THE BENEFITS OF AGING AND THE HEALING PROCESS

We speak too little of the benefits of aging. But  I’ve discovered in the second half of life, that each year we live we have an opportunity to resolve our issues and find inner peace.

By the time we reach the half century mark we’ve had enough experience to see patterns emerge. These patterns are a personalized and invaluable teaching tool. They point us directly to the areas that we need to address.

YOUTHFUL DALIANCES

In our youth we were drawn like a moth to a flame to the world in front of us. Our interest was not so much in our interior world, as to making external adjustments. We changed jobs, changed relationships, had a child and life moved on.

As we mature, however, we come to understand that healing and wholeness, peace and happiness, are an inside job. It’s less about a new job and more about a new perspective. The midlife years begin the dismantling process. Our perceptions of ourselves and our place in the world begins to shift, and we start to figure out what we really value. We often discover that what we thought was true for us no longer fits, and that many of our choices were not our own but a result of our upbringing. Indoctrinated from birth with family and cultural values, we grow up adapting to survive. The gift of hindsight enables us to begin clearing away the clutter and debris we inadvertently dragged with us from our childhood.

HEALING AND WHOLENESS

In the process of my own healing over the last four plus years (if you are interested in reading more visit my blog ManifestMe2014), there have been discoveries, large and small, that led to changes in everything from how I wear my hair to how I greet my neighbors, from how I interact with my husband to how I make my living. These discoveries have been, and continue to be, discoveries about what is really true for me. It is an on-going process as day by day I learn to live a more congruent life – matching my insides to my outsides.

I see my life now as a different sort of journey than I once thought it to be. It’s a journey of becoming, a journey toward greater synchronicity, clarity and inner peace.  I thought I knew what that meant when I was nineteen. I laugh now at my naivete. Then I viewed it as a state to attain, not as I now understand it as a flow into which we step.  The first step is to learn to trust ourselves and the process and may just be the hardest part. It helps to have companions on this journey, and is why I created the Aging Abundantly Community.

NO RULES, JUST A JOURNEY

There are no rules or how to’s for this path. Each journey is unique, but there are facilitating practices that help us strip away the detritus and get down to business. Solitude, meditation, prayer, simplifying one’s life, turning inward, reading, physically healing and nurturing practices such as massage, tapping (EFT), traditional therapy, essential oils, Reiki, acupuncture, yoga, and a myriad of other century old practices can help bring us back to ourselves and  pave the way toward inner healing and wholeness.

It is a mind, body, spirit journey. Wherever there is dis-ease, healing is needed before wholeness can be found. If one suffers from anxiety or depression, from IBS or chronic heartburn, from boredom or mental exhaustion, no positive flow of energy can occur. Each of us must begin where the need is most urgent. Healing one aspect leads us toward a second and third.

The healing journey is like the slow and gentle opening of a flower. For a blossom to be beautiful and fragrant it requires not just water, but nutrients and soil, sun and an ecosystem to support its growth. So too with us. We will blossom as we receive what we need to feed and nurture us. Our responsibility is to stand open and receptive to those things that feed our souls and to learn to love ourselves and care for ourselves as a mother or father would their child, or a lover her beloved. It begins there.