The Inner Work of Age

"Dr. Zweig reminds the reader that 'as each of us chooses not to merely grow old but to grow whole, to intentionally step across the threshold to become and Elder, we discover that aging can be a spiritual path.” There is a lot of 'stuff' that comes up as one ages and reaches certain milestones that are too often associated with redundancy, where one feels relegated to the corner of the room, no longer viable, when one’s 'doing' slows down and as such, one might be termed a liability to society and instead of an honored and revered member. This inner work, this move to self-awareness will greatly benefit the reader in particular - and one’s community as well. Do the inner work necessary to transition to the role of elder–you’ve earned that crown. Wear it with pride."

Auteur

Connie Zweig, Ph.D., is a retired psychotherapist, former executive editor at Jeremy P. Tarcher Publishing, former columnist for Esquire magazine, and contributor to the LA Times. Known as the Shadow Expert, she is the coauthor of Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow and author of Meeting the Shadow of Spirituality and a novel, A Moth to the Flame: The Life of the Sufi Poet Rumi. She lives in California.

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A guide to working through the inner obstacles of late life and embracing the spiritual gifts of aging

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From Chapter 6. A Review of Your Lived and Unlived Life

Most of us live our lives in reaction to changing circumstances, in the details of the moment that require our energy and attention to meet our survival needs, our emotional needs, and the needs of those we love. We are lost in those moments as if they are disconnected from what came before and what comes after, as if they are single, separate entities, like the many-colored threads of a tapestry before we turn it over and stand back to view the finished pattern.

As the great existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”

The effort to understand a life, repair it, and find meaning in it is a natural developmental task of late life. With the loss of the ego’s agenda, we can suffer disorientation, and a life review can help us reorient to the soul’s mission and give us a deeper purpose for late life.

But no one teaches us how to do this in a thoughtful, organized way. No one teaches us how to digest the life we’ve lived, distill the lessons from it, and turn them into wisdom. So, we watch older people trying urgently to tell their stories or reminiscing in a way that makes them appear to be lost in the past.

Fifty years ago, experts in the field of aging believed that this reminiscence was a sign of senility, which reinforced ageist stereotypes. But in the 1960s, renowned gerontologist Robert Butler discovered that many older people seem to be experiencing a profound internal effort to come to terms with everything that happened to them in the past. He coined this phenomenon “life review” and concluded that it is a normal, necessary task of late life, not a pathological one.

Butler suggested that the purpose of life review, whether spoken or written, is to recall unresolved conflicts and reconcile with them through seeing a larger picture or reframing the events. This may lead to reconciliation with estranged loved ones, making amends and forgiving them, or forgiving ourselves. In the best case, it leads us to give up denial or blame and become accountable for the life we’ve lived.

The call to review our lives may come as a gentle nudge to see it from the long view, not through the eyes of youth or of middle age. We want to recognize what we have made with the life we were given, or what it could have been if it had unfolded differently. We want to detect the patterns in our choices, the results of our actions, the coincidences in seemingly chance encounters, and the residue of unfulfilled desires--the full weave of the tapestry and the images revealed there.

Sometimes, the shock of mortality awareness triggers the desire to review our life, evaluate our achievements, and possibly design a new direction. Or the reality of retirement may catalyze a process of self-reflection about the past and inquiry about the future. Sometimes the event of becoming a grandparent stirs a need to tell our stories, to record them in the memories of our family members or in an actual written or video document to create a legacy for future generations. In other cases, a nagging feeling of guilt or shame brings up a need for emotional repair, which requires us to look back and examine when we were harmed or harmed others.

In a less intentional way, people in late life may repeatedly tell the same stories from their past, in a dreamlike, nostalgic reverie, as if to digest something that’s stuck somewhere or to complete something that’s unfinished. They may fantasize about the life they did not live, which they could be living if only this had happened or not happened. Their minds may wander between reality and fantasy, between what is and what’s out of reach, between choices made and not made, opportunities lived and missed, loves gained and lost. And they are haunted by internal shadow characters that grieve lost potential, regret abandoned gifts, long for ideal lovers, and mourn unfulfilled dreams.

In late life, these shadow characters inhabit us and inhibit us from redesigning our lives now. They form an inner obstacle: remaining stuck in denial about the past or stuck in fear about the future. The result: We live in a narrow band of time, unable to make the shift from role to soul.

Instead, with a life review, we can gain the opportunity to see the full arc of a lifetime from a higher, broader vantage point. We can see how the key moments in our lives were interconnected and became sacred passages with a hidden purpose: the evolution of the soul.

My client, Alan, had been harboring resentment toward a woman who had rejected his marriage proposal decades earlier. He just got stuck there. But when he looked at his full life span in the way that we will explore here--backward and forward, above and beneath--he realized that the painful rejection by one person was not isolated from the rest of his life. That pain carried with it a pattern of feelings from his early childhood. This insight led him to seek therapy and to learn how to have a much more rewarding relationship. At last, Alan could reframe that apparent failure as a turning point that took him in a new direction, an ending that became a beginning, a loss that became a gain in awareness and maturity.

Seeing from this deep and wide vantage point, we can release the past and live more fully in the present moment, opening to love of family, creative impulses, and the beauty of the natural world. A life review can be a portal to presence. And it can help prepare us for death by lessening feelings of fear, guilt, anger, and regret as we move toward life completion.

On learning that he had terminal cancer, the late neurologist and prolific author Oliver Sacks wrote, six months before his death, “Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. . . . I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. After all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure” (“My Own Life,” New York Times, February 19, 2015).

As a scientist, Sacks viewed life through a material lens. Others, with a more philosophical or spiritual lens, seek to address questions of existential or spiritual mea…