Joan Ditzion on Ageism

Posted on June 23, 2021August 20, 2024 by Dr. Toni

Feminist pioneer Joan Ditzion may be best known as one of the authors of “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” After all, the seminal book has been a staple on the shelves of women around the world, ever since the publication of the first commercial edition in 1973.

Joan Ditzion standing in front of several of her artworks. Next Avenue, Our Bodies Ourselves — Joan Ditzion has returned to her pursuit of art; here she is with some of her work | Credit: Joan Ditzion

However, that was only the beginning of Ditzion’s journey into tackling the dual issues of feminism and aging. Now 78, the former art educator-turned-clinical geriatric social worker who lives with her husband Bruce in Cambridge, Mass., spoke with Next Avenue about the latter half of life, the women’s movement, ageism and staying relevant.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Next Avenue: What did you learn from the early women’s movement that has carried forward to your current fight against ageism?

Joan Ditzion: I define myself as an aging activist, and having a sense of agency fuels my purpose in life in many ways. One of the things that profoundly affected my attitude was that my values and visions were my feminist values, having been part of the successful social liberation movement in the “Our Bodies Ourselves” project.

A core lesson I learned fifty years ago, in the early days of the women’s movement, is that sexism is a social construction. I had grown up as everyone did in those days, with my sense of myself as a woman in a patriarchal view of society; that women are inferior to men. I was very well loved in my family, but nonetheless, these were the cultural attitudes I was raised on.

“I define myself as an aging activist, and having a sense of agency fuels my purpose in life in many ways.”

I was the other sex, a sex object to please men. A male-centered view of reality was the reality of the world. When I began to realize that there was nothing biologically pre-determined about this, but it’s really just a social construction based on a patriarchal view of the world and sexist attitudes, I began to change my sense of myself, and embraced my identity as a woman and a woman-centric view of the world.

This was probably one of the most formative experiences of my life. Now, more than fifty years later, I fully embrace my identity as a woman in the second half of life.

And over the last ten or twenty years, I have been dealing with changes in my body and my place in the generational hierarchy, this new stage of life and having less time.

I also have had to deal with ageist responses to me as an aging woman. I was immersed in the aging field for many years and I understood it well, but began to really integrate it personally as I aged myself.

More problematic than the normal aspects of aging, were the ageist, demeaning attitudes that I was bumping up against. I kept bumping into ageism and my anxiety rose and I feared ‘I was over the hill, I’m less than, I’m in decline, I’m more marginal, I’m a sexually invisible’ and all of that.

Old book cover of "Our Bodies Ourselves" by Joan Joan Ditzion. Next Avenue — Early cover of the seminal “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” | Credit: Joan Ditzion

But, in my late fifties and sixtiess, this light went off. I was struggling with internalized — and in turn, institutionalized — ageist attitudes, just as I did decades before when I was struggling with sexism. In the early days, I kept thinking, sexism is a social construction. So, I just kept repeating, ageism is a social construction, and it’s our cultural attitudes towards aging, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Many of us, aging women and men, are asking: How do we balance the affirming positive attitudes of aging with recognizing the realities and problems of aging?

How do you think older women in particular need to navigate this tightrope?

We know that each stage of this life is much more complicated and much more complex than many of our cultural stereotypes or myths or stories. And if we all age consciously and feel, not ‘less than’ because we are aging, we can individually and collectively transform attitudes in ourselves, in society.

It’s a huge, social, cultural problem. It requires collective action, so we should find ways to shift from an age-segregated to an age-integrated society.

Basic research even shows that there’s much lower rates for any kind of mental health, or psychiatric conditions, for people who resist ageist attitudes.

How can older people, and older women in particular, take action, or push back against ageism?

This is such a timely and important topic for everyone. We can all be aging activists.

“So, I just kept repeating, ageism is a social construction, and it’s our cultural attitudes towards aging, and it doesn’t have to be that way. “

Pre-COVID, I used to look for opportunities. I would try to find things I could do to change attitudes.

For example, when I turned seventy-five, I decided to stop dyeing my hair. So, I went to the local pharmacy looking for some gray tint and was told there’s no such thing, that no woman ever wants to go gray. So I started pushing back — insisting it’s part of my natural aging process.

There are moments like this in everyday life, where we can really change attitudes. And my fantasy is if everyone looks for moments like these, we can really begin to address this kind of thing, and listen to ways people demean or put themselves down or diminish themselves or feel ‘less than’ because we’re aging.

Intensive Journal

Posted on June 15, 2021April 27, 2024 by Dr. Toni

By Ellery Littleton

This article presents a summary of some of the basic ideas of Ira Progoff’s “Intensive Journal Process,” and includes a very brief outline of one of his extensive journal-writing exercise cycles: 12 Entries.

Ellery writes: “The first Intensive Journaling workshop I attended in 1981, was two weeks long, 9 to 5, five days a week. At first, I didn’t think I could possibly write about myself for two weeks; at the conclusion of the workshop, I realized I had barely scratched the surface.”

Ellery Littleton teaches several programs at The Haven. His next is Writing up a Storm: Haiku, March 6–7.

***

Long before there were analysts’ couches, encounter groups, gestalt, bodywork, and the myriad other approaches to personal growth and transformation, people who wanted to search for meaning and perspective in their lives often wrote their thoughts, feelings and dreams in a journal.

Particularly among creative people – from Leonardo da Vinci to Anais Nin – journal-keeping has historically been a vehicle for releasing tensions, resolving conflicts, working through crises and connecting with the intuitive inner self – the “person within the person,” as philosopher/psychologist Ira Progoff described it, who can be the source of so much sound guidance and wisdom – your best counselor and spiritual advisor, in fact.

Progoff, who died at age 77 in 1998, was the godfather of the contemporary journal-writing movement, which has blossomed incredibly in the last couple of decades. His best-known book, At a Journal Workshop (1975), is the basic text and guide to the application of what he called the “intensive journal process.” It still stands as the best, most complete work in the entire ever-expanding library of journaling guides. It is rather like the King James Version of journal-writing books – long, complex and challenging – the source of many of the most enduring and useful concepts in the field.

Writing in a journal about one’s ideas, feelings and experiences is almost always useful, “but an unstructured journal usually just goes around in circles,” Progoff said. “To become a valuable tool of psychological self-care, a journal needs a design that will help a human being answer the question ‘What is my life trying to become?’ “

A student of Carl Jung, Progoff was committed to the adaptation of humanistic Jungian ideas to the process of journal-writing, and began by encouraging journal-keeping among his private patients in the 1950s to help them “sort out their lives.”

Over the years, these rudimentary journals evolved into the sensitively structured, multi-layered, cross-referencing set of notebooks which now form the basis for Intensive Journal Workshops, offered across North America and around the world by the New York-based Dialogue House, established by Progoff in the 1960s. Each workshop participant receives a specially organized looseleaf notebook, which leads them through specific writing guidelines. The process is designed to help people “tap into the underground stream of their interior lives to work out their beliefs, find answers to problems and deeper meaning in their existence.”

“It’s a highly useful, practical method, leading to some profound insights,” Progoff said, “but it’s not a self-concerned approach because the answers usually lie in connection with finding meaning in – and connection to – something larger than one’s self.”

Intensive journal workshops encourage individual privacy, although people are periodically invited to read portions of their journal, so they can experience the emotions that surround reading their entries aloud. No judgments or analyses are invited. “I try to help people get over the habit of constantly judging and diagnosing themselves and others,” Progoff said, “and look at things objectively as they are. The workshops provide a place where you can sit quietly to let the muddy waters of life settle and clarify themselves.”

This atmosphere of meditative silence provides an environment that helps people search deep within themselves, and tune into a larger awareness. “At deep levels within us we know more than we are aware of,” Progoff frequently stated. “The process helps people open themselves to this non-intellectual perception, which draws them fully into their own life story.”

Aging and Mystical Consciousness

Posted on June 8, 2021 by Dr. Toni

Signs You Might Be a Mystic

Posted on March 15, 2021August 20, 2024 by Dr. Toni

You may know one—or even be one yourself.

By Samantha Vincenty

Ask someone without a theology degree to picture a “mystic,” and they might imagine a yogi meditating on a mountaintop, the whirling dervishes of Turkey, or a nun living a monastic life of fervent prayer. People slightly more familiar with the word may even be able to name a few of the best-known mystics: Rumi, the 13-century poet and Sufi mystic, or Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish nun known for writing about her mystical experiences (including levitation). All of these examples have one thing in common: They live, or lived, in a place and/or time far removed from anything we can relate to today. Nobody envisions a mystic plodding outside to grab the mail.

According to scholars—and self-described mystics—that’s not always the case. What’s more, there are, evidently, plenty of self-identified mystics among us today.

So, what exactly is a mystic?

The answer to that question varies according to who’s doing the defining, and which religion or belief system they subscribe to. Truth-seeking, and dedication to making a firsthand connection with a higher power, are the consistent themes.

“A mystic is a person who has a direct experience of the sacred, unmediated by conventional religious rituals or intermediaries,” Mirabai Starr, author of Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, tells OprahMag.com. Starr has both written about and translated original mystical texts.

Achieving that sacred, or divine, experience requires “transcending established belief systems, bypassing the intellect, and dissolving identification with the ‘ego’ self,” Starr says.

“To qualify as a mystic, as one who has had a mystical experience, or a series of mystical experiences, it really means allowing yourself to let go of your identity and just… being.“

“A mystic is someone who has an experience of union with The One—and The One may be God, it may be Mother Earth, it may be the cosmos. That experience is rare, but everyone has them I think, where you momentarily forget that you are a separate ego, personality, self, and you experience your interconnectedness with all that is,” Starr continues.

Since the word “mystical” is somewhat subjective here, we’ll go with the dictionary definition: “involving or having the nature of an individual’s direct subjective communion with God or ultimate reality.”

That moment of union “may be a full-blown mystical experience like the Christian mystics or the Hindu mystics speak about, where you go into almost a trance-like state, but it doesn’t have to be.”

What does a mystic do?

“Anything and everything—that’s the key,” says Starr.

“To qualify as a mystic, as one who has had a mystical experience, or a series of mystical experiences, it really just means allowing yourself to let go of your individuated identity and be,” she continues.

A mystic may cultivate these experiences through meditation, or what Starr calls “a more contemplative variety of prayer. It’s a kind of turning inward and allowing yourself to just abide in a space that makes a welcoming place for the sacred.”

Writing poetry is another way that mystics have traditionally made a “welcoming place for the sacred,” which Rumi, 16th-century Hindu mystic Mirabai (Starr’s namesake), or 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz were famous for.

Those verses often take an almost longing, romantic tone, as in Mirabai’s “I Send Letters,” which begins, “I send letters to my Beloved, The dear Krishna, But He sends no message of reply…”

“Discursive language engages the intellect and the analytical mind in such a way that it kind of precludes that softening, that heart space,” Starr says. “That is where the mystic lives, and where the mystical experience unfolds.”

Even if a mystic isn’t moved to put pen to paper, simply reading others’ poetry can bring them to transcendence.

“Mystical poetry is both an outpouring of the mystic’s own experience, and an invitation for everybody else to enter into that kind of mystical heart space,” Starr continues. “All of the mystics across the traditions claim the same thing, which is, ‘my experience of union with the beloved is absolutely ineffable.’ It cannot be described in words or concepts. And yet, they can’t help but write about it or sing about it, or paint about it!”

Are there Catholic mystics?

Yes. There are academics, members of the clergy, and Catholic church members who believe in the mystics of the past—or even identify as one, themselves.

In a 2013 interview about Christian mysticism, professor and Roman Catholic theologian Bernard McGinn said that “a mystical person would be someone who’s committed to the search for a deeper contact with God.” A mystic, by his definition, who has “achieved that in a very supreme way.”

Perhaps the most famous example of a highly-regarded Catholic mystic who achieved it in a very supreme way was St. Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Carmelite nun and author. A polarizing figure during her time as a Carmelite reformer, her own ecstatic religious experiences included accounts of levitation (though modern historians have speculated that she actually suffered from epilepsy). The nun’s writings on prayer, particularly The Way of Perfection, are still considered theology classics today.

Modern mystics live among us today, though they don’t all write poetry in isolated obscurity—in fact, you can find some of them on YouTube.

Father Richard Rohr, an author and Franciscan friar, writes about mysticism and developing a close relationship to God through prayer. In a June 2019 visit to Oprah’s SuperSoul Sunday, Rohr shared his thoughts on how names for a higher power, such as “God” or “Jesus,” are “historically limited. The Universal Christ author posits that setting those names aside may open up one’s relationship with a higher power.

In an adapted excerpt from Rohr’s A Spring Within Us, he says that mystic “simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience. All spiritual traditions at their mature levels agree that such a movement is possible, desirable, and even available to everyone.”

Who can be a mystic?

According to Starr, a mystic can be a bartender or a bus driver, or a schoolteacher, or a journalist—it’s got nothing to do with your external life and everything to do with internal experience.

“A mystic is an ordinary person who does ordinary things and experiences these moments of profound union with The Source, Starr says.

Another sign you may be a natural mystic? An extreme affinity for nature.

“That’s why there’s the term “Mother Earth.” For a lot of people with mystical inclinations, it’s a felt relationship with the earth, like a cherished loved one, as a relative. It’s about fully embodying our humanity and our relationship with the natural world, but that’s still a mystical experience, because we, our separate ego-self dissolves into that vast mystery of The One.”

The Subtle Ageism We Commit Against Ourselves(and How to Shift Our Attitudes)

Posted on February 24, 2021August 21, 2024 by Dr. Toni

It’s no surprise that we’re steeped in a culture that values youth over maturity. Negative stereotypes about aging are everywhere. We’re taught from birth to be anti-aging.

Even when you know ageist attitudes are ridiculous, the constant bombardment of negative messaging can allow subtle forms of ageism to seep in and affect us.

When that happens, we can even become subconsciously ageist towards ourselves. And while ageist attitudes from outside may be easier to spot, the ageist messages that spring from inside us can be harder to recognize.

Examining and confronting these under-the-radar forms of ageism can have amazing benefits for your health and well-being.

Studies show that those with positive attitudes about aging live over seven years longer than those with negative attitudes. But more than that, having a pro-age attitude can fill every year of your life with new opportunities, amazing adventures, loving friends and family and a new desire to embrace everything this life has to offer.

How do you know if these subtle forms of ageism are impacting you? Below are five ways ageism can affect you or women you know—and how to shift to a pro-age mindset.

1. Letting your age dictate your lifestyle

Some people take it easy later in life. Others get busier.

No longer occupied with making a living or raising children, many find this is a great time to spend quality time with family and friends, take on new or forgotten hobbies or even start a new business or venture.

But some women find it harder to navigate this time of life. After a lifetime of negative messages about aging, they believe they’re “supposed” to do certain things at certain ages. This belief can get in the way of going for what would actually be gratifying out of fear it’s inappropriate.

There’s nothing wrong with taking it easy or starting new endeavors as we age.

Whatever you choose to do, do it because you want to, not because someone told you that’s how people your age are supposed to behave.

What’s possible for you depends on your attitude, not your age.

2. Dressing “your age”

There are a lot of messages out there about how women should “dress their age”—and specifically what women should look like and wear.

Our suggestion? Go for fun!

Choose clothes that make you feel comfortable and confident, regardless of what the style mavens say about it.

Colors, cuts and styles don’t mean nearly as much as how you feel in your clothes. When you feel good, you look good. You radiate confidence and confidence is beautiful.

3. Fear of looking your age

The beauty industry tells us that the worst possible thing we can do is allow ourselves to look our age—and then markets a multitude of products and services designed to disguise every sign of aging.

All that messaging can weigh on us.

Our founder Cindy Joseph taught us this: If you catch yourself considering a new beauty routine—like dyeing your hair or using anti-aging products— Are you motivated by fun? Or fear?

The personal choices you make regarding makeup, hair dye and other beauty treatments are yours and yours alone. But making those decisions from a place of fun, excitement and celebration will make the results much more enjoyable for you.

If you find you’re motivated by fear, you may want to rethink that particular choice. Instead, find ways to love yourself as you are. Find inspiration in pro-age women you admire and then do what pleases you.

4. Forgetting to dream

No matter your age, there’s time to dream and go for what you want.

Many Boom women have begun new endeavors or careers later in life. Boom Ambassador Kim Bomberger began a new career in communications at 50. Then, at 60, she started her own portrait company.

Our own Cindy Joseph embarked on a new career as a silver-haired model at 49 and co-founded BOOM! at 61.

It’s never too late to follow your dreams. Nor are you ever too old to start dreaming.

If you find yourself rejecting your desires because you think it’s inappropriate to want those things at your age, consider looking with fresh eyes. You’re never too old to go after what you want—unless you think you are.

5. Neglecting your health

Part of rejecting ageism is taking time for self-care—and addressing your own health needs at every age. That means taking time to exercise, meditate, eat well and engage in activities that give you pleasure and benefit your health.

Shifting away from ageist attitudes and toward a more pro-age lens is so beneficial for your long-term health and well-being. Loving yourself has benefits at every age. Thank you for being a pro-age inspiration!

Do you recognize unconscious ageism in yourself? What do you do to combat it?