Description

This 3-session webinar will center on our quest to keep growing and feeling, ever more deeply, as we age. As the years go by, the question for each of us becomes more and more real: What does it mean to age? Despite the limitations that come as the body wears down, there are many gifts to inhabit by aging. For it seems that aging requires a separate set of skills. Ultimately, if faced tenderly and truthfully, aging is, as the Jungian analyst Helen Luke describes, a journey into simplicity.

Perhaps our greatest resource in aging is staying close to life and staying creative. For creativity never leaves us. Its call simply keeps changing. And living a creative life does not mean that we have to strive to create great art. More deeply, we are asked hold our individual lives as a work of art that inhabiting fully will bring into being. Just as we need oxygen to breathe, we need the creative flow to keep our heart alive. This is especially important as we age. To live a creative life sustains our inner health.

To be clear, the goal in facing aging is not to beat it, or duck it, or run from it, or even to reframe it, or minimize it. The goal in facing aging is to live more fully the closer we get to death, so we can die with no feeling left unfelt, and no voice of life left unheard, and no thing in this world left unloved.

I confess, very simply, that it is humbling to age and exciting to be fully here. After so many years, I feel like a man who has been turned inside out by life and this has made me a student of the inside of everything. I think, as we age, we meet in this inner field of presence, where there’s very little left in the way.

—Mark Nepo