Ageing with Awareness:
52 Contemplations for a Year of Weekly Inspiration

“Ageing with Awareness…52 Contemplations for a Year of Inspiration” is a collection of reflections on conscious ageing/eldering. Each contemplation can serve as an inspiration for the week ahead.

Some of the contemplations are directed toward your inner life, others to the practical aspects of ageing. Yet others ask you to feel into areas where you may not be particularly comfortable. They challenge your internal (as well as social) ageism and ideas about how you might live in this stage of life. Still others present an exciting vision of elderhood.

Here’s a sample contemplation:

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Sculpting

We live in a culture that asks us to continually add—possessions, friends, savings, insurance policies. It is as if we are blank canvases or blank pages, simply waiting to be filled. At earlier life stages the only limit was our imagination. We had energy and drive to splash colours and write words until, over a lifetime, the page or canvas is completely covered. What can an elder do with this metaphoric life painting or completed book? How satisfied are we with this finished product?

Happy, fulfilled elders are often able to share a secret. At this period of our lives we can see ourselves as three-dimensional, as sculptures. We have not simply been fortunate to receive the gift of a block of shining Carrara marble. We were pro-active and sculpted our lives from the material we were given. With a sure hand on the chisel, we are now able to rid ourselves of what is no longer contributing to our lives. We elders become sculptures of awareness and grace, beauty and aliveness.

Elderhood offers the remarkable opportunity to let go, to strip away all that distracts us from the process of deepening consciousness, all that clouds our ability to be fully in the now. We can find the energy to release outworn ideas, and contribute our long unused paraphernalia to charity. Thus we make space to refine our inner possessions as well as our outer environment.

We then become the beings we were meant to be, the embodiment hidden in the marble block. Having let go of the objects and opinions, even beliefs, that have held us back for decades, we become more spacious, freer. Suddenly we are living a life of meaning where we express each aspect of ourselves authentically.

As a sculptor sees the finished work in the raw block of marble, we release, unveiling our true self into the world. We become inspiring beings, beautiful in our elderhood, free of what is peripheral to the truth of who we are.

Happiness can now radiate from us as stunning works of our own creativity. We have become living, breathing sculptures, affirming our commitment to the joy of elderhood.

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This book is available worldwide in hard copy or on Kindle.