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Webinar Homesickness as a challenge and opportunity for personal growth?«, 30 January 2020, 3.00 p.m. - 4.30 p.m.

When we are studying, working or living in a foreign country, homesickness is a usual and inevitable reaction. We are missing to what we are attached to, what gives us a feeling of security – these are especially our relatives and friends, home place, but also our mother tongue and culture. In milder forms homesickness is a valuable challenge, because its dash of anxiety and nostalgia stimulates us to learning and adaptation to the new environment, so that we activate and keep contacts with home, relatives and friends at the same time. The heavier forms of homesickness may lead to mental disorders which manifest themselves usually as the combination of more distinct depressive and anxiety symptoms, but also this is a chance for personal growth if we are ready to look deeper in ourselves and to confront our personal history, immediate circumstances and our life vision. The deeper our insight into ourselves and our life circumstances, the easier we will find our place in the world and our life mission and our homesickness will reveal to us as part of eternal human longing for more existentialy fully lived life. This is why homesickness is worth cultivating.

On the webinar we will discuss:

• What is homesickness?
• What are different possibilities for understanding homesickness?
• What are the usual milder and heavier forms of homesickness?
• What are the physical and mental signs and how we can recognize them?  
• Why it comes to homesickness?
• Which factors have influence on it?
• What is the existential meaning of homesickness?
• What can we do for coping with homesickness, so that we can use it as a challenge and opportunity for personal growth?