Dr. Toni

Spirituality and Aging

Posted on by Dr. Toni

Do you find yourself asking the deeper-scarier-questions as you make your way through middle age and get closer to the last act? Well, you’re not alone. But as a member of the baby boomer generation-the group that famously questioned authority-old-time religion might not be for you. So what does being spiritual mean?

Host Robert Lipsyte gives his personal definition of spirituality and then sits down with the experts. Susan McFadden, professor of psychology at University of Wisconsin and co-author of New Directions in the Study of Late-Life Religiousness and Spirituality, speaks out for the spiritual side of anti-establishment Boomers who may not be religious but do a lot of good. Rabbi Marc Disick of Temple Sinai in Stamford, Connecticut, agrees that religion aside, God is what happens between people in a community. The most spiritually supportive thing we can do for older people, he says, is make them feel that their wisdom and years count for something. Reverend Jim Forbes, Senior Minister Emeritus at Riverside Church in Manhattan, adds that the vulnerability of old age can best be remedied with a community that truly values its older members. Reaching out to others is the real spirit in action, the panelists all agree.

Lipsyte next turns to a take on spirituality from the East. Though he’s the blond-haired, blue-eyed dad of Uma Thurman, Columbia University Professor Robert Thurman is also an ordained Buddhist monk whose books include Inner Revolution and Infinite Life. But Lipstye wants to know, can you really teach “old dog” baby boomers the Buddhist “tricks” of patience and common sense?

Don’t you dare call him spiritual! Air America radio host Lionel offers his distinctly non-holier-than-thou riff on all that sweet talk we use to avoid facing the sour facts about getting old.

Listen now by clicking here…

Spirituality of Aging: Attitude is Everything

Posted on by Dr. Toni

The Midlife Transition often triggers thoughts about getting older and getting on in life. Perhaps a more pertinent thought to ponder should be: “What does it mean to age successfully? According to some experts, it’s not enough to just tick off the birthdays. “Successful” aging requires deliberate forethought, a conscious effort and the right attitude.

Attitude is 90% of the aging issue. It has been said that the results of life’s twists and turns is 10% of what happens to you, and 90% is what you do with what happens to you. No doubt there is a physical decline that comes with age, but he counters, this decline is one that can be mitigated and shaped rather than given into. It’s that very decline that can become the spark when coupled with the experience gained through the years. The end result can give older adults, while different than the past, as much of a fulfilling, exciting, and fun life as they enjoyed in previous years.

Climbing Mt. Everest at 93 years of age might be theoretically possible for some, but not realistic for most. In his book, From Age-ing to Sage-ing, (1995 Warner Books) Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Zalomi coins the phrase, “conscious aging” where a person ages deliberately and intentionally. He advocates living life as it is rather than allowing life to live us.

For those who seek to consciously participate in the aging process, here are some specific methods for developing a more positive lifestyle and attitude:

• Be realistic. Maybe you don’t have the energy or the strength of your youth but you are more creative than ever because, and over the years, you have learned about yourself, your strengths as well as your opportunities to grow (some mistakenly call these opportunities weaknesses.)

• Take risks in life. Life has always been a series of risks: getting married, flirting with financial disaster by connecting yourself with one company for a lifetime, having children, serving in the military. The real goodies in life require risk-taking, a stretching of the envelope, a willingness to try new things.

• Respect your own opinion, especially, your inner self. While culture might try to suggest that you are ‘out of date’ because you can’t (really don’t want to) operate the latest electronic gadget, you have learned more about life and living through experience, something that is much more valuable.

• Be flexible and adaptable. Older adulthood should be the time of the greatest flexibility because there is a perspective on life that can only be sculpted by years of experience. Older people have already experienced significant change and have survived, even thrived. The change in age is the only difference from those of the past. Who knows what lies beyond this specific challenge?

• Take on new challenges and learn new things. It has been said that a person only grows old when they can no longer learn. Many people treat the past as a fortress to be preserved rather than a foundation that enables them to grow and risk and learn. Don’t forget that while some challenges of the past were painful, most became life-giving and renewing.

• Deal with pain and losses, but don’t hold on to the suffering they bring. Suffering is in the eye of the beholder. A person can be in pain but not suffer as well as suffer but not be in pain. Pain and loss often signal something ‘old’ is dying in our life. We need to look for the new that always is there, if we are attentive, open and ready to receive.

• See the half full glass. Be optimistic. You have successfully coped with challenges in the past. Why not the challenges of today or even the fears of the future?

• Take care of yourself with healthy eating and regular exercise, not only of the body but of the spirit. Take time to walk, to reflect, to consider, to remember. Read a good book, one that interest you but never had the time to read until now. Many find meditation as essential to life as an hour at the gym. But don’t forget to go to the gym as well.

• Don’t accept society’s myths as true about you. Society sees aging only in terms of decline. Because older adults are not able to DO the same things that they did when they were younger, they are to be pitied and even marginalized. But as an older person once said to me, “There are some things that a person just can not learn until age 85.” To quote Dr. Jacob Pressman, Rabbi Emeritus at Temple Ben Am in Los Angeles, “As it takes a village to rear a child, so does it take a lifetime to create a fully human being.”

• Don’t deny your age, learn from it. It is teaching you the life-lessons of wholeness that you have always been meant to hear.

– from the Center for Spirituality and Aging

Reinvent Yourself – Take Steps to Complete

Posted on by Dr. Toni

There is no way you can move into the future, unless you let go of the past. Today I’m beginning a series of articles about
FIVE very practical ways of doing that.

I once heard that there are only 3 things which really hold a person back in life: unmet needs, insufficient distinctions /language and being incomplete. Being complete at all times is a skill worth mastering.

“We spend our lives doing what we are incomplete about.”

A young woman, interested in writing met a famous author at a party. “I wonder if you’d help me she asked. How many words are there in a novel?” The author was taken aback, but managed a sympathetic smile. “Well, that depends. A short novel would run about 65,000 words.” “You mean 65,000 words makes a novel?
Yes, he said hesitatingly, “more or less.”” Well, how do you like that she said gleefully. My book is finished!.””

In order to make room for the new, we have to complete the old. Of course, I never tell you anything that I haven’t been living lately and this is no exception. I’m packing to move and clearing out LOTS of old things. I threw out papers from many years ago – brought back memories, but, it’s no longer who I am. I had a little bit of a
nostalgic time going through all my old client folders… remembering and letting go.

Also called an old boyfriend that I never quite said goodbye to – I called to say hello and goodbye… Great feeling.

So, let’s begin by asking the question: WHY COMPLETE
Lack of completion in any area of our lives takes energy away from us… it lowers our self-esteem to have projects unfinished.
I interpret that to mean that incompletions dominate our lives until they are known and resolved.

Often people choose professions based on where they suffered in life (therapists, healers, financial planners, ministers?) hmm. Who knows… We all spend some part of our day engaged in activities that no longer have any bearing whatsoever on what we want to do.

Most people survive these incompletions, but in every instance there is a cost. Because the natural state of human beings is balance, wholeness and integrity, we lose power and energy when we are incomplete. Proof? Virtually everyone feels much better after having cleaned out a closet, or after a course is complete or a major project is finished.

I suggest that a person who has mastered the skill of being complete about everything as it occurs (after completing the past stuff) is someone who has virtually boundless and healthy energy. Their juice is not being sucked up
by the known and unknown stuff to which they have been accustomed to.

Want to move forward? Reinvent yourself? Trying to get clear on where you want to go? Where do you begin?
If you’re holding thoughts of poverty, scarcity or negativity, sweep them from your life to create uncontaminated space for prosperity to
dwell. Clean house. Literally and metaphorically…

We’ll always have incompletions in our lives and rarely is someone fully complete about past trauma such as losing a loved one or childhood damage. The point here, though, is that you can substantially enhance your well-being energy level and effectiveness by being more complete.

I’m certainly not talking about being manic about being complete all the time. Life is MESSY by nature. Go with the flow, but always get complete about the things or situations that you know will bug you later. Don’t step over anything.

More to follow in the days and weeks to come.

WHAT ARE INCOMPLETIONS, and where do they come from? incompletions are events which have occurred in our lives that passed by without our having done what was necessary to be complete (as in satisfied, handled fully,
responded powerfully) about.

Examples are as follows:
People we have not said I love you to – and want to;
A person with whom we have not made amends for wrongs we may have done.
Taxes unpaid.
Not stopping someone from saying things that hurt you
Doing something you considered wrong or not right
Not going for a goal you really wanted but were afraid to go for.
Not taking out the trash when it was full yesterday

There are important signs of being incomplete:
REGRET; REMORSE; SHAME; ANGER; DENIAL and continuing SADNESS.

What is a recurring problem you have individually? Collectively? Why does it keep coming back? What is the “complete work” you could do to have it complete forever.
Do it!! please. NOW. It is costing too much.

Spiritual Growth – a Major Midlife Transition Task

Posted on by Dr. Toni

Spiritual growth is the process of evolving our consciousness. What exactly does this mean? We can define spiritual growth in a number of ways:

1) As we grow spiritually, the way that we perceive the world should be changing for the better. For example, in the early stages of our spiritual development, we might take a relatively bad experience that we have and simply chalk it up to being bad luck, and possibly play a victim role in how events unfold. We react to the experience in a negative way and make little or no growth from it.

As we make spiritual growth, we can choose better actions to deal with such negative experiences, turning them into positive ones. Instead of playing a victim role when something bad happens, we can reflect and look for the deeper meaning, and try to see our part in how we might have brought such an event on.

2) As we grow spiritually, our attitude shifts for the better, in a number of ways. Spiritual growth isn’t so much about changing our world or our lives, but about changing ourselves and how we perceive the world. It is like waking up and seeing the world through “a new pair of glasses,” as it says in the AA big book.

One way that our attitude changes is in terms of pride and humility. As we make spiritual progress, pride starts to melt away as we realize that we really don’t know it all, and that every experience can become a learning opportunity for us if we approach it with genuine humility. People that we might have dismissed in the past come to have new meaning for us, because we know that each person might have a potential lesson to teach us. Pessimism doesn’t play well with this idea. Instead, we start looking for the silver lining in things in terms of our experiences and what we might possibly learn from them.

3) Our connections with others change as we grow spiritually. One way that this happens is mentioned above, in that we come to see others as potential teachers. Another way that our relationships change is that we tend to place more value on them as we grow, and there is also a tendency towards reaching out and helping others. These ideas replace what is normally selfish and self-seeking behavior that used to dominate our lives.

4) A holistic approach to our life and our overall health comes into being, as we start to realize that everything relates to our spiritual growth. For example, we might start eating better, quit smoking, start exercising, and so on. We see the connectedness of these holistic ideas and realize that we can’t make further growth until we address certain problem areas. A balanced lifestyle becomes the goal, as we see how this further helps us to grow spiritually.

In addition to these ideas, spiritual growth is also characterized by a growing connection with a higher power, which some might experience through prayer and meditation. We come to learn that our greatest teacher can be either the stranger we meet on the corner, but also the quiet and still mind that we achieve in solitude while meditating.

And now I’d like to invite you to learn exactly how the creative theory of recovery can help you find spiritual growth. Come visit http://www.spiritualriver.com/

Life Transitions – Midlife

Posted on by Dr. Toni

The Death And Rebirth Of Self

Sometimes a part of us must die before another part can come to life.

Sometimes a part of us must die before another part can come to life. Even though this is a natural and necessary part of our growth, it is often painful or, if we don’t realize what’s happening, confusing and disorienting. In fact, confusion and disorientation are often the messengers that tell us a shift is taking place within us. These shifts happen throughout the lives of all humans, as we move from infancy to childhood to adolescence and beyond. With each transition from one phase to another, we find ourselves saying good-bye to an old friend, the identity that we formed in order to move through that particular time.

Sometimes we form these identities in relationships or jobs, and when we shift those areas of our life become unsettled. Usually, if we take the time to look into the changing surface of things, we will find that a shift is taking place within us. For example, we may go through one whole chapter of our lives creating a protective shell around ourselves because we need it in order to heal from some early trauma. One day, though, we may find ourselves feeling confined and restless, wanting to move outside the shelter we needed for so long; the new part of ourselves cannot be born within the confines of the shell our old self needed to survive.

We may feel a strange mixture of exhilaration and sadness as we say good-bye to a part of ourselves that is dying and make way for a whole new identity to emerge in its place. We may find inspiration in working with the image of an animal who molts or sheds in order to make way for new skin, fur, or feathers to emerge. For example, keeping a duck feather, or some other symbol of transformation, can remind us that death and rebirth are simply nature’s way of evolving. We can surrender to this process, letting go of our past self with great love and gratitude, and welcoming the new with an open mind and heart, ready for our next phase of life.

From The Daily OM