The Power of Story

The Stories of our Lives

As part of this course at Meridian University, I am asked to keep a running journal of my reflections on the “offerings” of the week. In addition to what pops for me, I will find at least three other theoretical sources to support the numerical age range on the human timeline.

The course opens with Elderhood, the years after the halfway point as I like to call them, the station on the timeline of life that Ilchee Lee calls the Cycle of Completion. After reading the course description and the direction of the culminating writing project I surmised that underlying themes will be

• Adjusting to Aging
• Life is a Story

In reviewing the topics for the SIGs (Special Interest Groups) and the required texts, I have a sense that we are going to hop around the human timeline of Childhood, Adolescence, and so on. The first week assignment on Death Awareness hints that fostering an awareness and imagining into the end of life can be a source of richness for the entire life span. 

I coined a phrase unknown to me and not something I could google around 2022: “Later Literacies”. I wrote on this topic towards the end of my coursework in a Masters of English degree at NAU. [PDF Annotated Bibliography] Learning to age, being a Life Long Learner of our own lives, was part of the puzzle pieces of my thinking at the time. It keeps coming forward especially when I come across the concept of the work of the Death Doula.  I had a doula “help me” through the live birth of my son. I have been introduced to a doula specializing in bringing in life with another guiding others at the end of life.

Is my mythopoetic identity as Depth Docent to guide individuals through the aging process? Am I a guide and a helper? My Soul is doing a bit of jumping up and down, twirling, clapping, and more than smiling as I express all of this in words onto this journal space.

• Week 1 Journal
• Week 2 Journal
• Week 3 Journal
• Week 4 Journal
• Week 5 Journal
• Week 6 Journal
• Week 7 Journal
• CWA- Hinge Moments: Initiation, Identity, and the Spiral of Becoming

WEEK 1: Elderhood and Later Literacies

Death Awareness [PDF]

Bar-Levav, Reuven. “A Credo to Psychotherapists, or Time—The Unstretchable Dimension.” Voices, Fall 1989.

James, Jennifer. “How Death Awareness Enriches Your Life.” TEDx talk, December 2015.

Adjusting to Aging

Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. “Does Who You Are at 7 Determine Who You Are at 63?“ New York Times Magazine, December 2, 2019. [PDF]

I turned 63 a few weeks ago.

Part of the creative work I did this summer was a training called “The Child Archetype Facilitator”. This title is alive for me. I reflected on playing school and librarian before I went to school. At age 7, I was in 2nd grade and a voracious reader already. My teacher told my parents I needed more than picture books because I was devouring them. My dad and I took our first (of only a very very few one-on-one field trips together) to the library. He got me my first library card and we checked out Nancy Drew Book 1 and 2: The Secret of the Old Clock and The Hidden Staircase and a Hardy Boy book he liked. He was only 28 years old and taking his 7 year old to the library…an initiation that is so easily recalled at my age of 63.

I am who I was at age 7.

In the Child Archetype course, one of the first images that came across my search was this “Lil Depth Docent”. I was born to teach. At age 7, I lived through the Sylmar earthquake and I remember a sense of carrying for a neighbor boy who was all shook up in the after tremors. I think I knew I would want to be a mom. I was an active athletic kid, I loved freedom in the neighborhood. All of this is very very fresh due to the art I made last month that centered around my Child archetype. Lots of playground activities, nature, and books. Not so different than today.

Pipher, Mary. “I’m Going to Die. I May as Well Be Cheerful About It.” New York Times, March 7, 2020. [PDF]

I do not fear death. I never have. But then again, I haven’ t received a life ending diagnosis or been in an accident that left me on the brink. I held my Father’s hand and it seemed natural when he took his last breath. My grandparents deaths were expected since they were in their 90s. I have a Great Grandmother who lived to 100. I don’t think it is out of bounds to say I will live to 120. I mean I feel I will …even if it isn’t Kronos modern time. I will have packed in 120 years regardless of my death age. I’ve read the piece, and it doesn’t really matter what was written, I sort of forget – but it did launch me into writing this reflection.

Segal, David. “Letter Day Saint.” In “Parent Trap.” This American Life, episode 401. Aired February 19, 2010. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/401/parent-trap. [PDF]

My father, PT, began his “departure trip” eight years ago. My mom is visiting me this week and we actually discussed the rapid timeline from annoyance of his golf game in July, to fatigue and a toe wound in August/September, a visit to the ER in early October and then BAM death in early November. I think of him often, he “arrives” in moments when I need to remember a story or a lesson I think he would teach with a funny quip. The one I probably share the most is “Little Kids, Little Problems, Bigger Kids, Bigger Problems”. [snip]

So my reaction to Letter Day Saint, is that she needed to write these letters for herself as she was working through her early departure when her daughter was at the tender age of 16 BUT they were too closed lens. They were too influential. They felt haunting to me. To be fair, I was probably not my best parenting version when my daughter was 16. At that age, both the child and the parent are preparing to “drive out into the world”. The modern family system still gives a couple of years to get used to moving out for higher ed or find roommates for that first adulting job.  

My reactions and personal life reflections show me why this landed as a prompt in the first week of the course. There are many cycles, stages, adjustments, learnings, reworkings in this human adventure. I would like to believe that if Elizabeth could have seen the impact of her letters on Rebecca and Gordon she might have made other choices. Maybe fewer? Maybe less guidance?  I don’t know if there is ever any real script… we al just have to live it. What I do know is that needing my mom didn’t stop at my wedding day. Lucky for me, she is with me for five days and I can have real time discussions with her about our lives past, present, and future. Again, I am loved and lucky. 

Hillman, James. The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life. New York: Random House, 1999.

I read the book, I went back and highlighted, I reviewed the highlights and made notes (Prefaces and Chapter 1 Book Notes) and then I went hunting for themes for takeaways and journal musings and what I ended up with a jumbled mess – instead of weavings and personal aha insights, it was looking like a tangled set of knots rather than a lovely ball of yarn. Clearly this book has a lot to say to me (as outlined in my Book Notes), but here are the biggest of the big ideas to share at this time in my meandering narrative form:

Hillman invites me to consider that aging is an art form as we travel this psychological journey. I am intrigued that with imagination we can play with time and write our past, present, and future stories and the constant through all of it is our “Character”. He is inviting me into his writing to enter into yet another new way of looking at aging and I am excited and intrigued, and as curious as the invitation seems to require.

The Big Ideas on character: Authenticity, Integrity, and Individuality remind me of my embrace of my Daimon and the life I am meant to live. I see it as my SoulWork and I write SoulCurriculum for myself and others. As he speaks about the importance of myth and the plots of our lives on pages 11 and 12, I am getting reminders of my own work four years ago creating a pilot study on storytelling, transformation, archetypes and myth https://thepowerof-story.com/beginnings/   I am bringing this into my week 1 journal musings because I feel the syncroncity – I sense that I was circling around James Hillman’s ideas before I knew of his work in the world (or met his son, Laurence Hillman).

Societal Views and Shifts. Before I read on, I am thinking that my journey to finding my true and authentic self was in breaking away from societal storylines. I feel there is a cultural shift in attitudes toward aging, with older generations redefining what it means to age and remain active in society. Reading on he hits on it and I note:

Hillmans spends a few pages talking about how different societies views the old, but states “In general, in the United States, we hate aging and hate the old for embodying it” (16). 

I highlight this because I do feel that there is a shift going on 25 years later from the publishing of this book, in that the Baby Boomers are rewriting aging. They are not sitting on the sidelines …or rather they are not being kicked to the curb.  As a matter of fact those who were born with Pluto in Leo seem to be struggling to “leave the stage”.  We have more politicians who refuse to step down, many in their 80s and even 90s are seeking another 6 year term in the Senate.  The money being spent on anti-aging and the rise of Botox since Hillman wrote this book… I wonder what he would say.  But on the other hand, many since Covid, including myself stopped coloring our hair… I am embracing my graying hair, tiger stripe eye crinkles, and crepey arms and legs by reframing them as my “lived silk”. 

My highlight pen caught these ideas on the final pages of the chapter:

“Our elders seem to be extending the soul by drawing it back to them” (26) and we need to extend the idea of extension. And first off , “we can extend backward”. “The further back you can reach in imagination, the more extended you become”. (27). 

(This is making me curious again about the book on “To Read Next” pile by Jean Houston called Jump Time. I am definitely embracing that we can live, dream, imagine a much different time than simply sun clock time!)

Hillman wraps up the Longevity chapter on page 28: “Backward, downward, outward extends a life beyond its borders and free it from attachments to personal identity, characters freed of that greedy bully, Me”. And, “The further back into history you can reach, the further down to what is later than you and lower than you, and the further out to what is not you, the more extended your life. Longevity is liberated from the time capsule. This is true longevity, an outlasting that is everlasting, for it has no stopping place”. 

• Question: I wonder if Jean and James had conversations about time??
• Answer: It doesn’t look like it but….

London, Scott. “On Soul, Shadow and the American Psyche: An Interview with Jean Houston.” Awaken, November 7, 2023. Originally published in Salt Journal, no. 1 (November/December 1997).

What I found interesting is that these two books were published around the same time. I went searching for a conversation with Jean Houston and James Hillman. Even though there is no evidence of them in an interview together, on a panel at a conference, or personal acquaintances sharing personal conversations, I feel confident in my suspicion that they knew of each other’s work.

Scott London brings in questions for Jean to answer about James Hillman’s ideas but does not address my question about time specifically. [INTERVIEW LINK]. While they take up time from different angles—his in the elastic backward-and-outward stretching of a life, hers in the leaps and accelerations she names Jump Time—the two were writing in the very same historical moment, each circling what a life lived at full stretch might mean.

Jean Houston, who just passed a few months ago at the age of 89, in her own way of living, seems to embody exactly what Hillman was calling for: proof that character can still be growing, still gathering its adjectives, well past the point our culture expects a person to slow down.

Note: I need to ask Laurence Hillman about their connection. I am recalling that at Jean’s Memorial Celebration of Life at Meridian, he spoke and mentioned that she invited him into one of her early collaborations (was it before his father died) and that he had the honor of Jean sitting on his PhD dissertation committee at Meridian University.

THEORETICAL RESOURCES

Lee, Ilchi. I’ve Decided to Live 120 Years: The Ancient Secret to Longevity, Vitality, and Life Transformation.Chandler, AZ: Best Life Media, 2017.

Lee challenges the assumption that life effectively ends at retirement, arguing that lifespan can extend meaningfully to 120 years. He proposes that a long life is only valuable if it is also a purposeful one, built on the power of choice, self-reliance, and a clear sense of purpose. I wrote about my discovery of this book in 2022 at the retreat center he built in Sedona, Arizona [HERE].

Woodman, Marion. The Crown of Age: The Rewards of Conscious Aging. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2002. Audio recording.

Woodman shares we are crowned twice. Once at birth and then a second crowning js only available through our lived experiences as we enter elderhood. She traces the archetypal passages from virgin to mother to crone. She tells of her own near-fatal illness and she frames aging as a paradox in which physical strength wanes even as spiritual depth continues to emerge.

Randall, William L., and Gary M. Kenyon. “Time, Story, and Wisdom: Emerging Themes in Narrative Gerontology.” Canadian Journal on Aging / La Revue canadienne du vieillissement 23, no. 4 (2004): 333–346.

In searching for related theoretical resources this week, I found Kenyon and Randall’s work on “Narrative Gerontology. I will state: I am diving deeply but having to come up for breath or I will drown. With some help from Claude (and yes I understand the AI policies laid out by Meridian this quarter on writing and editing***), I found this summation article.

It draws together three aspects of aging: the temporal (storytime), the poetical (the stages, styles, genres, contexts, and selves of self-storying), and the spiritual (meaning and identity) and weaves them all together in a theme of wisdom and the possibility of “wisdom environments.”

Narrative Gerontology as a Later Literacy?

My Lil Life Long Learner is all lit up right now. Just as Jungian Arts Based Research is feeling like a foundational piece of my doctoral studies (so I am taking a 6 week symposium course at the LABRC on the methodology); maybe this work by Gary Kenyon and Bill Randall, both at St. Thomas University is too. Their touchstone book: Restorying Our Lives: Personal Growth Through Autobiographical Reflection (1997) it works through the life-as-story metaphor using literary terms like plot, character, theme, and point of view.

This is fascinating me and tickling my soul. It is reminding me of Peggy Rubin’s To Be and How To Be text I read last quarter where my takeaway is that our life is a play with settings, characters, plots etc.

All of this also builds on my Masters work at NAU from 2020-2023 and my own memoir writing, personal myth writing, and creating my website with the title The Power of Story with the tag line ‘Storytelling can open doors to self-discovery’. When I wrote it then I believe it was more in the theme of healing through storytelling since I had done a ton of writing about my struggles in a reproductive body… I also say often: ‘when I tell my story, it opens the door for you to tell your story, and together we can learn and heal’.

 “We not only have stories, We are stories.” 

Randall, William Lowell. The Stories We Are: An Essay on Self-Creation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995 (2nd ed., 2014).

Story is not something we tell about our lives. It is the structure our identity takes. Meaning-making and identity development have no age limit; they are, in Kenyon and Randall’s framing, a potentially infinite process, standing in direct defiance of any decline-model of aging.

They have developed some core vocabulary that resonates with me:

• Restorying — the ongoing reworking of how you understand and narrate your own past; not a single retelling but a continuous process
• Radical restorying — a deeper, more fundamental reworking of a life’s narrative, not just retelling but reconceiving
• Coauthoring — the idea that others help write our life story with us; a life story isn’t a solo document, it’s built in relationship, each telling inviting another
• Biographical aging — how the style of a person’s storying, not just their chronological years, marks their aging
• Storytime — the field’s term for how time is actually experienced in narrative: not clock-time, but subjective, felt, flowing and stalling unevenly
• Backshadowing — retelling the past as though it always, inevitably, led to where you are now — a kind of narrative smoothing
• Sideshadowing — holding open, in retrospect, the paths not taken alongside the one that was — a more honest, less deterministic way of narrating a life

Randall and Kenyon ground the whole field in the idea that story-making is how meaning gets made at all – not a tool applied to aging from outside, but the basic mechanism of how humans learn, interact, and experience gender and culture. From there: memory itself works through imagination – recalling the past isn’t retrieving an exact replica, it’s weaving a storyline out of raw events so that every act of remembering is already a small act of authorship.

Related works and the field’s trajectory aka more for my To Read pile

• Kenyon, Bohlmeijer & Randall edited Storying Later Life: Issues, Investigations, and Interventions in Narrative Gerontology (Oxford, 2011)
• Randall separately wrote Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old with Elizabeth McKim
• Randall’s more recent research direction is “narrative resilience” that the links between how older adults tell their life stories and the resilience they show

The field of “Narrative Gerontology: explicitly builds on Robert Butler’s 1963 paper “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged,” which argued reminiscence in old age is a healthy, universal psychological process tied to Erikson’s “ego integrity vs. despair” stage. Narrative gerontology absorbs this into its broader claim that we are continuously “storying” and “restorying” who we are, not just recalling facts. I can’t find that original article that isn’t behind a paywall. But I found this:
Butler, Robert N. “The Triumph of Age: Science, Gerontology, and Ageism.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 58, no. 4 (1982): 347–361 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1808551

I am Elderhood.

I am the wind in your hair. I am the shine on your face. I am the gateway to the second half of your life.

I gift you your birthstone to remind you of the map you were given when you took your first breath.

You are free.

I want you to enjoy this path to individuation. I want to you to always look upward. Be open. I want you to lean into the moment. Be present.

I give you these pearls from Greta.

These gifts are from your Soul – your companion – your Daimon.

Week 2: Early Childhood and the Construction of “Truth“

The Role of Attachment in Infancy on Later Health [Video]

The bond of infant and caregiver. Secure attachment gives a sense of love and being lovable. The caregiver is a safe space for infant stress. Infant biology is tuned into parental energy. Chronic insensitivity will activate a biological malfunction of stress which will impact health. Cortisol issues linked to a variety of negative outcomes.

Parents need to be sensitive, respond in a timely manner, protection from stressors, balance their own needs with those of their child. Attend to self, the partnership, and other relationships. ENJOY the child.

Response of my own memories of attachment:

As I reflect, I hit the attachment jackpot.  My parents met before they were teenagers, attended high school proms, and after a brief breakup freshman year of college, reunited on Thanksgiving break the following year, got engaged, and got married before they turned 21 in June 1962.  I was born in August 1963 after my father graduated from USC and got a good paying job. As the first child, I was also the first paternal grandchild. All four grandparents lived within a 3 mile radius of me with three maternal cousins close by too. 

The “First Boy” was born a week before my 3rd birthday. There is a picture of me in my room with my new baby doll. Whether this is a memory of mine or a story from a relative, I wasn’t too pleased about everyone giving their attention to the new baby.  I was dethroned.  Rumor is I wasn’t the nicest to him and my Mom tells a story of him climbing on my back and sinking his new teeth into my upper neck where I couldn’t reach him. We never did anything half ass in my natal family – including sibling rivalry.  My sister arrived fourteen months later and my youngest brother is about 8.5 years younger. 

I always had a safe haven with grandparents, aunts and uncles, and an enormous network of “close family friends”.  With that said, we were not a touchy feely family. I was told many a time to “go work it out in your room”.  Not a lot of room for emotional development, but lots of emphasis on athletic endeavors and competition.  But I knew there was love. Hugs came in goodbyes once we all started leaving and coming home for and from college. It is still a loud family where it is easier to bark than share a hurt feeling. 

I “tried” to raise my kids a bit differently. I was shut the teasing and bullying down pretty hard – but I was the most sensitive and most picked on. I can see now that I was a bit of a Unicorn in the family – the one who was told she was too sensitive. Shadow work has revealed that I was TOO everything according to many so I put my “shine” on the shelf.  

Overall, I feel I received high quality attachment, and I believe I easily passed that on to my own children. Not a perfect mom or caretaker, but our home continues to be a “Container of Care” – a safe harbor. 

Symbolic Play [Web]

Response to a memory:

I have many memories of sandboxes. But just jumped in my mind is a sandpit my parents dug on a beach vacation to act as a playpen for my very active little brother. I took it over. I was maybe four years old. I recall the cozy feel of the cool sand and it being a space where I was all alone (no doubt from my brother who may be in that biting phase I mentioned last prompt).

I made little shelves and turned it into my kitchen. I must have had some cups and pails for the beach, but I vividly recall that I was make believe baking and shelving spices and utensils. In my body I was free. I was important in that I had a task to do. (Not sure for who). 

I like my solitary spaces. I am in a hermit environment at the moment in the mountains this week. The square footage (and view) is much different, but I can sense the comfort in the solitude of being independent and happy alone in my own spaces. 

What do Babies Think Alison Gopnik [Video]

Long childhood seem to be associated with knowledge and learning. However, until you know how to survive you are pretty helpless. Early learners as “R&D of the humans species”. We can consider them butterflies flying around (caterpillars as adults crawling along). Babies brains are powerful learning computers. Babies might be making complicated calculations to revise and figure out and make predictions. Using unconscious statistical experiments. Play as research. Alison believes babies and children are more conscious than adults. Lantern of Consciousness (rather than spotlight). Lots of lighting up for neuroplasticity and inhibitory parts have not turned on in the brain yet.

“But if what we want is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children.” (17:40)

Do Babies Cry in Different Languages Sophia Hardach [PDF]

• Babies hear prosody in the womb.
• Babies cries will mirror native language.
• Babies mimic prosody they hear forming later speech
• Parents encouraged to listen, sing, and interact with babies
• Simple sounds, even howling can calm babies and foster connection
• Crying has a role in communication development.
• Parents develop ability to recognize and respond to their baby’s unique sounds.

The Linguistic Genius of Babies Patricia Kuhl [Video]

Baby brains = rocket science. Preserve a language? Talk it to babies. After age 7, brain decline. Babies as “citizens of the world”. They can distinguish sounds where adults are “culture bound listeners”. Babies are statisticians that analyze the language they hear. As they get accustomed to the language of their environment they will release sounds that won’t be required for their communication. Bilingual exposure then increases their language sound skills. However, a human being is needed to get a baby to “take statistics” not just exposer to audio and video.

The Still Face Experiment Edward Tronick [Video]

The Good The Bad and The Ugly. Sometimes a parent cannot pay attention (still face) and the baby will get stressed and try many things to get the mothers attention again. If baby gets it she engages again, but what if they don’t get that reparation? What happens to children who are constantly ignored?

Oneness and Separateness RESPONSE:

I did not choose these two situations because they fit Kaplan’s quote. I chose them first. Then I actually read the quote with non-skimming eyes, and both fit.

Eight miscarriages. Six unmonitored cycles of Clomid. I gained thirty pounds and became unhinged. When I finally brought my doctor my own research, he lectured me on doubting him.

That was the letdown. Not that my body would not comply, though it would not. The bigger break was realizing I was not an omnipotent ruler of the universe, and neither was he. I had handed him that role. Doctors, priests, I trusted them the way I once trusted the world to simply work. When it did not, I surrendered something. Not hope. I surrendered the naive, all trusting version of me who believed authority equals care. I took control of my own journey instead. I held to one phrase through all of it. Always Keep Hope In Your Heart.

The second one crept up slower. A friendship. The ease just went out of it. Time together stopped being fun. She got disinterested in the things I was passionate about, and she started saying so out loud. Snappy tone. Passive aggressive little comments. I could feel her annoyance before she said a word.

The contrast between the way things were and the way things are now was too stark to ignore, exactly like Kaplan says.

And then it hit me. Hearing that tone come out of her, I thought, OMG did I do that to my kids?

Three kids under the age of ten. Perimenopause creeping in while I was refereeing sibling squabbles and running a household. And a doctor, again, telling me my symptoms were in my head, or just stress, or something I should learn to manage better. Gaslit twice now, over two different decades of my reproductive life. The exhaustion, the hormones, the sheer under water feeling of it, that came out somewhere. Snappy. Passive aggressive. On my own kids, the way I just heard it come out of a 60something woman. 

I thought I had done the work already, chipping away at that Child within, back when I took my fertility journey back from the doctors who failed me. Turns out she does not stay chipped away. She comes back dressed as a tired mother in perimenopause, snapping at her kids the same way a former friend once snapped at me. (Interesting …cheeks red with shame is not creeping in … hmmm). 

Attachment Theory: The Basics Chapters 1-3 (Ruth O’Shaughnessey) [BookNotes]

The aha that stays with me most from Chapters 1 through 3 was the importance of vagal tone – a well regulated vagus nerve. 

Bowlby describes the behavior. Ainsworth provided the measurement. But Chapter 3 gave me the mechanism, the actual physical thing happening inside a comforted baby’s body. Comforting a distressed infant activates the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve tells the body to release oxytocin. Oxytocin is the feel good hormone. Do that consistently enough, and the baby grows more receptors for it. A template gets built for every future emotional experience that baby will have.

Bowlby’s secure base and Ainsworth’s sensitivity scale point to it. My own image of the mom reading the loud room and moving her fussy baby out of it instead of just offering a bottle. All of it comes down to this, whether the vagus nerve gets activated or not. Whether the nervous system learns help is coming, or learns it is on its own.And the flip side matters just as much. If comfort does not come, cortisol and adrenaline do not switch off. The brain wires for stress instead of for safety. Big T trauma or little t trauma, either way, the body remembers what the nervous system was trained to expect.

There have been public health initiatives to support the building of these foundations but with cuts to Head Start in the USA, will our society’s stress levels continue to increase?  

Rapprochement and Narcissism

• A.H. Almaas on Rapprochement {W2.R2}
• Revisiting Rapprochement in Light of Developmental Theories (Bergman)
• On Narcissism
• Selection on Rapprochement 

The Inner Planets one pager confirms for me that Rapprochement is a Push/Pull dance. In teens and beyond it can best be described as the can’t live with them, can’t live without them patterning. I am sensing that the narcissistic wound comes to light when there is a message interpreted as I can’t live with you unless you become who I want and need you to be. Self esteem plummets and the narcissist searches for that unconditional love connection.

So yes. This idea does make sense to me.

In previous classes I used my brother as an example of having to endure a narcissist. Part of it was because my parents put the first born son on a pedestal and he was indeed athletically talented enough to be put in the headlines. But he was also told not to show his emotion on the court. I wonder if he experienced the be who we want you to be instead of being allowed to be an emotionally expressive being. I do sense his self esteem sucks. When things do not go the way he wants them to go he throws adult temper tantrums. It becomes all about him, even if he is ruining family functions.

I have seen this pattern outside my family too. A have shared the story of a doctor running six unmonitored cycles of Clomid on me. When I finally brought him my own research, he did not engage with it. He had a professional hissy fit and lectured me for doubting him. He basically fired me as a patient. 

That reaction was the tell. A confident authority does not need to punish a patient for asking questions. A fragile one does. I can not live with you unless you accept me exactly as I present myself, that was the real message underneath his lecture. I surrendered my naive all trusting version of myself that day, the one who believed doctors and priests deserved that kind of unquestioned faith. 

Between my brother and that doctor, I see the same pattern twice, just wearing different hats. My brother wore achievement. The doctor wore authority. Both were costumes for the unconditional love connection that rapprochement never quite secured. When things don’t go their way what arrives is not calm correction. It shows up as a tantrum, a hissy fit, a lecture. Whatever the form, self esteem stays propped up a little longer.

Psychological Baby Pictures (Joanne Rubin, Ph.D.)

I did not fully grasp the introduction to this piece. It is written for readers already fluent in Ken Wilber’s Integral framework, a massive attempt to map every school of psychology and spirituality onto one grid. What did land for me was the narrative itself, a first person account written as if by the baby, tracking development from birth through age five.

The toddler thinking he runs the whole toy factory. The heartbreak of the game called Run Away. The simple tantrum logic of I feel bad, there is bad in me, I am bad. This is rapprochement translated into felt experience rather than theory. It sits alongside everything else I have been reading this week, Bowlby and Ainsworth on attachment, Mahler and Bergman on separation-individuation, Almaas on the lifelong nature of the rapprochement wound. Rubin’s contribution is showing where all of it lives inside one larger developmental map, and reminding me that the fall from grandiosity is not a failure. It is universal. The question is only how it gets handled.

Basic Theories of Child Development [PDF]

As a teacher in the 90s I called myself a Constructivist Based Learning theorist. I believe we construct our own knowledge. The teacher is a guide, not an all knowing fact filler upper. Vygotsky and Piaget are names I carry with me 30 years later as are Constance Kamii and Larry Lowery. As a math educator I taught teachers how to teach math using these theories and the work of Ruth Parker and Kathy Richardson. Marilyn Burns was another guide for me and I inserviced many teachers using their curriculum tools and the Investigations series of math units. Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development was most likely an unconscious guide for my parenting. Challenge learners but not to the point of frustration. Offer clues but do not outright teach strategies.

My grandfather John became the proof of many of my foundations for teaching and learning, long before I had the theory to name what he was doing. He never let us “win” at a game. We could ask questions about how he always beat us, but figuring out the strategies is an important element to developing deeper thinking.

THEORETICAL RESOURCES

Ruiz, Miguel. “Domestication and the Dream of the Planet.” In The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom. Narrated by Peter Coyote. San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen Publishing, 2010. Audiobook.

A note on why this belongs here

I chose to include this chapter from The Four Agreements because it arrived through synchronicity rather than assignment, and synchronicity has a way of pointing at exactly what a week needs. I read this book more than 25 years ago and taught its four specific agreements to my own teens when they were young, without ever grasping, at the time, that I was not yet living my own authentic self.

Revisiting it now, I see it doing something I missed the first time: planting the seeds for understanding Shadow. Ruiz’s language of domestication, the reward and punishment that trains a child the way one trains any animal, is really describing how we get taught to fit in and, in the process, lose our authenticity. We forget who we are before we ever have the chance to choose who we might be.

What ties it directly to this week’s material is his passage on language itself as the first and deepest agreement: it was not my choice to speak English, any more than it was my choice to be domesticated by repetition, in the Skinnerian sense, into a set of beliefs I never consciously selected. This lands hard against the week’s readings on infant language acquisition, where the science says something almost identical: a baby’s brain commits to the sound patterns of its native language before it can speak, before it can consent, before there is any self yet formed to do the choosing. If we never chose what to believe, and never chose the very code we think in, what does that do to Truth, the theme this module keeps circling?

Ruiz’s answer is that truth was never something to find outside ourselves. It’s buried under the mitote, the fog of everything we agreed to without knowing we were agreeing. And the way through the fog is the same courage this whole quarter keeps asking me to practice: the courage to challenge a belief that makes me feel safe, precisely because it is a lie. This is also, I realize, the same invitation James Hillman offers in The Force of Character — that aging itself is the art of embracing our character fully, of finally becoming unwilling to keep performing the domesticated version of ourselves.

Winnicott, D. W. “The Concept of the False Self.” In Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, 65–70. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. [Link]

Winnicott and Ruiz are describing the same event from two different viewpoints. Winnicott shows me the mechanism up close, in the ordinary intimacy of a parent teaching a child to say “thank you.” He is precise about what is actually happening in that moment: not gratitude being taught, but a small, sanctioned dishonesty being installed, “a price to pay for socialization” (31). This is how societal domestication sneaks in. Not through force, but through politeness. It arrives disguised as good manners, so quietly that neither parent nor child notices a program has been written.

Ruiz shows me what that programming becomes once it has had decades to compound. If a child can be taught, gently and lovingly, to say a thing they do not mean, then by adulthood an entire architecture of belief can be built the same way, one small agreement at a time, until the beliefs themselves are mistaken for truths. Ruiz’s real contribution to me this week is not naming that we are domesticated. It is naming what domestication does to Truth itself: it manufactures it. Agree enough times, and a belief just becomes “true.” Fact-checked or not. That feels like a problem in today’s world of disinformation and societal polarity.

Rogers, Carl R. “‘This Is Me’: The Development of My Professional Thinking and Personal Philosophy.” In On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy, 3–27. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. [Link]

I loved this chapter so much I bought the book. I keep returning to three of his many “significant learnings” and together they trace like an arc.

First, “I can trust my experiences” (22). Before anything else can happen, this has to be true. Not that my experience is flawless, but that it counts, that it is my real data.

What makes trust makes possible: “When the most private and personal and unique things are shared they probably speak the most deeply to others” (26). This is the one that sang because I sensed it before I even finished reading Rogers say it. It’s the whole premise behind my website: The Power of Story, years before I had this citation to back it up. The particulars we are all tempted to keep private, the ones that feel too specific or too small to matter to anyone else, are exactly the ones that open a door for someone else’s own story.

The third hit me multiple ways “the facts are friendly” (25). At first it was this week’s prompt on truth but then Rogers admits this one cost him something to learn. He describes real anxiety waiting to see if his hypotheses would hold, real fear of being wrong. But he came to trust that even the evidence that unsettles us is the only thing that moves us closer to what’s true. I am reminded that “…being closer to the truth can never be a harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing” (25)

I want to build this not only how I live my life but into how I teach. Rogers used “reaction sheets” with his students, a way to let the people he was guiding tell him how his guidance actually landed, including where it missed. I want to use this too. It’s the Reflective Practitioner idea in its most honest form: not just reflecting alone, after the fact, but building in a real channel for feedback that might be uncomfortable, and choosing to stay open to it anyway. I experienced this as an adjunct professor at UNLV and again in asking for feedback after weekend workshops. Sometimes I already knew, but other times it was eye opening. A good reminder to build this into my future SoulCurriculum offerings,

Week 3: Latency and Adolescence

Ferrer-Wreder, Laura, et al. Identity in Adolescence. Available from: VitalSource Bookshelf, (5th Edition). Taylor & Francis, 2026. [BOOK NOTES]

• Adolescence returns in later life. Erikson writes that old age brings back adolescence’s identity tensions At fifty-seven, I leaned back, arms wide open on a zipline and I had not yet declared myself at the halfway point of my life. These same arms wide open began the PGI Purpose Discovery program in September 2025 and I faced the Grand Canyon after my 63rd birthday with this same wide arm embrace of my life. I keep hearing the song “The Edge of Seventeen” as the end of the natal nest and the moment I began to walk into my own identity. (178)
• Continuity of the me-that-was and the me-that-is (Pasupathi). Coherence comes from linking past and present selves. “I am who I was at seven” and “I see my acorn in the art” are continuing bridge network. (9)
• Selecting and discarding childhood identifications (Erikson). Identity forms when a teen keeps some early identifications and lets others go. I kept the reader, the leader and the caretaker, and my current collage artwork brought forth this synthesis in the image of the girl and the silhouette she grows into. (20)
• Intimacy after identity. For Erikson, genuine intimacy follows identity. At nineteen I offered intimacy before my identity was authentic, and the ghosting showed me what that cost. I was lost in this betrayal for a long time. (27)
• Identity is lost and regained. Erikson compares it to a good conscience, never won once and for all. The shine I shelved in childhood was lost, not gone, and I have been regaining it ever since. (22)

From the classic film, Annie Hall: “I Never Had a Latency Period” (video) {W3.LA1}

“Will you be my valentine?”
said the timid porcupine.
Listening, he heard
not a single word.

“Will you let me hold you please?
Let my arms enfold you please?
Why are you so shy?”
There was no reply.

“I’ll make you my Mrs., dear;
smother you with kisses, dear.
Darling, won’t you try it?”
All he heard was quiet.

“Though I have persisted here,
still you have resisted, dear.
I must need more practice,”
he said to the cactus.

 — Kenn Nesbitt

Growing Up Online (video) {W3.LA2}

This film puts me in many chairs to view it. A teacher who had networked computers in her classroom in the 90s; a wanna be mom in the 90s who had used the internet herself as a lifeline to finding peers experiencing the same infertility struggles; then ten years later this video highlights what I was watching in the teens around me which lead me to be the parent who was tech savvy enough to try and stay ahead of my kids’ access to handheld computers with a variety of social media apps and online video gaming on Xbox etc.

A few other very specific chairs in my own personal development and life story:

• The 1970s neighborhood kid with no screen at all
• The daughter who was never tracked
• The friend of parents just ahead, learning from their kids
• The friend of principals handling it inside the schools
• The woman who left social media in December 2025
• The learner of AI LLMs, guiding future educators
• The Depth Docent looking back

Friedman, Richard A. “The Big Myth about Teenage Anxiety.” New York Times, September 7, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/opinion/sunday/teenager-anxiety-phones-social-media.html.

This article is a counterargument to the 2008 video above. Don’t we all adjust to new technology? Yet, 8 years later we have class action settlements proving that the Tech Giants knew the technology was harming teens and the algorithms are addictive.

Adrienne M. Banny et al., “Relational Benefits of Relational Aggression: Adaptive and Maladaptive Associations with Adolescent Friendship Quality,” Developmental Psychology 47, no. 4 (2011): 1153–66, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022546.

Gossip does not stay behind in adolescence. I still meet it as an adult. My mother’s rule was simple: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” As a young woman I added my own barometer. “Don’t say something you wouldn’t say directly” Through the years, I have experienced the bonding and the destruction of gossip and backstabbing and it taught me what this study circles around: If a friend talks about others with me, I assume she talks about me with others.

What I try to carry now are three questions. Is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful? (I wish I’d stumbled on this when raising my kids). 

I found with my kids that the best lessons came through story. If they hear a story as if it happened to someone else, they might quietly find themselves in it. I’ve curated some stories and then addressed a translation of the research. 

The Feather Pillow (10 -year-olds)

Long ago, a villager loved to share news about his neighbors. One day he felt sorry and went to the rabbi. The rabbi handed him a feather pillow. “Cut it open on the hill and let the wind take the feathers. Then come back and pick up every single one.” He couldn’t. They were in gardens, on rooftops, in the river.

Some scientists wanted to learn what happens when friends say mean things about kids who aren’t there. They asked a whole middle school to secretly write down names on a list. Who ignores people to be mean? Who spreads rumors? Then they asked best friends how their friendship felt, and asked again a year later. They found that saying mean things together can make two friends feel closer. But the words are still feathers. You can’t gather them back, and the kid who isn’t there still feels them land.

The Bat, the Birds, and the Beasts (14-year-olds)

When the birds and the beasts went to war, the bat flew to the birds. “Look, I have wings. I’m one of you.” Then he crept to the beasts. “Look, I have fur. I’m one of you.” When peace came, the birds and the beasts compared stories. Neither side wanted him. That is why the bat hangs alone in the dark.

In one study, high school students brought a friend to a lab. The two were left alone in a room with a video camera and asked to talk about their peer group. Coders later watched and rated how mean the gossip got, from none to really hurtful. Six months later the researchers called to ask about the friendship. For everyone, more gossip meant rockier friendships over time, with more fighting, criticism, and jealousy. So here is something to ponder: If a friend talks about everyone else with you, what is she saying about you when you’re not there?

Ratatoskr on the World Tree (17-year-olds)

In Norse myth, the world tree Yggdrasil holds all the worlds together. An eagle perches at the top. A serpent gnaws at the roots. And a squirrel named Ratatoskr runs up and down the trunk all day, carrying each one’s insults to the other. He keeps them in conflict, and he belongs to neither.

The researchers followed two groups of teens, one for a year and one for six months. They studied what they call relational aggression: rumors, exclusion, shared judgments about someone who isn’t there. What they found challenged the usual view. We expect it to damage friendships, and it can. However, between true best friends, it also drew them closer. Sharing a harsh opinion feels like trust. I’m letting you in on something private. But it also made friendships rougher over time. The authors call it a double-edged sword. They noted that their groups were small, and the results show a pattern, not a cause. They also insist the person being talked about is still harmed. The closeness is real, and so is the cost. The question is whether you want to be the squirrel on the tree.

True. Kind. Useful. I learned this summer, with my own grown children, how much the third question matters. A second-hand story can be true and still not be useful.

Adolescence arrived for me the way it does for many girls, through the body. A month before my thirteenth birthday – menstruation. Weeks before my fourteenth birthday, I quit competitive gymnastics because I had grown too tall AND my father looked at my torn-up hands and wondered aloud who would ever want to hold them. That same year, seated by test score, I bombed a test on purpose so a boy wouldn’t see me as too smart. Mary Pipher writes of bright girls who go underground at this age, trading their true selves for acceptability. I was a thirteen-year-old bookworm with glasses and I put my academic shine on the shelf. Of all the things I regret in adolescence, that one burns bright. 

There were times I would never want to repeat. A mean girl whose jealousy made her unkind in SO many ways. High school dance-date dramas that taught their own rules: don’t best deal; if you say yes, you go with that one or you stay home; if a guy blows you off, don’t let him see you cry in that moment. There were drunk-girl regrets. And at nineteen, the shame of being ghosted for days by the guy I had been dating, after trusting him with my first time. Lessons that were agonizing at the time, but now seen as necessary. 

At barely eighteen, weeks before college, I let many voices convince me to break up with my boyfriend, and I didn’t do it well. I went to my grandmother Tessye to regroup, and she said, “Be thoughtful of leaving others behind, you never know where they will show up again.” Ira Progoff places the first true initiation between sixteen and twenty, a death and a birth at once. Something ended badly that summer, and an initiated elder was there to name what it meant. That boy showed up at my college two years later. Forty-five years later, her words keep proving true: People from the past show up again.  

Would I repeat those years? Not the heartache. But there were amazing memories of friendship, athletic championships, cheerleading, the purple of my high school mascot, sorority life, loyalty, love, courage. I watched myself go from a thirteen-year-old bookworm with glasses caterpillar to a fully colorful social butterfly.

I am at an art retreat this week. I made a collage to hold the energy of my adolescence. Across the lower left, a reader is nearly swallowed by towers of books in black and white. Across the circle at the lower right, a face blurs in rainbow light, muddled and confused. Across the top, everything flies: swings, a leap over the water, a climber in her harness, hopscotch squares waiting for the next jump. On the right, a woman carries a tall stack of books upright through a library. At the center, a small girl in a white dress and pink shoes stands in window light, and behind her, larger and in motion, is the silhouette of a young woman with her hair streaming.

I feel I was the teenager I was always destined to be. I brought the spunk and my love of literature. My athletic body that loved to fly. The container-maker who played school and librarian, then held a cheer squad together. The sensitivity my family called too much, which let the hurts land deep and later made me a more open companion and leader. And the loyalty and courage that were there all along. I have said in a previous module I am who I was at age seven. The collage shows me she never went away. She grew into her own silhouette. James Hillman writes that the whole oak lives in the acorn. I see my acorn in the art. She is on the right flying on a zipline at the age of 57.

Progoff, Ira. “Modern Culture and the Psychology of Initiation.” In The Dynamics of Hope: Perspectives of Process in Anxiety and Creativity, Imagery and Dreams, 169–83. New York: Dialogue House Library, 1985.

• Initiation without ritual. Progoff’s modern individual goes it alone, with no socially held ceremony. The teens in Frontline are doing exactly that, online.
• Prototypal initiation. The first initiation becomes the pattern for all that follow.
• Hinge experiences. Successive initiations as hinges on a door between rooms. 
• Governing symbol. When an image loses its meaning, confusion appears until a new one is born. 

When sharing a difficult period in my life, I took a deeper look at my Perimenopause Hellscape and recalled a descent in a fog of overwhelm that led to getting lost in judgement and attempted perfection performances, and then ascending int finding my voice and entering the early stages of my most authentic self. 

Attempting to hear myself in the chaos and noise has become a red flag signal for me in later life. I have climbed out enough times, and reflected upon the process, that I can see I have developed a playbook. Progoff calls it a prototype. The pattern I am beginning to see: my body knows first, then I gain clarity, and then I engage with a transformative learning experiences that changes me and pushes me to grow. 

Although age sixteen to twenty may have been a time of adulthood initiation in earlier centuries, Progoff notes it is most likely delayed until later in modern times. Although I had many experiences in my late teens and early twenties that felt like many little deaths. Partying with alcohol and avoidance of growing up I delayed myself. I ended up isolated and lonely. Overweight and binging videos. My friends were moving into marriages and home buying and I was lost and bobbing along. 

Near my 25th birthday I made the conscious choice to kill off childhood and take a step into adulthood. The moment came when I announced to my cousin “it is time to get our shit together”. There was no traditional ceremony, no ritual, I did it alone. I had some of the pieces practiced like attempting going on the wagon, trying the latest new fad diet, learning a new craft or diving into some literature but I had never strung it all together into a set of steps that would become my transformational prototype. This time I joined Weight Watchers, began a rigorous walking routine, and basically stopped drinking and eating sugar (too many WW points). As my body strengthened, the detox was clearing my mind. I pulled away from social scenes and friendships that didn’t serve me. I found new hobbies. I began to imagine myself into adulthood. 

From that moment in August to nine months later in May, an actual gestation period, I would retreat into a liminal chrysalid space, emerge as a butterfly and inform my roommate from college that I was ready to meet a normal guy. Weeks later she plans a blind date barbecue with a friend from her work and my husband walks in the door. Soon after, I leave behind my undergrad degree of business and walk toward what I was born to be: an educator. At the age of 28, I am married, we have relocated and have put a downpayment on a home, and I meet my first class of 3rd graders at the bubble on the first day of school as a licensed teacher. 

A couple of seven year cycles later, I am a stay at home mom in the underworld fires of hormone imbalance. I am in a dark valley and a slight ray hits my psyche and reminds me: The Body Knows. 

I knew something was not right. This time diet and exercise were not enough. The prototype from initiation needed assistance and add-ons. I would seek the wisdom of “elders”, give up alcohol completely for over a year, and go into partnership with my sister to buy a franchise to publish a healthy living | healthy planet theme magazine. My experience follows Progoff’s description of a prototype that follows the same form and pattern with new content (183). I see now that my successive initiations are hinge experiences. As my life progresses I will use the model as I open new doors and pass into new phases of my life.  With each new growth cycle I keep more and more of the strategies as everyday rituals and habits.  (w3.wa1)

O’Shaughnessy, Ruth, Katherine Berry, Rudi Dallos, and Karen Bateson. “Middle Childhood and Child Outcomes in Attachment” and “Attachment in Adolescence.” Chapters 4 and 5 in Attachment Theory: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2023.

Middle childhood (about 6 to 12). Bowlby described this as the start of a “goal-corrected partnership.” The child no longer needs the parent physically close; it’s enough to know the parent is available and can be reached. Children begin to hold the parent in mind, understand the parent’s plans, and negotiate. Researchers see secure attachment in this period linked to better emotion regulation, easier peer relationships and more confidence at school, though the links are moderate, not destiny. The internal working model, a child’s inner template of “am I worth caring for, and will others respond,” is consolidating.

Adolescence (about 12 to 19). The big shift is in the attachment hierarchy. Hazan and Zeifman found that teens move attachment functions to peers in stages: first seeking closeness, then turning to friends for comfort, and only later, often with a romantic partner, using someone other than a parent as a secure base. Parents usually stay the backup in a real crisis. Joseph Allen’s work frames the central task as “autonomy within relatedness”: secure teens can argue hard with parents and stay connected. By mid-adolescence, the working model generalizes into an overall “state of mind” about attachment, which the Adult Attachment Interview measures. First romantic relationships become the testing ground for everything learned earlier, and later-life “earned security” remains possible for those who didn’t start with it.

THEORETICAL RESOURCES

Pearson, Carol, and Bonnie Bright. “Persephone Rising: Dr. Carol Pearson in Depth Dialogue with Bonnie Bright.” Dinner & Depth, Depth Psychology Alliance, February 5, 2016. https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/video/persephone-rising-dr-carol-pearson-in-depth-dialogue-with-bonnie-.

Pearson, Carol S. Persephone Rising: Awakening the Heroine Within. New York: HarperElixir, 2015.

I chose Pearson after watching her own interview on the book, where she reframes Persephone’s descent not as abduction alone but as a passage toward genuine agency. That reading matched something I’d already sensed before I found her work: that eating the seeds wasn’t captivity finishing its job on me, it was the moment a choice became possible again, inside the captivity itself. Pearson gave me the theoretical language for what I’d already lived. Last week Ruiz showed me how domestication happens. Pearson showed me what happens after, when the domesticated self finds a door and steps through it.

Pipher, Mary. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Putnam, 1994.

Mary Pipher had already been here in Week 1 to reflect on death awareness. Finding her again this week, attached to Ophelia, felt less like a new source and more like a return. I read Reviving Ophelia about six years ago when I pulled it off of my therapist’s bookshelf after a session. I don’t think I understood how deeply it had lodged in me until this week, when Ophelia resurfaced alongside Persephone.

Ophelia snuck in this week and her myth is a warning rather than comfort. She’s Persephone without seeds to eat: a girl built entirely out of the roles handed to her in a father’s expectations and a lover’s approval. When both were violently and abruptly withdrawn in the same Shakespeare act, there was no self left standing underneath her. I chose Pipher because she gave me the vocabulary for the version of myself I could have become, if I’d kept drinking my father’s “seeds” instead of eventually choosing my own. Ophelia isn’t a cautionary tale about someone else. She is my reminder of the hazy path I chose to walk off of in my mid twenties. 

Svehla, Catherine. “Moonstruck with Selene and Hecate.” Myth Matters (formerly Myth in the Mojave), podcast audio. Mythic Mojo, accessed 2026.

I chose this one because a little goddess image caught my eye this week at the art retreat image table. I had a spider sense it might be Hecate and it was confirmed. The 3 point crown and snakes wrapped around like Kundalini. My art knew before me this week. I have created a color scheme of pinks and deep dark blues. A literal crossroads got laid out a few days ago. 

I realize in this week’s writings on initiations that she arrives at my own crossroads before I had language for her: a light held up in a turbulent river, a sense that my body already knows what it needs even when my mind is still catching up. Svehla’s episode (and the one that follows) reminded me that Hecate isn’t fixed to one age or one face; she moves between worlds, between Selene and Artemis, shaping and being shaped by them in turn. I’m not ready to figure out  everything Hecate is asking of me yet. I’m choosing her as a source precisely because she still has much to say to me. 

Week 4: Young Adulthood | Emerging Adulthood | Adulting

Berry, Katherine. “Models of Adult Attachment.” In Attachment Theory: The Basics, by Ruth O’Shaughnessy, Katherine Berry, Rudi Dallos, and Karen Bateson, 00–00. London: Routledge, 2023.

• “…according to attachment theory, adults also need attachment figures to provide a source of comfort and security during times of physical or emotional stress in the same way that infants and children do” (90).
• In childhood and adulthood: a desire to be close to attachment figures; involuntary separation causes distress; and providing a secure base allows the confidence to explore and try new things (91).
• Pre-existing beliefs lead people to think and behave in consistent ways as their internal working model (00).
• Summary: All the models presented in the chapter “highlight the importance of secure attachment for psychological health and wellbeing in adulthood” (105).

Ferrer-Wreder, Laura, Kazumi Sugimura, and Jane Kroger. “Intersectionality, and the Confluence of Gender and Sexual Identity.” In Identity in Adolescence: The Balance Between Self and Other, 5th ed., 00–00. New York: Routledge, 2026.

Intersectionality and Identity Integration

• No single facet of identity outranks any another. Identity is the whole package, shaped by what the person and society deem important (142).
• Identity integration, rooted in Erikson, holds continuity across four types: contextual, temporal, ego, and person and society (143).

Gender Identity

• Many cultures have long recognized more than two sex and gender categories, and gender shapes the distribution of social power (145).
• Person, behavior, and environment combine and influence one another, with the social carrying the most weight (146).

Sexual Identity

• Sexual orientation identity is the self-recognition of one’s orientation as part of who one is (148).
• Synthesis is the optimal point, where personal and social aspects align into a clear, authentic, self-accepting identity (149).

Ferrer-Wreder, Laura, Kazumi Sugimura, and Jane Kroger. “Forging a Brave New Digital Identity.” In Identity in Adolescence: The Balance Between Self and Other, 5th ed., 00–00. New York: Routledge, 2026.

• Digital environments are now a core context for adolescent identity, holding both risk and possibility.
• The field is young, fragmented, and asks first what digital life means to the young person.
• Social media and games are contexts for identity, offering information, values, and lifestyle possibilities, with diverse meanings that make development complex (Granic et al. 2020).
• Gen Z largely came of age before AI’s integration into digital life; Gen Alpha is coming of age during it.
• The field remains fragmented (Avci et al. 2024) and represents only a minority of the world’s youth (Sirin et al. 2024).

Ithaka – by CP Cavafy {W4.LA1}

I love this powerful poem…and to hear Sean Connery read it to me. “I hope your journey is a long one”. It always inspires me to live fully in every moment with gratitude but mostly with curiosity. Don’t hurry. Enjoy the journey.

Scales, Peter C., Peter L. Benson, Sabrina Oesterle, Karl G. Hill, J. David Hawkins, and Travis J. Pashak. “The Dimensions of Successful Young Adult Development: A Conceptual and Measurement Framework.” Applied Developmental Science 20, no. 3 (2016): 150–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2015.1082429.

• Names eight dimensions of successful young adult development: social, psychological, behavioral, educational, occupational, health, ethical, and civic. Only a minority of adolescents are well prepared for the transition (150).
• Guiding questions: are young adults prepared for meaningful societal roles, for work, learning, and life, and to become parents, good neighbors, productive workers, and engaged citizens? (150)
• Traditional markers: leaving home, financial independence, finishing school, full-time work, marriage, and parenthood (153).
• The transition varies by culture, gender, and historical era (154).
• Transitions can be turning points toward healthier paths. Marriage, pregnancy, and parenting are linked with reduced drug use, and marriage with young men’s reduced crime (154).
• Most high school seniors still lack adequate foundational building blocks, and are often no better off than younger students (155). Programs for young adults are few and narrow. Few teach life skills like relationships or finances, and most overlook the non-college population (154).
• Disadvantaged youth often carry real strengths, especially family and mentor relationships, yet racism, discrimination, and poverty make the path far harder (156).
• There are multiple paths to successful young adulthood, and the re-centering of identity takes many forms (156).
• Meaning is culturally situated.
  • Physical health: not risk-free, but a healthy lifestyle, nutrition, exercise, and sleep. Lack of access to preventive care is a major barrier (159).
  • Psychological and emotional well-being: satisfied with one’s path or able to improve it, self-accepting, resilient, developing purpose, prosocial (159–60).
  • Life skills: an array of skills for negotiating one’s environment successfully (160).
  • Ethical behavior: integrity, caring, honesty, responsibility (161). Young adults face a mix of traditional and new moral issues as they solidify authentic personal and social identities (162).
  • Healthy family and social relationships: people to turn to, satisfying friendships, and quality intimate relationships (162). Many young women hold marriage as meaningful while also committing to self-development and independence (162).
  • Educational attainment: structural barriers mean individual initiative alone cannot overcome systemic forces (163). Post-secondary attainment is desirable, yet often out of reach absent policy and social capital (164).
  • Constructive educational and occupational engagement: study, work, or raising a family as the platform for future adult life (164).
  • Civic engagement: giving back to the community, which also increases the helper’s own well-being (164).
• Close connections that build identity, agency, and commitment to community through five actions: expressing care, providing support, challenging growth, expanding possibilities, and sharing power (163).
• What Young Adults Need
• Dewey: the purpose of development is more development. Human development is a never-ending interaction, even fusion, of person and context (165).
• A thriving orientation, beyond merely competent or okay, is marked by the mutual growth and well-being of both person and context over time (165)

“Generation Boomerang.” (Video)

• A comedian is one of them
• Boomerangs, yuckies, and Italy’s “Big Babies”
• Did we tell them to follow their bliss? Economics?
• Why not spend your 20s figuring out what you want to do… Peter Pans?
• Are we making it too easy to just go home?

Henig, Robin Marantz. “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html.

“You get on a pathway, and pathways have momentum,” Jennifer Lynn Tanner of Rutgers told me. “In emerging adulthood, if you spend this time exploring and you get yourself on apathway that really fits you, then there’s going to be this snowball effect of finding the right fit, the right partner, the right job, the right place to live. The less you have at first, the lessyou’re going to get this positive effect compounded over time. You’re not going to have the same acceleration.”

• A new stage named. In the 1990s, Arnett sensed that people in their late teens and early 20s were psychologically distinct, and found Erikson’s “young adulthood” too broad for a span that held both him and his students, with critical tasks beyond intimacy.
• The brain agrees. The limbic system surges at puberty while the prefrontal cortex keeps maturing for another decade, and now that young people can delay adult obligations without censure, social maturation may finally be in sync with the brain.
• The timetable is internalized. Young people and their parents alike expect later marriage, family, and career, so many are simply not yet braced for the trappings of adulthood.
• Not only for the privileged. Arnett insists emerging adulthood is not mere self-indulgence. For young people like Nicole, it may be an opportunity, perhaps a last one, to turn a life around.
• Stage or aberration? Lerner argues a true stage must be universal and essential, and the answer matters: a passing aberration is something to wait out, while a true life stage calls for new systems of education, health care, and social support.

Munsey, Christopher. “Emerging Adults: The In-Between Age.” Monitor on Psychology 37, no. 7 (June 2006): 68. https://www.apa.org/monitor/jun06/emerging.

• Despite stark differences in background, Arnett’s 300 interviewees described the same “feeling in between,” still pondering identity while tied to family.
• The five ages:  Identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in between, and possibilities.
•  Later marriage, wider college access, women’s careers, and the pill have lengthened the road to adulthood.
• Some prosper and some struggle, shaped by childhood foundations, culture, and access to decent work.

Byock, Satya Doyle. “The Inner World of the First Half of Life: Analytical Psychology’s Forgotten Developmental Stage.” Psychological Perspectives 58, no. 4 (2015): 399–415. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332925.2015.1092758.

• Analytical psychology has largely ignored Jung’s “first half of life,” the forgotten middle child, leaving young people hungry for guidance on their inner lives with little in the Jungian world that reflects them (1).
• Jung framed this stage as establishing oneself in the world through work, education, a mate, and family, killing the dragon and separating from the mother as preparation for later introspection. He saw the midlife transition as culturally unsupported, and Byock argues the same is now true of the passage into adulthood (2–4).
• A quarter-century of intellectual schooling has abandoned embodied life and organic play, feeding the myth of vertical growth and a fear of failure so extreme that a tiny scratch can feel like dissolution. Young people are not taught that descents are natural, and higher education can deepen the struggle rather than ease it (5–7).
• Where rites of passage once transformed the young ego, there are now classes, homework, and soccer practice. As Campbell warns, what is not supplied from without through myth and ritual will announce itself from within, often painfully (7–8).
• A chaotic society calls young people inward earlier. Byock finds no biological reason tying individuation to midlife; it answers a loss of soul, and whoever heeds that inner drive, at any age, is ready (9–11).
• War, economic change, civil rights, and feminism reshaped the road to adulthood, and Arnett’s emerging adulthood names its long, exploratory form. Initiation and midlife may now become intertwined thresholds rather than the two ends of a single stage (11–13).

In response to W4.P4

Dive. Swim. Rise. 

I am 63, and I reflected in some artwork this summer that I’m entering into another seven-year cycle. My intuition of sacred number cycles finds support not in Arnett’s single stage but in Rudolf Steiner and his second-generation interpreters, Bernard Lievegoed and Gudrun Burkhard. Steiner described human development in seven-year septennials, and if you make it to 63, you basically get bonus time. Woohoo. Lievegoed and Burkhard, honored as the father and mother of biography work, carried the septennials through age 63, and the model has since expanded to include elderhood beyond it.

Arnett’s Five Stages fit the model of my personal experience. Diving is a time of identity exploration and instability. My world shifted and I got pulled under. Swimming is a liminal time of in-between and self focus until I rise into an age of possibilities. I swam to the surface at age 35 when my first child was placed in my arms, I dove down again at 42 into menopause, 49 into the welcome waters of menopause and when my father when I was 55 I felt reborn again and ascended again. I dove into formal learning, received another master’s degree, started teaching again, and began a PhD at Meridian. 

The planets and luminaries support all of these sacred numerical cycles too. I appear to follow the rhythms of Uranus moving through zodiac signs and houses about every 7 years. My mother just experience her Uranus return at the age of 84. Jupiter returns every 12 years. Saturn every 28-30 years with squares and oppositions about every seven. I had my first miscarriage around my first Saturn Return. I received my Master of English around my 2nd return. 60 years old isn’t just my own intuitive halfway point. Ilchi Lee writes of it in I’ve Decided to Live 120 Years, and in the Chinese calendar, they cycle of 12 animals and 5 elements returns at age 60. I am a Water Rabbit. Some say the human body is designed to complete it twice. 120 years. 10 Jupiter returns…. 

Angela Assis in her presentation, “Contested Lineages: Bernard Lievegoed and Gudrun Burkhard as Second-Generation Interpreters of Rudolf Steiner” goes beyond septennials to mention the 18.6-year Moon node cycles and names 33 has a special threshold, a time between death and resurrection (9:15) which I is linked to the span of Christ’s life. 

The cycles continue. Like a mermaid, I am swimming and navigating this current (wink) developmental stage. 

• Assis, Angela. “Contested Lineages: Bernard Lievegoed and Gudrun Burkhard as Second-Generation Interpreters of Rudolf Steiner.” Presented at the 100 Years Rudolf Steiner conference, Program for the Evolution of Spirituality, Harvard Divinity School. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gz9zGdtq0Q.
• Burkhard, Gudrun. Biographical Work: The Anthroposophical Basis. Translated by Cristina D’Agostino. Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2007.
• Lee, Ilchi. I’ve Decided to Live 120 Years: The Ancient Secret to Longevity, Vitality, and Life Transformation. Sedona, AZ: Best Life Media, 2017.
• Lievegoed, Bernard. Phases: The Spiritual Rhythms of Adult Life. Translated by H. S. Lake. London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1998.
• Munsey, Christopher. “Emerging Adults: The In-Between Age.” Monitor on Psychology 37, no. 7 (June 2006): 68.
• https://www.apa.org/monitor/jun06/emerging.
• Steiner, Rudolf. The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education. Translated by George and Mary Adams et al. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1996.
• Sullivan, Erin. Saturn in Transit: Boundaries of Mind, Body, and Soul. York Beach, ME: Weiser, 2000.

How the US is destroying young people’s future Scott Galloway |TED2024 • April 2024

Why? Stats. Bold Ideas. Disruption. Humor. Change Agent. And… He gets incredibly emotional about the future of our young people: he closes: Do We Love Our Children? 

Why 30 is not the new 20 Meg Jay | TED2013 • February 2013

Why? It’s 13 years later and things are worse and society is declaring our 20somethings as failing. Our minor “Assisted Adulting Program” is allowing our 24, 25, 28yo kids to live independently so that they can launch. We are investing in our kids now so that they can explore and make mistakes now and gain identity capital.  “The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one” (12:05)

JOURNAL ENTRY WEEK 4

The offerings this week remind me of the SoulCurriculum modules I am curating – and experiencing as a participant – to explore alchemical psychology. I created this spiral collage in the black earth of Putrefaction, in a month when the worms of an old childhood song kept crawling in and crawling out, circulating the soil. Photographs of the girl I was… wind along a trail of dots and hearts through Child, Maiden, and Mother, into the Queenager I am now, and then spiraling in to AI-imagined future faces of the Queen, the Crone, and the Earth Citizen still ahead. Many more cycles to come. Many more Uranus transits of seven year cycles. 

The alchemists called this circular work circulatio, and they built a vessel for it, the Pelican, whose neck bends back into its own belly.  James Hillman notes, what rises does not escape; it is sent back down again as nourishment. My life seems to cycle this way, each moment becoming food for the wisdom I carry into the next phase. 

So when this week’s readings asked whether the tasks of young adulthood are ever truly finished, my collage art had the answer: Nothing is finished. Everything is fed back into the vessel. Dewey, quoted by Scales and colleagues, states in plain classroom language: “the purpose of development is more development” (165).

If I follow the dots, the readings seem to show up as markers along the spiral. In the Child and early Maiden rows, my schoolgirl self climbs what Byock calls “the myth of vertical growth,” a report card, an award, a achievement at a time, and no one tells me that descents are good for me too (6). 

Farther along the Maiden path near the age of 25, I turn onto a new road, and Jennifer Lynn Tanner’s words ring true for me: “pathways have momentum.” As a bride and a young mom, I am reminded that the need for a secure base does not end in childhood. As Berry writes, adults “also need attachment figures to provide a source of comfort and security” in times of stress, just as children do (90). 

My Motherhood years also held the dark valleys, and Lievegoed, as Angela Assis tells it, would call them “not a pathology, but a threshold of initiation, a moment when deeper capacities could awaken” (15:38). Now, in my Queenager years, back in the training waters of a doctoral program, I take heart from Byock’s reminder that the call to individuation can come “in any age or condition” (11). 

And for the Queen, the Crone, and the Earth Citizen still ahead, I will carry Cavafy’s blessing: 

I hope your journey is a long one.

Week 5: Middle Adulthood

Hillman, James. The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life. New York: Random House, 1999. Ch 2-6

Chapter 2: The Last Time

• We search for closure. Last rites. Last supper. Last time. “By putting closure to a series of events that otherwise could run on and one, the last time is outside serial time, transcendent” (31).
• Comparing a person’s psyche to a boardinghouse full of characters (32)…”our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve. That’s why we need a long old age: to ravel out the snarls and set things straight” (32).
• An old eye is an anomalous eye. The older adult with his own peculiarities can’t “see straight at all” and favors the odd (35). “The anomalous eye just likes to watch, to sink deeper into the puzzle of human character which increases tolerance for human oddity” (36).
• “We come to realize that character dissolves into stories about character”… “That is why the idea of character is so needed in a culture: It nourishes imagination” (38).

Chapter 3: Old

• Old is visible. Not necessarily based on years. The word derives from the root: To Nourish.
• “Aging opens the door to ‘old’ and old age opens it yet wider” (45).
• Old implies layers. Old isn’t just aging but carries images of oldness.

Section II: LEAVING

Chapter 4: From “Lasting” to “Leaving”

• To Hillman, lasting to leaving is not who we are leaving but attitudes regarding the mind and body having outlasted their youthfulness and usefulness (54). “The more we try to last, the more afraid we become, for we are going against the innate intelligence of human nature. (54).
• “Yet gerontology continues to focus on the biology of aging, and so does not come to honest terms with he character of the elderly” (55). “Earlier years must focus on getting things done, while later years consider what was done and how” (56).
• We should nourish the older years with freedom, arts, nature, silence, service, safety, and simplicity (57). Embrace the aging, admit needing help, lighten up , cut ourselves some slack.
• “Wrinkles and creases are not merely signs of aging flesh and drying skin; they display the lines of character” (58) We are not just biology. We are also a psychic field.
• “As we unfold into speaking, standing, walking, discriminating, and mastering, so we may infold, once called the involution of aging. “…Initiations into another way of life” (59-60)
• “Anything we tie to death kills it” (60). “But never would we abandon the aging body as source of insights…Biological systems are psychological fields, asking to be read for their intelligence” (61).
• “And we shall not neglect the rot, because what feels most concrete, ugly, and unacceptable offers the more surprising insights” (62).

Chapter 5: Repetition (This chapter stands out to me as one of the most informative)

• The very old and the very young love to repeat their stories and hear them over and over again. “Repetition satisfies a longing for sameness” (64).
• “the accomplishments of art, the efficacy of prayer, the beauty of ritual, and the force of character depend on petty repetitions any instant of which, taken for itself alone, seems utterly useless” (67).

Chapter 6: Gravity’s Sag

• Shift from ascending to descending…growing up to sagging down.
• Buried in the word grave…
  • gravity, the force that draws things down to the core of the earth
  • gravitas, the Roman word for weighty seriousness
  • grave of a cemetery, where the body is laid to rest
  • gravid, pregnant (heavy with child)
• “We old ones are weight bearers, and nature grows us downward” (69). Many great mythological character DESCEND: Ulysses, Innana, Hercules, Psyche, Persephone, Dionysos.
• “When the body begins to sag, it is abandoning sham and hypocrisy. The body leads the way down, deepening your character. It doesn’t know how to lie” (71).

Chapter 7: Waking at Night

• Awaken to the night. “Waking up to these (archetypal) figures of the night world deepens and broadens character” (74).
• “The restless mind is besieged by insights; lying sleepless, we develop a strange intelligence. Is this how the images of the dead communicate, how the ancestors instruct us?” (76).

Attachment Theory Chapters 7 and 12.

Chapter 7: Attachment Theory and Adult Mental Health (Berry) pp108-118

• Associations between insecure attachment styles and mental health problems in adulthood. Those with secure attachments tend to manage life difficulties and hold positive beliefs about self and others. “There is clear evidence that adults who are insecurely attached are more likely to have mental health difficulties of various kinds” (116).  
• Noted that not everyone who has mental health issues necessarily has insecure attachment issues. (115). 
• Be cautious about blaming parents and caretakers (116). 

Chapter 12: Attachment in Adult Psychotherapy (Berry) pp196-211

• “A key goal of an attachment-informed therapy should be helping the insecure client develop more secure attachment working models” (210). 
• Secure base therapy might include: attunement, sensitivity, empathy, responsiveness, acceptance, understanding, and unconditional positive regard. 
• Challenging the client’s previous expectations of attachment to change relations to others. 
• The authors think: “that attachment theory offers a well-established and theoretically coherent way to investigate empirically the main medium of therapy…across different therapeutic models” (211). 
• Other factors could include the therapists own attachment histories; separation and endings in theory and working with different attachment styles. 
• According to Rogers (1965) therapist should demonstrate three conditions: congruence with the client-being genuine and allowing the client to be fully who they are and their range of feelings; unconditional positive regard; and empathetic understanding. (200)
• Evidence that therapists need to have secure base so that they are not pulled into behaving in ways that would maintain difficulties with attachments in their clients (204). 
• The case study with David showed me that building a safe therapeutic foundation was key. Then the strategy was to give him action based attachment bonding ideas for his child so that eventually trust was built and they could work together to take a look at his upbringing issues and free him to express his feeling and develop intimacy ties with his new child. 

Shalit, Erel. The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey. Carmel, CA: Fisher King Press, 2011, 1–27.

• Levinson’s eras. Life falls into four overlapping eras of about twenty to twenty-five years. Middle adulthood runs roughly 40 to 65, when strength and productivity can ripen into judiciousness and breadth of perspective, along with the turn from youthful narcissism toward awareness of mortality (9 to 10).
• Erikson’s arc. From basic trust in infancy, to “Who am I?” in adolescence, to ego integrity versus despair at the end, where the elder still rejoices in each morning’s sun (9).
• The tenant. In the second half of life the ego must realize it is a temporary tenant in this life’s dwelling, not the owner of the house (11).
• The sun’s descent. Jung says midlife fear is not of death but of the sun drawing in its rays, a reversal of the morning’s ideals (14).
• Neglected features. The midlife task is to come to terms with what was neglected, even what conflicts with one’s values. The husband may find his tenderness and the wife her sharpness of mind, and Shalit suspects her sharpness threatens him more (14).
• The river. Life as a cycle joins the archetypal and the personal. The river keeps its identity while always moving, both being and becoming, and we share the destiny of flowing water (22).
• The journey Home. The first half departs home to find one’s own path. The second half is a long journey in search of Home, as in the Odyssey (23 to 24).
• The missing anima. Many fairy tales search for the lost essence of soul. A lucky few live this naturally, while most of us must consciously embrace the Self, and wisdom becomes a return to eternal symbols (25).
• Rivers of every kind. Father Sky and Mother Earth shape the river, which moves through upper and lower worlds as rivers of fertility, forgetting, rebirth, death, and sorrow (27).

Bruni, Frank. “Gray Hair and Silver Linings.” New York Times, November 8, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-gray-hair-and-silver-linings.html.

Frank Bruni names what aging takes. Lost ambitions, a shrinking margin for error, and most of all lost people, whose disappearances begin to quicken in the 50s. Yet he notices a muscle growing stronger. Perspective. The capacity to find good in the bad, to let things go, and to shed isolating pride and pettiness. A couple in a medical waiting room showed him that we may gain as much as we lose, with connection waiting where we least expect it.

COMMENTS to his article

ramblero

Redwood Shores, CANov. 9, 2014

Last year at 69, the end of the middle third of my life (I have a genetic

predisposition for old age; my Nana died at 110) I decided it’s much more fun and physically

and emotionally beneficial to “go out with a bang” (snip)

Bottom line…..You CAN do it….but YOU have to DO it.

(Why are you still sitting around???)

I just keep hearing Jean Houston: LIVE BIG.  As I have written, I am embracing Lee’s book title: “Ive decided to live 120 years”. Another mantra I was taught: Move today like you want to move in 10 or 20 years from now.  

The body is an amazing thing. I am getting signals that I’ve been standing and doing art and sitting and reading/writing and it is time to get out there an strengthen myself or 73 and 83 years of age. Back to the “protocol”…cut out the sugar. Eat mindfully. 

Lori

New YorkNov. 9, 2014

Everyone is aging. Even new born infants.

Remember the line attributed to Maurice Chevalier: “old age isn’t so bad when you consider

the alternative.”

Simple. We take a first breath. We take a last breath. Fill the space in between with zest. 

Kopsa, Andy. “There Are No Five Stages of Grief.” New York Times, February 28, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/style/self-care/there-are-no-five-stages-of-grief.html.

A memoir of her Dad’s death. This is the month/season we said goodbye to PT on November 8, 2018. The time when the veil is the thinnest. I’ve researched some exact dates, it was a New Moon on November 7th …and the astronomical Samhain.

Bering, Jesse. “Half Dead: Men and the ‘Midlife Crisis.’” Bering in Mind (blog), Scientific American. Accessed October 6, 2026. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/bering-in-mind/half-dead-men-and-the-mid-life-crisis/.

• Jaques and genius. Elliott Jaques coined “midlife crisis” in 1965 while studying creative genius. Around 35 to 39, many great artists died or burned out, while others like Bach, Shakespeare, and Dante found their deepest work as death became real to them.
• Levinson and de-illusionment. Levinson popularized the idea in the late 1970s with The Seasons of a Man’s Life, placing the crisis around 40 to 45. Comparing youthful dreams with present reality brings grief over lost chances, sometimes a frantic “now or never” flight, and often a turn toward maintaining what one has.
• Myth or meaning. Epidemiological studies find midlife no more prone to depression, divorce, or distress than other stages. Freund and Ritter suggest a gentler view, that midlife is less a crisis than a challenge, as the sense of limited remaining time presses us to redirect our path.

Bowles, Nellie. “A New Luxury Retreat Caters to Elderly Workers in Tech (Ages 30 and Up).” New York Times, March 4, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/modern-elder-resort-silicon-valley-ageism.html.

• Modern Elder Academy
• Ms. Stevens observed that talking about aging was enlivening. “It’s not making me think about death at all,” she said. “It’s making me think about the life I have left.
• “The social narrative is basically, midlife is a crisis and after a crisis you have decrepitude,” Mr. Conley said. “But you actually are much happier in your 60s and 70s, so why aren’t we preparing for that?”

Martin, Mike, and Daniel Zimprich. “Cognitive Development in Midlife.” In Middle Adulthood: A Lifespan Perspective, edited by Sherry L. Willis and Mike Martin, 179–206. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005.

• Midlife is more about the peak than a period of decline. For four of six abilities, people in their 40s to 60s outperform their 25-year-old selves. Only processing speed and numerical skill begin to slip (182).
• Things are changing behind the scenes. Midlife looks flat in group averages, yet individuals vary widely in which abilities rise, hold, or fall (182, 189).
• What we do in midlife is important.  More than in childhood or old age, midlife cognition is shaped by personal environment, such as work, family demands, and what one practices (181). Learn bridge, a new hobby, book clubs, mental fun.
•  Memory proved more responsive to life circumstances, while processing speed seemed tied to physical functioning (199).
• Training gains and transfer are likely higher in midlife than in youth or old age, supporting an engaged lifestyle as a buffer against later decline (181, 190). You have to start early…can’t fix it after retirement when one thinks they have more time.

w5.p3

Where most maps put middle age in my rearview mirror, at 63, Levinson’s 40-65 is really the only range that still claims me (Shalit 10). I have stepped into many spirals of growth so I am accustomed to being in a liminal threshold where I can look in multiple directions. 

Many theorists throw around chronological ages as mentioned by Shalit and Bering. For Jaques the midlife crisis is 35 to 39. College students state it is 35, thirty-five year olds say 40. A Swiss sample agreed on 35 to 53. Pirkei Avot says forty for understanding, fifty for counsel, sixty for mature age. Shalit gives me the Grimm tale that the donkey is burdened from 30 to 48. 

The Modern Elder Academy say elders begin at 30. I disagree. When Bruni writes from the age of 50 I can find some agreement. The lab results declared my reproductive years in the rearview mirror. I stepped into liberation. From all of these sources, it appears men feel half dead by midlife but I was just walking into a newfound freedom in my body. I was reclaiming vibrancy and not yet ready to even claim the halfway point. 

A couple months before my Golden 63rd Birthday (I was born in 1963), it struck me that I was crossing a threshold from Womb 1.0 into Womb 2.0.  As there have been many numbers thrown around in the readings this week, my own personal solar years can create a timeline. 

Early Middle Adulthood (35-50): The Mother Years, Perimenopause Hell

The Hinge (50-55): My body is freed. I am liberated from the fertile Reproductive Body. 

Uncrowned QueenAger (55-63): The Father’s Daughter dies with him, I reach the halfway point at 60. Elderhood ignites. Mythopoetic identity states her name: Mary Hillman Ruetten, Depth Docent. 

Crowned QueenAger (63-70): The crown is found. Apprenticeship training is underway.

According to Steiner and Lievegoed, my septennials are complete and the years that follow are free and gifted years but this time feels like a lot more than just bonus time. 

The writings of James Hillman have been singing to me since I read the book in August. Applying his ideas and the other theoretical readings this week shows me how many women live in my inner world in this one life. The Mother, the woman in the hinge, the Father’s Daughter, the Depth Docent. Hillman calls our nature “a plural complexity” (32). My timeline is a boardinghouse of selves. There is no theorist’s range that fits me cleanly but that does not trouble me. The older eye sinks “deeper into the puzzle of human character” (36) and grows tolerant of oddity, including my own. My map was less about a calendar and more about my body. The sagging body is “abandoning sham and hypocrisy” (71) and mine tells me my truth. 

Applying theory this week to my life turned numbers into chapters with a multitude of characters. Hillman confirms for me that “character dissolves into stories about character” (38), and this week my ages became my story with new characters arriving rapidly in my expressive art. 

Mary’s Middle Age Toolbox: Transitioning out of Motherhood to QueenAger

In the past seven years, I have collected a variety of tools to support my transformational growth and development. The thematic buckets hold Learning, Love, Light, Laughter. Over the years I was introduced to SoulCollage® and then I became reacquainted with fairy tales and mythology, archetypal energies of tarot and astrology, and I am currently exploring alchemical psychology. As I ponder further, these feel like my heart and soul tools. 

There have been many guides and this list is not complete. 

• Seena Frost’s SoulCollage® and my original teacher Jessica Snow
• Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Women Who Run With the Wolves
• Sharon Blackie: Hagitude [The Fool’s Journey Exercise]
• Laurence Hillman: Planets in Play and Demetra George: Asteroid Goddesses

James Hillman’s Chapter 6: Gravity’s Sag represents many of my own experiences and discoveries. The body knows. Gravity pulls the body down and my soul dives and descends in the underworld. The grave and gravid. The womb and tomb. “We old ones are the weight bearers, and nature grows us downward” (69). Blackie introduced me to Death as midwife (272).  [Book Notes}

Hillman names the mythic ones who descend: Ulysses, Inanna, Psyche, Persephone, and Dionysos (69). I know this road. My perimenopause years were a descent into a basement with a flickering bulb and a broken string just out of reach. I did not choose to go down but my body took me there. I was at an art retreat last weekend and I am exploring Persephone through the work of Carol Pearson’s book Persephone Rising: Awakening the Heroine Within

Hillman also asks us not to neglect the rot, because what feels most ugly and unacceptable “offers the more surprising insights” (62). This summer I made a spiral collage in the black earth of Putrefaction. The worms kept crawling in and out, turning the soil. What decays becomes food for what grows next.

He writes lying sleepless we “develop a strange intelligence,” and he wonders if this is how the ancestors instruct us (76). Just this morning, my cards spoke to me as I was sleeping. I woke knowing the many red cards are part of my Womb 1.0 to Womb 2.0 journey. 

Repetition, Hillman says, is how ritual and character are made (67). For years I chose a word of the year to carry me: bloom, luminosity, radiance, glow. I did not see then that I was repeating one longing. My psyche was asking to shine. My shadow work was a journey to taking off my lampshade to release my design, my shine. Having a word and a spirit animal guide each of these past few years has been a valuable tool. 

Persephone recently showed me that she guided me to choose to eat the seeds and step into adulthood. My protocol was nourishment and Hillman tells us to nourish the later years with freedom, arts, nature, silence, service, safety, and simplicity (57). My toolkit continues to expand. 

Blackie, Sharon. Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2022.

Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.

Frost, Seena B. SoulCollage Evolving: An Intuitive Collage Process for Self-Discovery and Community. Santa Cruz, CA: Hanford Mead, 2010.

George, Demetra, with Douglas Bloch. Asteroid Goddesses: The Mythology, Psychology, and Astrology of the Re-emerging Feminine. Rev. ed. Lake Worth, FL: Ibis Press, 2003.

Hillman, Laurence. Planets in Play: How to Reimagine Your Life Through the Language of Astrology. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007.

Pearson, Carol S. Persephone Rising: Awakening the Heroine Within. New York: HarperElixir, 2015.

Week 6: Later Adulthood and its Care

Hillman, James. The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life. New York: Random House, 1999.

Chapter 9 Drying Up: “The dry soul reaches up, seeks illumination. It sparks with flashes of insight and quickly catches fire. And it brings light, as elder, as mentor. But wisdom seems to require some wizening” (82). The alchemists teach that evaporation boils off what has kept one stuck. They teach that the soul needs some drying cause it gives it, “dry wit, dry eye that sees the world with less subjective affections. We became astringent-sec, like a good wine” (83).

Chapter 10 Memory: In remembering more of the pleasant images and moments, “Is this a subtle hint that the soul is letting go of the weight it has been carrying, preparing to lift off more easily?” (93). 

Chapter 12 Parting: “Preparation for final departure begins as coming apart”; “Coming apart also frees character from personality” (99). Dionysos energy. A call to find intelligence in our bones and our organs: “We hardly know we consist of body parts until they break down” (101). “Perhaps we come apart in order to depart so we can appreciate what has been carrying us along for so many years…” (102).

Chapter 16 Return: On the importance of metaphor and myth: “This book twists conventional ideas about aging, attempting to convert much of what plagues later years into intelligible insight. We are trying to find a home for our happenings. The facts of aging become more understandable when brought back to soul, which can give them value. A symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs” (128-9). 

Interlude: The Force of the Face Many thoughts on Faces but I am drawn to Emmanuel Levinas and his thoughts that “the human face as an archetypal phenomenon bears one message; utter vulnerability” (141). Why do we mask ourselves?As for mirrors, they “cannot tell the wold truth, and therefore they always lie” (147). Hillman concludes this interlude with a call that “it is a citizen’s duty to make his face public” (151). I take this as a call to live authentically and honestly – embrace the vulnerability of living in a human body. 

Week 6 Readings PSY 505

W6.R1
Sweetland, Julie, Andrew Volmert, and Moira O’Neil. Finding the Frame: An Empirical Approach to Reframing Aging and Ageism. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute, 2017.

I felt a tightening in my jaw about the insidiousness of individualism and how it has put up walls around our homes and separated us from our communities. I felt hope at reframing aging as a narrative of Building Momentum. I believe that there is real potential in Intergenerational Community Centers for a beneficial step toward writing a new narrative.

Life’s Third Act | Jane Fonda | TEDTalk (December 2011)

• The Staircase. The Human Spirit can ascend. 
• If we study our first two acts can that inform how to live in our 3rd act. 
• In “Doing a Life Review” we can free ourselves from or past. Rebuild our relationships and our stories. We always retain the choice to how we will react to our life situations. 

Older People are Happier | Laura Carstensen | TEDTalk (December 2011)

Paradox of Aging. Older people are happier. Many a study tried to disprove it. It’s not generational… it is older people are happier until the oldest agers. Experience a wide range of emotions and they engage with sadness more. Positive attitudes and greater enjoyment and satisfaction. 

W6.R2
Mineo, Liz. “Harvard Study, Almost 80 Years Old, Has Proved That Embracing Community Helps Us Live Longer, and Be Happier.” Harvard Gazette, April 11, 2017. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/.

My heart got a jolt of flutter like when my husband walked through the door the first time I ever saw him. Yesterday was our 36th wedding anniversary and I feel optimism that barring any accidents or unforeseen mishaps we can continue to nurture our relationship as not only a burst in romance but a tool for our longevity. I can’t help but smile at the picture of Waldinger with his wife Jennifer Stone, and the caption: “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.” 

W6.R3
Goleman, Daniel. “Erikson, in His Own Old Age, Expands His View of Life.” New York Times, June 14, 1988. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/22/specials/erikson-old.html.

Joan Erikson shares: “you don’t get wise unless you age” (p. 2) and “When it comes to understanding life, experiential learning is the only worthwhile kind; everything else is hearsay” (p. 4). I breath in and breath out with ease. I feel a kindred connection with Life Long Learners. I plan to be sharing my experiences in the hopes of guiding others when I am in my 80s and beyond.

W6.R4
President’s Council on Bioethics. Taking Care: Ethical Caregiving in Our Aging Society. Washington, DC: President’s Council on Bioethics, 2005.

I know we are talking about Elder Care Taking…and this was written 20 years ago… but my big concern today is that the attack on women’s reproductive rights is giving ethics committees power in some states to use women as incubators and affect their further fertility. So what I feel from this introduction and conclusion is anger in my belly and fire in my heart. We do a terrible job in this country of taking care of our children, our mothers, our citizens, and yes our elders. We are the richest country in the world and in the past 20 years it has gotten worse. Our country has allowed measles to come back, our maternal mortality rate is unacceptable and we have people going bankrupt for healthcare events with diminished access to quality care.

W6.R5
Span, Paula. “The Reluctant Caregiver.” The New Old Age (blog), New York Times, February 20, 2013. https://archive.nytimes.com/newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/the-reluctant-caregiver/.

My eyes sort of move downward and I wonder if I could have been a better caregiver to my grandparents and my mother in law before their deaths. I can state excuses (living hours away and managing three young children) but I could have done more communication more often. I relied on my parents, aunts, and uncles to care for my grandparents and I stepped aside to allow my husband and his family to care for their mother. After this blog I have better understanding of my father not wanting to visit his mother in her final days. It frustrated my mom, but my Nana had always chosen my uncle over my father so the relationship was not there then or at the end.

W6.R6
California Elder and Dependent Adult Abuse and Neglect: The Law and Mechanics of Mandated Reporting. N.p., n.d.

As a teacher, I am a mandatory reporter.  This article outlines many similar scenarios of abuse and neglect. The twist for the elder is that they most likely were independent and fully able to care for themselves at points in their life. Now that they depend on others to assist with bodily function tasks and other survival items, there can probably be a high incidence of frustration and anger. This article provided me greater awareness of things to watch for as my own family ages and needs more full time care.

W6.R7
Interlandi, Jeneen. “The Unending Indignities of Alzheimer’s.” New York Times, December 1, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/01/opinion/alzheimers-long-term-care.html

My elastic expanding heart can make room for supporting the challenges of living with dementia diseases and caring for those who have increases in safety and self care needs. The affect today is gratitude, an exhale, that Alzheimer’s has not shown up in my family, so maybe I will not be afflicted, hence my children might not go through what the Interlandi family went through. I realize that there is no guarantee that Alzheimer’s will be eradicated, but I am hopeful that medical research is getting closer to a solution. 

W6.R8
Lawhorne, Larry W. “End-of-Life Care in the Nursing Home: Is a Good Death Compatible with Regulatory Compliance?” Bioethics Forum 15, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 23–28.

By now in our readings, I am frustrated and my voice is itching to scream out that we can do better in the United States of America. In 1999 Lawhorne called it “simplistic and probably unfair” to blame regulations as the primary obstacle to a good death in the nursing facility. I push back. Lawmakers like Amy Klobuchar outlined solutions for better elder care in this country especially in her 2020 primary run. Twenty years after Lawhorne, she was still calling for “urgent action.” But instead, voters in 2024 chose someone who is tearing apart every government agency that makes lives better for others. The naked corruption to steal tax dollars is harming every citizen whether they support him or not.

Week 6 Prompt 2 FINAL Pdf

My grandparents have crafted a template for ending a long life well lived. They all had the privilege of living independently at home. My grandmothers were the caregivers of my grandfathers. Only my paternal grandmother needed to spend her final days in an elder care home. I do not believe she was there for a long period. I travelled to visit her once. What stands out for me more is that the facility burned down in the Altadena fires in January 2025. 

Mid October 2018, this time right now as we come come closer to the cross quarter of Samhain, when the veil is thinnest, my father began his steep climb to take the last steps of his life. I believe we all live our second half to 120 years, but for some they take the last stairs 5, 10, 20 years at a time. My father reached the summit at the age of 77 on November 8, 2018. I just recently confirmed he passed hours from a New Moon and the exact Samhain closing. 

His story included a chapter called “I Don’t Want to Be the Sick Guy”. He didn’t want to be bothered with pricking his finger to check his blood sugars and he asked me when I got my medical degree when I suggested a continuous glucose monitor. My mom’s healthy lifestyle and superb cooking probably gave him many more years of hanging out at his club playing golf and cards and telling his many embellished and cherished stories. 

When his blood sugars spiked to a critical state, he was admitted to the hospital in very late October and was put on dialysis. Cancer was discovered, but not the primary source, and on Halloween morning my sister and I met with my Dad to hear his final wishes should the diagnosis be terminal. He met with his spiritual advisor that night and was at peace that regardless, he would not pursue invasive treatment. His friends visited, we made plans in case he just needed to restrengthen, but days later the cancer was deemed rapid and we he wanted to be home. My brothers got him there on Tuesday evening. Hospice arrived as I did on Wednesday morning and I began making calls when I observed his rapid decline. Sandwiches, water, chips, cookies arrived with his friends from every stage of his life. On my parent’s outdoor patios, the storyteller was being showered with stories steps from where he lay all afternoon. His grandchildren were calling in and we held the phone to his ear. At about 7pm, in the early dark of his last night he was given last rites that were dramatic, beautiful, and memorable. My youngest brother slept by his side on the couch and before sunrise he summoned my mom and I. He was surrounded my love and I told him “We got this” moments before he took his last breath. 

Peter Hillman, an extremely bright light, touched a multitude of people.  He was a basketball and baseball athlete in his college years and married Sharon Shollin between his junior and senior years after meeting in 6th grade. I was born months after his college graduation. His celebration of life on the day of the USC Notre Dame game in late November was a fitting day for the man who defined heaven as a place where every four years you start as a freshman at another great football college.

My mother will be 85 years old this year. She is a vibrant role model for all around her and she is living independently in the home where my Dad took his last breath. Her parents lived into their late 90s, but she notes that her parts are starting to tell stories. She has a plan. For now, that does not include moving from the multiple stairs in her house. We all know she will be forced to move when she is unable to climb them each day to her kitchen living area. She has made clear she wants to see mountains when her story is coming to an end. 

Prepare for a Good End of Life | Judy MacDonald Johnston | February 2013

“Making a plan A plan involves answering  straightforward questions about the end you want.  Where do you want to be when you’re no longer independent?  What do you want in terms of medical intervention?  And who’s going to make sure your plan is followed?” A plan needs an advocate. A plan needs caregivers.

What do you want to hear at the end? and who do you want to hear it from? Most want reassurance that everything is going to be ok.

Tremors

Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014.

A good friend and I caught up last week. She has been back east a lot this summer managing her father’s care and celebrating his 90th birthday. She is not only trying to meet his desires and needs, but manage her siblings’ attitudes and emotions. She asked me if I had read the book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande. I had not. I took a look at the sample and immediately ordered it since it matched up perfectly to our discussion this week about Elder Age and Care. Gawande’s words anchor my Week Six takeaways: “Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end” (245).

Gawande names what I have been circling all quarter. “All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story” (140). Agency is not the same as independence. For Gawande, autonomy means “you may not control life’s circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them” (210). My father chose his final chapter on Halloween morning. My mother is choosing her relationship with her stairs. I plan to write my life one step at a time. 

Gawande also names the “Three Plagues of nursing home existence: boredom, loneliness, and helplessness” (116). My dad never met those characters in his story. He never planned to. He just kept living big. When his time came, he wanted to be at home in hospice, and we made that happen. “Home is the one place where your own priorities hold sway” (89). His priorities were people and stories. Friends from every stage of his life arrived that sunny November day with sandwiches, beer, and cookies and that unplanned party filled the patio with stories and laughter only steps from where he lay. I would recommend it to everyone. As I reflect, I hear Jean Houston reminding me to Live BIG, with capital letters.

For the girl who plans to live to 120, I have a sobering look at the wear and tear journey. I am living it with my mother right now in her 80s, but her mother was a role model for us, and my mom continues to show us the way. I admit that I am going to be having some conversations with her sooner rather than later. And I plan to use Gawande’s lessons about hard conversations. With my mom the discussion might be what would she give up to stay in her house with the stairs and what wouldn’t she. 

Lessons on Hard Conversations

• It’s a process, not an epiphany. Accepting mortality and the limits of medicine takes a series of talks, not one (182).
• Treat it like a procedure. “A family meeting is a procedure, and it requires no less skill than performing an operation” (181).
• Sit down, make time, and listen more than you talk. “If you are talking more than half of the time… you’re talking too much” (182).
• Ask, tell, ask. Ask what she wants to know, tell her, then ask what she understood (207).
• Say what it means to you. Gawande was given three words: “I am worried” (206).
• Ask what matters most. Not treatment X versus Y, but “What is most important to you? What are your worries?” (201).
• The four questions (259):
  1. What is your understanding of the situation?
  2. What are your fears, and what are your hopes?
  3. What trade-offs are you willing and not willing to make?
  4. What course of action best serves this?
• The breakpoint. A series of talks about when to switch from fighting for time to fighting for what matters, like family, travel, or chocolate ice cream (185).
• What it gives back. Afterward, his family felt “relief… clarity” (213). And people who had these talks were “far more likely to die at peace and in control… and to spare their family anguish” (177).

Week 7: On Death and Dying

Roy, David J. “We All Die Unfinished: A Meditation on Existential Suffering.” Journal of Palliative Care 31, no. 1 (2015): 3–4.

David Roy says we all die unfinished, that we exit from time before our integrity is ever whole. He is measuring in Kronos/trips around the sun. My 120 years lives in Kairos, where a life can be full in any moment and still be reaching. I don’t carry 120 as a number. I carry it as a direction. Jump time: Backwards. Forwards. Up. Down. Sideways.

Bar-Levav, Reuven. “A Credo to Psychotherapists, or Time—The Unstretchable Dimension.” Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy 25, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 83–88. With commentary by: Wissler, Anne L. “Commentary.” Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy 25, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 88.

Time. I’ve been playing around with it. I think time jumps around. Jean Houston does too and although I haven’t read her book yet, it is within reach and I hope to work in some scanning for this week’s journal because this time theme keeps showing up.

I speak of living to 120. I don’t think it has to be solar rotation time. Some days I feel younger, some days older, some days my head is in the sky, and then I am grounded on earth, and sometimes below the earth where the roots of trees extend down and communicate with other roots. If I allow myself to let time jump around, I feel that aging will be liberating rather than stuck on a timeline. I joked just yesterday that should I get hit by lightning today, make sure to share at my celebration that I lived 120 years.

If time can jump forward, it can also be pulled backward. Bar-Levav names the two forces that keep us from moving at all: the “Pull of Regression” and the “Push Against Progressing.” I take his words to heart as a warning to not allow those two forces to create tensions that waste my precious time. He also notes that people often kill time without even realizing it (86).

Bar-Levav wishes for more time, doing things he enjoys and surrounded by people he loves. Me too. I am a year older than he was when he wrote this, and I want more time for more things than he did. I want more time to live into my most authentic self and model that for those who look to me for guidance. I don’t need time for this, but I’d love to explore more places and try more food, and see more exhibits, and hear more speakers share their stories and findings on being a human.

At 66, his patient wanted more time too. She wasn’t willing to just wait and die. I stand with the woman who refused to be turned away (85). If I live longer for just one thing, let it be proof that age is not something to dread, but a time to live big and be vibrant.

Saul, Peter. “Let’s Talk about Dying.” Filmed November 2011 at TEDxNewy, Newcastle, Australia. TED video, 13:19. https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_saul_let_s_talk_about_dying.

YES. This is how it should be.

I notice a comforting exhale. My body is calm. My heart is wide. I am affected by recognition, and it is connected to PT’s death.

We didn’t know anything about “Death Awareness” or how to handle a death story, but we all listened to him. In mid-October he made clear that if it was cancer, he was not doing chemo or anything invasive. When it was found, we got the dialysis port out of him, got him home, hospice arrived, and he passed less than 36 hours later.

I see a rocket. His death story as a countdown to “We have lift off.” In July he was cranky. In August he had a toe issue that wouldn’t heal. In September a doctor told him his kidneys looked questionable. (PT responded with “this doctor thinks I should go get a plot at Forest Lawn.”) In October things were off.

October 30 = Cancer. BLAST OFF. He was off to explore the stars. Unlike watching a space launch on TV, I was there in person. On the ground. Feeling all of the whoosh and power of jet propulsion. It was wide-eyed awe.

I’ve been remembering holding his hand, but this time I witnessed his journey to the stars. I held his death as a beautiful experience and it is still that, but now it holds even more ease with death eight years later.

The video sparked, yet again, a nudge for the Depth Docent. Could I be the one who picks up the work Saul started? The project that died when the funding ran out? To start something where I live and go and have these conversations with individuals? Again, I get a nudge to consider training to be a Death Doula. This is no small implication.

Martin, Claire. “Dying a Difficult Subject, a Vital Conversation.” Denver Post, December 27, 2010. https://www.denverpost.com/2010/12/27/dying-a-difficult-subject-a-vital-conversation/.

Tools the article points to: Five Wishes, from Aging with Dignity, an advance directive covering medical, emotional, spiritual, and personal wishes.

Ways to start the conversation

• Be candid. Admit it’s awkward, then say you need to know their wishes if illness or an accident ever leaves them unable to speak for themselves.
• Appeal to the planner. Ask what they’d want you to do if they lost the ability to control things or communicate.
• Shift the blame. Mention that your doctor, attorney, or coach urged you to write your own advance directive, and you realized you don’t know their wishes.
• Use a movie as a doorway. Watch a film together about someone facing a life-threatening situation (the article suggests Wit, Million Dollar Baby, and Whose Life Is It Anyway?, among others), then ask what they’d want if it were them.

Questions to discuss

• Who should be your medical proxy if you can’t decide for yourself?
• If your illness worsens, do you want a Do Not Resuscitate order?
• If you can’t breathe on your own, do you want a respirator? For how long? Would you accept a tracheotomy if it went past about ten days?
• If you can’t swallow, do you want a feeding tube?
• If you’re unconscious and unlikely to wake, do you want life support and artificial feeding? For how long?
• Do you want to donate organs or tissue? (The article notes a family objection can override a donor mark on a driver’s license.)

Davidson, Sara. “Talking About Dying.” The New Old Age (blog), New York Times, June 8, 2010. https://archive.nytimes.com/newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/talking-about-dying/.

• The flip. Share your own wishes first. It invites the other person to answer with theirs.
• Sit quietly together. Not everything has to be spoken; your thoughts and feelings will reach them.
• Write an unsent letter. Imagine them in a chair across from you and read it aloud.
• Follow their cues. It’s their life and their passing. Offer choices rather than plans.

Miller, BJ. “What Really Matters at the End of Life.” Filmed March 2015 at TED2015, Vancouver, BC. TED video, 18:58. https://www.ted.com/talks/bj_miller_what_really_matters_at_the_end_of_life.

Perspective, that kind of alchemy we humans get to play with, turning anguish into a flower (8:00)

We ask too much of our hospitals. They have an incredible purpose but not the ideal place for aging and end of life storytelling. A silver tsunami is coming, “now is time to try something new” (12:00). People want comfort, wonderment, spirituality…less burden.

Priorities change. Reward for just being. Using our senses. Bake cookies (14:45). Senses connect us and make us feel human. Sensory Delights. Tending to dignity. The aesthetic realm. Set our sites on “Well Being”. Beneficence.

Atkins, Martha. “More to Dying than Meets the Eye.” Filmed 2013 at TEDxSanAntonio, San Antonio, TX. YouTube video, posted by TEDx Talks. https://youtu.be/vg8WAv0YT9c.

Martha starts with: “We’ve taken death out of the home”. Her talk is about deathbed visions: the dying seeing long-gone loved ones, hearing music or comforting voices, drawn from her research with people who sat at the bedside. She began studying this after her own mother had visions while dying. And it matters that these moments happen. Visions with context are not hallucinations.

“We need less fear about death and dying” (7:25).

Have awareness for meeting the visions when they arrive. I love the example of a father’s concern for all of these pieces in his hand and the daughter goes and gets a ziplock bag.

“The more we tell our stories, the more we’re going to eradicate this fear” (11:06).

Steve Jobs: “Oh Wow, Oh Wow…”

Hillman, Ken. “We’re Doing Dying All Wrong.” Filmed 2016 at TEDxSydney, Sydney, Australia. YouTube video, 14:03, posted by TEDx Talks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQVC-8WEB7s.

Hillman, is an Australian intensive care professor, like Saul. His talk sets two family deaths side by side. His grandfather died comfortably at home around 1959, and his mother died about thirty years later after six months on what he calls an end-of-life conveyor belt. He also says doctors used to be able to write “old age” as a cause of death and now have to invent a medical term, because age-related frailty can’t be cured, yet we keep treating it as if it could be.

My grandparents’ long lives at home, and my father taking the side road home instead of the conveyor belt is what needs to become the norm. Elderly care has been hijacked just as midwifery birthing was taken over and medicalized for profit. We need to take control of our own end of life.

Schell, Bruce. “Lost: Musings on One’s Own Mortality.” American Academy of Psychotherapists. PDF provided in PSY 505 Human Development, Meridian University, Fall 2026.

This offering takes a turn in the week. Everyone else has been arguing that facing death brings freedom. Schell found the opposite. He was at peace when he knew he was dying, and the reprieve made him lost. He calls himself prepared for death, not life. The uncertainty frightened him more than the certainty ever did.

Ritchie, Hannah, and Max Roser. “Causes of Death in the US.” Our World in Data. Data from Shen et al., 2018. https://ourworldindata.org.

What actually kills us is mostly slow and ordinary. Heart disease (30.2%) and cancer (29.5%) together make up about 60% of deaths. Then come road incidents (7.6%), lower respiratory disease (7.4%), Alzheimer’s (5.6%), and stroke (4.9%). Suicide is 1.8%, homicide 0.9%, and terrorism less than 0.01%.

What we search for tilts toward fear. Cancer leads at 37%, while heart disease, the top killer, gets only 2% of searches. Suicide (12.4%) and terrorism (7.2%) are searched far beyond their share of deaths.

What the media covers is nearly the reverse of reality. Terrorism takes about a third of the coverage in both papers (35.6% and 33.3%), and homicide nearly a quarter. Heart disease gets about 2%.

The gap is the point. We talk about and fear sudden, dramatic deaths, while most of us will die slowly of chronic illness and frailty. That’s exactly the shift Saul and Ken Hillman describe from the ICU, and it’s why the slow conversations matter.

Peskin, Sara Manning. “The Symptoms of Dying.” New York Times, June 20, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/well/live/the-symptoms-of-dying.html.
People who witness terminal agitation often believe it is the dying person’s existential response to death’s approach. Intense agitation maybe the most visceral way that the human body can react to the shattering of inertia. We squirm and cry out coming into the world, andsometimes we do the same leaving it.

Peskin, Sara Manning. “The Gentler Symptoms of Dying.” New York Times, July 11, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/well/live/the-gentler-symptoms-of-dying.html.
Every major organ in the body — heart, lungs, liver, kidneys — has the capacity to shut off the brain. It’s a biological veto system. … the vast majority of us experience a slumberous slippage from life.

Breitbart, William. “On the Inevitability of Death.” Palliative and Supportive Care 15, no. 3 (2017): 276–78. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478951517000372.

William Breitbart introduced me to Avery Weisman’s idea of “middle knowledge,” the way we can deny death and plan for it at the very same time. Breitbart admits that even palliative care doctors cannot “stare at the sun” for long, borrowing Yalom’s phrase, and he laughs at his own shock that Don Rickles could die. I recognize middle knowledge in my father, who joked that his doctor wanted him to buy a plot at Forest Lawn while quietly deciding he would refuse chemo if it was cancer. I recognize it in myself, too. I hold an intention to live to 120 while I have already written my departure scene on a barge at sunset. Perhaps middle knowledge is not only a defense. Perhaps it is how we let death in at a pace we can live with.

Wellbery, Caroline. “The Comfort of the Ordinary: On Dying as We’ve Lived.” New England Journal of Medicine 381, no. 8 (2019): 701–3. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1905057.

Death is also about the survivors who want reassurance; Herbie insisting on “died,” not “passed away”; families laughing, singing, and telling stories at the bedside, with the mundane as the greatest comfort; the “dual framework” of hope and realism held together; the dying still dwelling in the here and now; “No death is just ordinary”; and living as we always did until the end, as a bridge for those who carry on.

Vesey, Kim. “First Breath, Final Breath.” Filmed 2015 at TEDxDayton, Dayton, OH. YouTube video, posted by TEDx Talks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWnZKAX_v3s.

First Breath, Final Breath. Just as I have spoken about having a Birthplan, the aid of a birth doula, I want the same for my Deathplan, and maybe my role is to be a Death Doula.

Those who are dying a very different perspectives on life and it makes them wonderful teachers. Overall, we need to approach these moments not with our heads but our hearts.

“Yes, birth like death, can be beautiful” (9:30).

Blackhall, Leslie. “Living, Dying and the Problem with Hope.” TEDxCharlottesville. YouTube video, 19:12, posted by TEDx Talks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQEWc3LVfyc.

Blackhall heads palliative care at the University of Virginia and has also studied Tibetan medicine and Buddhist thought. She looks at our human tendency to pretend we aren’t going to die, and at the challenge of clinging to “hope” while undergoing cancer treatment, arguing that accepting dying as part of life lets us live more fully in the days we have. Her line that “Dying is living” sums it up: death isn’t a lost battle or a failure of will.

Hope becomes a way to lock up addressing death. We want a peaceful and dignified death later. We turn to hope. We lock dying up in a little box called “later” (4:10). Hope decreases anxiousness about the scary place called death. Patients beg to not have their hope taken away.

But we don’t hope that the sun rises. We assume it will. But when faced with life-ending issues we use hope as a shield against fear. Hope as the other face of fear. Hope gets attached to interventions that may even harm dying patients. The purpose of any medical therapy is to give us more life…but what kind of life? But we need to recognize we have the gift of time and we need a better hope. Knowledge that dying is really living. What you are doing right now is your bucket list and it is the only one you will ever get.

Levine, Stephen, and Ondrea Levine. Who Dies? An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying. New York: Anchor Books, 1982.

The Levines invite us to live consciously so that we can die consciously. They suggest that we postpone death by postponing life, and that whatever we hide or hold tightly, including pain, becomes our prison. Opening the heart, finishing business, and softening around grief bring us back into life. I read the book in a spiral, beginning with the Tibetan bardos and circling back to the start. What stays with me is the image of dying in wholeness, like rain falling gently back into the ocean, and the reminder that to die at home is to die in the midst of love. BOOK NOTES

Houston, Jean. Jump Time: Shaping Your Future in a World of Radical Change. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000.

Writing in 2000, Houston named our era Jump Time, a moment of rapid, liminal change that calls for a spiritual renaissance equal to our technology. She describes the psyche in three realms (This Is Me, We Are, and I Am), linked by entelechy, the acorn of our full potential. She imagined polyphonic people able to call forward many inner characters as needed, and she saw the early Internet as a new kind of community. I borrow her title for my own experiment: letting time jump forward, backward, sideways, up, and down. Her description of kairos, the shuttle passing through the threads as new fabric takes form, has become a word for this whole week. BOOK NOTES

Final Live Class Reflection

This class brought me a widening, expanding awareness, and a sense of possibilities: who I am today, who I was, and who I can or will become.My biggest takeaway is learning my protocol for hinge moments, and seeing the repetitive routines of my cycles of transformation. I will continue to be a storyteller…but I also want focus on being a Story Curator and a Keeper of Stories. I will live today as if it is my last. Live big. Be bold. And that can be quiet too.

It’s not about fighting aging with GO-GO. It’s about being me. Authentic me. Listening. Not always DOING. Enjoying. Reflecting & Remembering. Imagining. LOVING. I will expand the sovereignty, drawn as a heart resting on a crown rising from a pool. (First time I have drawn the crown with more peaks and valleys).

Special Interest Group – Rituals and Rites of Passage

THRESHOLDS, ENDINGS, BEGINNINGS (Elizabeth facilitator)

Who am I BEcoming?

Rites of Passages – 3 Stages of Unfolding: Separation |Liminality | Incorporation

LOOKING BACK: What Chapter is Ending? What have I learned about myself these past seven weeks? If the person you were seven weeks ago met the person you are today, what would surprise them?

My Parenting chapter is changing. I am not longer on the field coaching my kids, I have moved to the stands as a spectator. I am an enthusiastic fan. I am always available for pre-game and post-game discussions, but I am watching rather than directing. I can see that they have all had experiences that launched them in adulthood.

What I’ve learned about myself is that I have a protocol for hinge moments. My body knows first. Then I turn to “Nourishment”. I turn to away from toxins and toward foods that are anti-inflammatory. This course coincided with Persephone and Demeter themed artwork. Just as Persephone chose to eat the pomegranate seeds and walk into adulthood, I made a choice at 25 to “Get my Shit Together” and it started with cleaning up my diet. With detox comes clarity and when my body and mind are clear my spirit can see pathways and choices.

Seven weeks ago Mary meets me today and what has surprised me is my widened and deepened perspective on elder aging and death. I thought I was well informed, but as always I learn I have much to learn. My heart had already widened and expanded this past winter but I learned this quarter that it is even more elastic and can continue to grow.

THRESHOLDS:What transition are you living through right now? What am I becoming? What is the title of this chapter?

Womb 2.0. I am invited to become my sovereign self. My new self uses her voice more and doesn’t share as much with those who don’t appear to be truly engaged and interested. I used to push small talk further, my intuition is better at knowing who deserves my wisdom and attention.  I had to leave a friendship that lost it’s ease. There was grief. Elizabeth notes that every right of passage asks us to leave something behind.

I don’t think that there is a part of me that does’s want to cross the threshold OR wishes I had not crossed this threshold from Womb 1.0 (0-63) to Womb 2.0 (63+). I will be honest and admit that I do move up and down in the spectator stands of my three kids’ “game”. Like a fan, I may yell by coaching ideas into the air of the stadium, but ultimately they have new teammates/partners and they get to choose their coach/mentors. I am a fan in the stands.

GIFTS for my JOURNEY

Francesca gifted me the grace and openness I give others. (There were tears).

Elizabeth gifted me inclusion in the game even if I am in the stands.

April gifted me continued strength and courage to be who I am walking into becoming.

AT MY THRESHOLD

I am leaving behind____relationships that lack ease.

I am stepping toward ___new skin with a patina shine.

The title of this chapter:__WOMB 2.0 – Expanding Sovereignty

Hinge Moments: Initiation, Identity, and the Spiral of Becoming