Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life - Softcover

Orsborn Ph.D., Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1644116677 ISBN 13: 9781644116678

Publisher: Park Street Press, 2024

Synopsis

Inspiring readings for spiritual seekers growing older, wiser, and fiercer

As featured in Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper!

• 2025 Nautilus Gold Award

• Presents years of weekly inspiration and practices pointing the way forward through every conceivable mood, opportunity, and stumbling block on the spiritual journey through the second half of life

• Includes quotes and stories by and about mystics, sages, and old souls from ancient through contemporary times who have walked this path before us

• Shares insightful guidance on transforming loneliness to solitude, loss of identity to freedom, anger to self-protection, fear to faith, and envy to love

Many of us navigating the years beyond midlife report high levels of self-acceptance, freedom, and joy, but there can also be bouts of second-guessing and regret as well as the occasional longing to be reminded that you’re not in this alone.

Designed to be read weekly in two-year cycles, the 120 timeless readings in this book focus on the issues and concerns that arise among those who view aging as a path to spiritual culmination. Transforming loneliness to solitude, loss of identity to freedom, anger to self-protection, fear to faith, and envy to love, Orsborn’s wise and compassionate insights are seasoned by quotes and stories by and about mystics, sages, and old souls from ancient through contemporary times who illuminate the path to living a full life while embracing old age. The connecting thread is the reminder that you have what it takes to shift from reacting with fear to the challenges of aging, instead accepting these challenges in a spirit of gratitude as they help you grow not just old, but whole.

About this title

About the Author

Carol Orsborn, Ph.D., is founder of the Spiritual Aging Study and Support group and author of more than 35 books, including The Spirituality of Age, with Robert Weber, Ph.D., and Older, Wiser, Fiercer. She has taught at Georgetown University and lives in Nashville and Toronto.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Greetings, Old Friend

You and I have been working spiritually and psychologically for a long time to get to this place of arrival. We who have been transformed by the challenges of time have tasted the wholeness, freedom, and completion that is life’s promise to us. We count ourselves fortunate to walk arm-in-arm with our cohort of lifelong seekers following the path of the mystics, elders, and old souls who have lit the way: Ram Dass, Rumi, Pema Chodron, and Carl Jung, to name a few. The growing cadre of way-showers grows deep and strong as we have learned from them so much about humility, acceptance, human nature, and what it means to fully embrace life.

In many ways the rewards wrested from growing older are greater than we’d ever expected. But even here, advancing toward the peak of adult and spiritual development, rising to meet life’s many occasions is sometimes more than we can bear. Just when we begin to celebrate a degree of mastery, something unexpected raises the bar. We encounter old wounds we thought we’d made peace with long ago. The thing we were most afraid of knocks at the door. Or we simply forget for a time how small we are and how big the mystery. One of the ironies of age is that past levels of mastery will never prove sufficient because as we expand and deepen our consciousness, the questions become only larger.

This book of readings has come to you at this particular bend in the road to meet you wherever you are in your journey through life. Every week for the next two years and beyond you will be reminded how far you have come already, and that regardless of what life brings your way, you are never truly lost or alone.

The weekly readings comprise a perennial loop of two-year cycles meant to accompany you through the coming years. They are designed to be read one each week, your choice of day and time, and over every two years’ span to cover every conceivable mood, challenge, and topic you may encounter. The readings are at once personal and archetypal, applicable to every one of us. They came to me from depths and sources beyond my ordinary consciousness in answer to my call for affirmation, insight, and guidance.

I literally lived, breathed, and dreamed these readings over the past seven years as I spent every morning recalling learnings gleaned from the most recent of more than a thousand dreams. This period included the marriage of my daughter and several years of solitude, first enforced by Covid, then by choice. Family and friends moved away for many good reasons. My husband and I understood, but still left us missing people we love, including our beloved grandchildren.

Along the way there was Dan’s and my joyous fiftieth anniversary celebration and a new puppy, but there was also my own serious fall, surgery, and recovery. My fascination with my dream life sustained me through the highs and lows, and I came to view this period as the call to live even more deeply.

For the many of you who have put my books on bestseller lists in the aging category, you will have the opportunity to connect with this new material as well as revisit some favorite passages adapted to this new context from my previous work. All of the readings, referencing many of the thought leaders who have served as my influences, are informed by my years as a scholar in the fields of religion and adult and spiritual development, as well as my immersion in the works and practices of a wide range of mystic and spiritual traditions, past and present.

In keeping with the intuitive nature of inner work, while the readings subtly build upon one another, they are not linear. Rather, they circle back in sometimes expanding, sometimes contracting spirals until every facet of the major themes of spiritual aging has had the opportunity to be assimilated by the reader on multiple levels. A major influence on my life and this book is Carl Jung’s assertion that the purpose of life is “increasing consciousness.”

Jung also asserted the validity of synchronicity, a principle I applied to the sequencing of readings. I trust that you will discover more than accidental resonances in the pertinence of particular subject matter to your life at each given point in time. It may seem as if the book were reading your mind, addressing the issue or concern you most need that week for immediate application. Other times, however, where there seems to be a discrepancy, several factors may be at play. There is wisdom and utility, for instance, in taking a moment when you are feeling strongest to fortify yourself with advanced learning for a time down the road when your path may wend its way back through the shadows. And vice versa, when you are feeling lost, a celebratory reading will remind you that, as the mystics report, “This too shall pass.” In keeping with synchronicity, it is suggested that whatever time of year you choose to begin your cycle of readings will be the perfect point of entry for you. No need to wait for the first week of January. Start now with this week’s reading and work your way through the readings week by week. Please note that some months have five weeks in some years, but not others. To make sure you are covered with a reading for every week of every year, I have included a Fifth Week Reading for every month. If you have arrived at a month that has only four weeks, consider the final reading of every month to be a bonus reading. When you’ve completed year two’s final reading, circle back to the beginning of year one to complete your own unique transit through this perennial loop of two-year cycles.

In the end, how you incorporate this book into your life is as free and creative as your unique approach to aging. For instance, you may also want to open the book at random, trusting that you are being led to the exact reading you most need at this time. Additionally, the subject index has been specifically designed to be of immediate use to you. You are encouraged to turn to the back of the book and scan the topics to see which one calls to you, and take it from there.

This book assures you of the possibility of living life’s promise one week at a time. It has come into your life at this juncture to remind you of what you already intuit: that however old you are, however challenging your circumstances, you can fulfill your life’s purpose. Nothing of what you’ve been through, from the moment you were conceived through the present, has been wasted. In the coming pages may you discover a new level of freedom in your life that is nothing you’d anticipated but more than you’d hoped. Shall we begin?

The Readings
Year One

January
First Week of January

As we ring in the first week of the year, it’s already time to take a break from New Year’s resolutions, a simultaneously noble and misguided attempt to game the future. In the past you’ve invested enormous effort attempting to orchestrate the year ahead by trying to figure out which self-improvement strategy, what altered circumstance, which new protocol will guarantee safe passage through to year’s end, only to realize there is no such thing. The effort, with its diminishing returns, is costing you too much.

But what’s the alternative?

This is the year you can instead go wild and vault into the new year with eyes wide open, hair flying. Try as you might, reality is going to have its way with you. Of course you should fix what you can, within reason; make the best possible decisions when you must. But as for the rest, you can do as the mystics teach: choose to face the future with more fascination than fear.

Just over fifty years ago, at the age of eighty-five, Jungian psychologist Florida Scott-Maxwell wrote, “We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience. Almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high. . . . You grow more intense as you age. Inside you flame with a wild life that is almost incommunicable.”

This is not the extreme sport of the extraordinary elder, meant to inspire the rest of us to take up mountain climbing at seventy or marathons at eighty. But the initiation of an even more extreme movement: that of the heart taking a leap of deep faith.

Edition details

• Publisher: Park Street Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1644116677
• ISBN 13: 9781644116678
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384