Benjamin Dio

Who I am

Benjamin Dio Sonnleitner. I live in Vienna and work where personal development, ethics, philosophy, psychology, and spirituality meet. I have worked in pastoral care and in nursing, and have accompanied people at the end of their lives. At the University of Vienna I studied cultural studies, with a focus on Jewish studies and religious studies, and then interdisciplinary ethics. I have also been shaped by the reckoning with my own history.

I write mainly in German. Gradually I am bringing my books into English as well, a language I feel a particular closeness to.

Why and how I write

What I publish took shape over years, mostly with no intention of ever making it public. I do not write from a safe distance; my books go where I have stood myself, and they do not claim that I have arrived there. I try to put images before commentary, to use words precisely, to hold ambivalence where it belongs rather than resolve it too soon, and to honor before I criticize. I am not the center of a finished teaching, but the host of a room. People, to me, are not problems to be solved, but Others whom we meet.

The idea it grows from

Everything I write circles one idea. I call it Relational Presence. Presence means the readiness to meet what is: not what should be, not what once was, but what is showing itself right now. Relational means that this presence proves itself in relationship, to yourself, to the Other, and to the field that people share. Its ethical short form is a single sentence: I betray neither your dignity nor mine.

It rests on a sequence, not a list: inner clarity, then mature relationship, then shared responsibility. And it does not run in a straight line. We meet the same themes again and again, love and loss, belonging, meaning, freedom, but never as the same people. This is not a school and not a doctrine, only a place where different ways of seeing can come into relationship with one another.

The six movements

Relational Presence cannot be learned as a technique, but it can be practiced as a movement. Six of them describe how it shows itself in a life, and they are not steps but parts of a spiral: noticing what is before it is interpreted; staying with yourself without abandoning the relationship; showing yourself instead of disappearing; meeting the Other as Other; loosening your grip on what you hold too tightly; and living connected, belonging to a We without vanishing into it.

The books

My books circle these movements, in essays, in narrative, and in one illustrated novella, When the Angel Stayed. Most of them are written in German; the English editions appear gradually, one at a time.

Contact

If something here speaks to you, write to me at kontakt@benjamindio.com. I read and answer everything myself.