It all started with a blog. I posted my thoughts, reflections, ideas, and musings about ageing with awareness along with my concerns and confusions. I sent them out into the world, not knowing who, if anyone, would read them. I simply followed the advice of a friend when she told me “It doesn’t matter who reads the posts. Just get them out into the universe.”
And that was all the encouragement I needed to write and post regularly until the dreaded Covid-19 arrived. While it has not infected me, the disease changed my life drastically, as it did for all of us.
It also changed how I wanted to express my creative energy. I wanted to shorten the blog posts into reminders, and contemplations to be savoured, for people wanting to grow older in a conscious way. So I took a year off from blogging to develop the contemplations that foster an alternative to the current paradigm of ageing.
The prevailing view of ageing diminishes our past, our present, and our future contributions to culture and society. It sees us as a burden with nothing to offer to the well-being of the world. In fact, the prevailing paradigm doesn’t see us at all. Most of us become invisible as we age.
Many commonly held beliefs about ageing populations and the ageing process are untrue. Nevertheless, we have often internalised them. What would our world be like if, instead, we saw ourselves and our cohort, as creative, fulfilled, inspiring and benefitting those around us? How can we change the way we see ourselves, thereby changing the way others see us?
Exploring those questions, and many others, is exactly what Ageing with Awareness: 52 Contemplations for a Year of Weekly Inspiration is designed to do. The contemplations will support, inspire, and occasionally challenge you as you examine your thinking and your feelings as you grow into ageing consciously. It is my sincere hope that they bring you joy.
To whet your contemplative appetite, here’s a sample for you to ponder:
“It is permitted. You may do this.
You may begin the story of your life right now, in this present moment.
It is permitted.
Each moment provides us the opportunity to re-frame disempowering thoughts and images we might carry from our distant past. We can, with a compassionate, tender and open heart, forgive ourselves and others. Each one of us has experienced hardship and pain. Those experiences have left scars. We can provide the soothing balm to heal those hurts and minimise the scars.
It is permitted.
Yes, it takes courage and determination. We find the willingness to look, to understand and then to see the gift in each of those hurts. We would not be the people, the elders, we are today without them. Some of the gifts may be hard to discover, hard to understand. Allowing an open space for growth allows the gift to become clear.
It is permitted.
This healing may bring tears of re-lived pain, or tears of relief, or tears of joy. We are now able to experience deep acceptance of our past and deep gratitude for the wisdom we have gained through it.
It is permitted.
Life now begins with a new perception, a different understanding of what has pained us. A lightness might grow inside, a load relieved, a wound healed. Now begins the life of a more liberated elder, a life unfolding in freedom. No external source has told us. We know from within.
It is permitted.
What difference do we now experience daily, in each breath, in each moment, living inside that freedom? What growth and change opens in our relationships? What sense of ourselves evolves? Let us write the story of our new life now.
It is permitted.”
You can order Ageing with Awareness: 52 Contemplations for a Year of Weekly Inspiration, either as an actual book to hold in your hands or your Kindle. This link will take you to your local Amazon store, wherever you live on this amazing planet.