Fierce with Age Archives, Vol. 5
Wisdom from Mystics, Sages and Wayshowers
Welcome to this edition of the Fierce with Age Archives featuring a combination of new inspiration as well as classics drawn from over 1000 entries gathered by a team of contributors over 15 years.
For the complete collection of best-of-the year-editions, click HERE.
THE DALAI LAMA’S TEARS
At one of his annual three-day retreats in New York City, the Dalai Lama…explained that when we open to the experience of interconnectedness with the world, our sense of individuality softens and the heart opens with compassion toward all beings. This compassion has a radiance about it, he added.
Suddenly he paused, interrupting his own train of thought.
‘But that’s not the way things are,’ he shared. ‘We are just people groping in the dark,’ and he put his head down and began to weep openly.
After a few moments, he sat up, blew his nose, and continued where he’d left off.
— Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle, Aging with Wisdom
TO RISK OR RETREAT
The world is moving forward into the future, whether we like it or not. Our new generation of elders have lived the changes every day, year after year. Over the span of our long lives, we’ve had to make difficult choices over and over again, to rise to whatever occasion life brings our way, or shrink away: to hide or refuse. To choose to stay engaged inevitably entails risk. And growth has been a risk many of us have always been willing to take…
So here’s the nub of it. I can mourn this new level of confrontation with my own degree of powerlessness, naiveté even, but to intentionally marginalize myself would lead me to place not so much safe as fallow. And so it is that this imperfect person living in imperfect times hopes to do what I can to make the world and myself better than we otherwise would have been. But still, one asks, does it really have to be this hard?
—Carol Orsborn, Author of Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life
A CURRICULUM FOR AWAKENING
For those of us who feel deeply committed to spiritual realization and being instruments of benefit in the world, what Carl Jung called “the second half of life” represents a remarkable curriculum for awakening.
The challenges inherent in the aging process can become a direct pathway to the actualization of our best human qualities — wisdom, joy, compassion, generosity, lovingkindness, and equanimity.
Although I didn’t know it that day, this was precisely the possibility I began glimpsing in my first meeting with Reb Zalman. His way of embracing and enjoying the role of wise elder planted a seed of transformation that helped me to relate to the aging process in a new and life-affirming way, and it’s one that’s been growing ever since.
David Chernikoff, Life, Part Two: Seven Keys to Awakening with Purpose and Joy as You Age
THE EVOLUTION OF AGING
“An increasing number of individuals in our generation are discovering the potential inherent in aging to provide a culmination to the spiritual path we have been walking most of our lives. This does not mean it’s easy…Conscious aging beckons us to take into account both the light and the shadow side of growing old. Admittedly, establishing and maintaining both a hopeful and realistic vision of the aging process requires a level of spiritual maturity that challenges the best of us.
So why embark on this path in the first place? Because conscious aging is the only path to embracing the entirety of our lives as the fulfillment of our spiritual purpose. For those of us who have embarked on aging as a spiritual path, it is an exciting time, indeed, to be growing old.”
–Robert Weber and Carol Orsborn, The Spirituality of Age: A Seeker’s Guide to Growing Older
FLOODGATES OF LOVE
With our new longevity and expanding spirituality, aging represents an initiation into a new developmental stage of the human life cycle, offering the transformation of self and consciousness and the revelation of a new and sacred world all around us.
This experience opens the floodgates of love, joy, wonder, and service. I feel myself changing and evolving as I age, as if God were entering my cells, expanding my consciousness, and transforming me into something new. Rather than a time of diminishment, aging can be a time of awakening consciousness.
John C. Robinson, Author of I am God
To pre-order Carol Orsborn’s new book Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life (Pub date December3) click HERE
For the Spiritual Aging Calendar of Free and Support Group Events, click HERE
How to Join or Start a Spiritual Aging Study and Support Group, click HERE