Continuing the Journey

I look forward to continuing to share my thoughts about how we can support ourselves to continue to evolve as we age. I’ve taken a much-needed break after posting weekly for more than five years! The reason for my hiatus was I needed time to complete the final stages of publishing a new book.

Composing Your Own Narrative: Discovering Your Hidden Wholeness summarizes the process one can follow to embrace our life’s journey. The work involved begins with taking a closer look at adults’ influences in our young lives. The goal of this work is to gain more insight on how the messages we received have played a role in how they did or didn’t guide our development. This work leads to insights about messages we have internalized about who we are and how we were supposed to live our lives.

Unpacking those messages gives us a chance to view them as adults. Children are like sponges, absorbing messages and directives without evaluating their validity or their fitness with who we are. This foundational work of acknowledging beliefs that we may have carried with us throughout our lives gives us a hard-earned opportunity to rethink their appropriateness in our lives.

Going forward, we begin to identify signs of our emerging self throughout our lives. Early signs of our preferences either – likes or dislikes – give us a glimpse that we have an authentic self that is looking to be discovered. Signs that indicate our interests in music, sports, service for example may help us clarify themes that have been a continuous presence in our life’s journey. Signals of our dislikes are also important to notice.

I find it helpful to create stages in our lives that are connected to our aging. For example, early life through elementary school, middle school/high school, post-high school, early adult lives, chosen roles in our lives, mid-life, work life, later life. Within these segments that are up to each person to define, we search for signs of our emerging self as well as themes that begin to hold a consistent presence in our lives.

Doing this work, myself, I discovered that I have had an interest in developing a rich inner life since I was in grade school. This theme in my life is also related to a drive to develop a rich spiritual life. I also discovered that I’m drawn to activities that allow me to create – like cooking, writing, gardening, problem-solving to name a few.

From this work, we are well-positioned to compose a narrative about our life’s story. I’ve been offering classes on this work for five years now. I’ve not only experienced the impact it has had on me, but I’ve also seen and heard from participants in my classes the value of this work in their lives. The ultimate gift to ourselves from this work is to gain insights into how well our childhood years prepared us for our adult lives. It is this piece of the puzzle that makes it easier to view our lives through a lens of greater self-compassion. We are able to claim gifts from our childhood that have served us well in our adult  years as well as areas that were limiting our development.

These reflections enable us to be more accepting of our own humanness, realizing that we like everyone else are not perfect. Words from Mary Pipher’s new book, A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence echo my experience:

“In my role as a therapist, I helped people create more empowering stories. Without stories, we are without a self. With only stories of loss and sadness we are unhappy people. However, we can all learn to craft healing narratives. We humans are heliotropic. With a little guidance, most people can move to be more resilient, more connected, and more light-filled lives.” (Pipher, p.7)

Being comfortable with our own narratives – even if limited to composing our own narrative for ourselves alone – enables us to invest energy into who we are Becoming. While there is no denying the challenges that may come with aging, there are also an infinite number of gifts. Telling our stories in empowering ways gives us the energy we need to continue to evolve.

I include a section titled, Next Steps, in the book that I also replicate on my website, https://stillevolving.net . The information offers two options for readers to assemble a group to collaborate with me in doing the work of Composing Your Own Narrative.

I look forward to sharing with those of you accompanying me on this journey of aging on how we can continue to support ourselves as we evolve. Do reach out to me at clivingstonedu@comcast.net with questions and ideas.

Namaste