Shedding our shells…
I have been away from my blog for awhile tweaking up the website and course content over at The Certified Energy Coach Program plus working on the Quantum Flow book and CD set. Lots to do and a fair amount of travelling into the bargain. Here I am again!
During my travels I have been talking with women about how we age, and what suprises there have been for each of us in ageing. Mine in my early 40’s has been my skin. To see it go from taut and smooth to a nearly invisible network of tiny, fine wrinkles - the “crepe paper” look so often referred to in discussing middle-aged women. And all without any pain or discomfort of any kind. The women I have spoken to reveal bodies that seem to randomly rearrange themselves, fluids that were once abundant in the joints and elsewhere beginning to lessen and hair that turns treacherously into a drab display of non-color. Again, overnight, again, without any seeming discomfort. (”It should hurt or something, such drastic change” says 52 year old Thuy) Plus which, the sofa begins to look more inviting and these wonderful, comfortably-bosomed women find themselves with hours gone watching television, reading fiction, calling in sick to spend the afternoon soaking at the hot tub joint and getting hot-stone aromatherapy massaged by a soulful Santa Cruz flower-child named Melusine…
My solidly middle-class mother always said of ageing that it was not for sissies nor the poor. Dad, quoting some scientist of the day observed that we are all dying from the moment we are born. When it was discovered at the ripe old age of 68 that Mom had had scoliosis all her life, her chiropracter recommended a course of massage in addition to suspension on a device that looked as if it had last seen use in a Victorian S&M dungeon. Mom never had a massage in her life until I went to d. deLarm’s shamanic massage class. She enjoyed the neo-Reichian work that we did but even then, it was just against her nature to take time - much less an entire afternoon - off for herself. And now a veritable cult has arisen around self-nurture - not at all a bad thing, a needful thing even, if taken in moderation.
And then, women will tell you, things start “falling off, dropping down, receding…” Mom had expensive dental work done when she was about my age and in the past month, so have I. I am intensely grateful for the ability to have this work done but it has made me reflect upon the role of ego in ageing as I went about for over week talking like a mush-mouthed gobbler with a swollen upper lip that made me look like a large-beaked bird. Mom often spoke as she grew older, how the aged lose their dignity piece by piece as abilities formerly taken for granted slowed, stuttered and finally stopped being possible altogether. I’ve resolved not to take that road, but to see and experience things differently.
Discussing midlife in her awesome book Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh posed this analogy: “Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells—the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions and the shell of the ego” I agree with Anne, that the “false front securities” are best let go of. I sat down and started looking at the lists of things to work on that I had made when I first started doing EFT, BSFF and prayerfully, calmly, TAT. After five or six years of it, many of these shells are completely shed and the rest I forgot to work on. I’m reminded now, and the work resumes. I am also put in mind hof how very many gifts there are in this age to take advantage of and be grateful for.
Agree with this? Disagree? What gifts do you give thanks for as you age? Feel free to leave a comment here…
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