treated as shameful — is its own kind of radical act.

This seems pretty obvious, the care and feeding of our body, but people amazingly overlook it. The sleep, the food, the exercise. As a therapist who is also a human, it can be hard to know how to bring these things up without the client feeling defensive or judged. Almost everyone thinks they can do better in these areas. If this is you, well, you are not alone.

It's at the bottom of the pyramid because it is the most elemental for feeling good. We are mistaken if we believe all of our thoughts or feelings are in our heads. That is actually not the truth. The entire body as an organism has feelings and is constantly communicating with the brain. Some would say that the gut is actually more important and more in the present moment than the brain could ever be. What you're doing with your body has absolute correlation to how you are feeling.

Silhouette of a person sitting cross-legged in meditation on a wooden deck at sunrise, with warm light streaming through palm trees, suggesting calm, reflection, and a focused relationship with oneself.

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The next layer of the pyramid is your relationship with others. We have families, and we get to also choose families. Phil stresses that making the plan to meet a friend for lunch is the important element. It doesn't matter how the lunch actually goes, but that you were caring for yourself by making the plan and by getting out of the house and getting dressed and meeting someone.

Our lives are increasingly spent in front of screens. When we're not at our desk in front of our laptop, we are wandering around staring at our phone. How can we challenge ourselves to get face-to-face with other people, people that we know and people that we don't know? How do we have small, medium, and large conversations with others, from the person who is making our coffee at Starbucks to the friend we want to know in a deeper way? This can feel like work for an introvert or an ambivert ( someone who is not quite introverted or extroverted), but it’s a major way in which we create good feelings.

Meet Yourself, over and over.

The top of the pyramid is one's relationship to oneself. It's often hard to sit with ourselves, so we do a million things to distract or keep busy or zone out. Any sort of practice in which we are spending quality time with ourselves, whether that's on a walk or doing some sort of meditation or any other activity that lets us be with our own thoughts and feelings is incredibly important. If you have had a coming out experience, this always requires a reckoning with self, and though this can be excruciatingly difficult, it also builds a rich bond between you and you.

This relationship, the one with ourselves, is the one that we have all through life. If we have a slew of relationships that haven't worked out, we have to look at the relationship we have with ourselves. All the answers are within.