Inner Work of Age

This has been an important book for me to read and reflect upon during my sabbatical when I have been considering my orientation and agenda for my 70s. The subtitle used as the title of this review summarises the message in a sentence, and for many people this shift constitutes an identity crisis which is fundamentally about moving from doing to being. The book is a personal one, containing many reflective interviews, and falls into four parts: the divine messengers, including retirement and serious illness, life review and the life repair, from Hero to Elder, and life completion. It is profound and searching journey that demands serious self-reflection that can be undertaken through a series of shadow and spiritual practices. The essence is to turn within, ageing from the inside out, ‘attuning to your soul’s longing and cultivating a deeper shift in awareness’ that is also a rite of passage whereby we release old patterns and potentially emerge as an elder with spiritual authenticity and authority.

The identity crisis brings up perennial existential human questions: Who am I? What are my values? What do I believe? What matters most to me? How can I give back to the common good? Many readers, like myself, will have been asking these questions throughout our lives without waiting for them to catch up on us. Age becomes our curriculum as we go through the three portals of shadow awareness leading to depth, pure awareness as the gateway to silent vastness, and mortality awareness as the portal to presence. The issues are brought to life through clinical encounters and the real-life experiences to which readers can readily relate. We find ourselves confronting and living such opposites as being and doing, freedom and dependency, vitality and fatigue, holding on and letting go, gains and losses, beginnings and endings. Ego goals of success, power and achievement are not those of the soul, which seeks to growth and evolution, as Jung was already pointing out in the 1930s. And in our time, the collective shadow becomes ever more visible and strident – this includes ageism.

Retirement offers the opportunity of shifting from doing to being, but also potential new beginnings in terms of reinvention. I resonated with Gina’s shadow character the Driver (also the Doer) who would not tolerate letting go, but nevertheless it needs to be released. Another client ‘retired’ her to-do list along with her concepts of success and failure. Life-changing illness can also act as a divine messenger, reminding us of our physical vulnerability and ultimate physical demise. Here people may be called upon to retire the Fighter on the basis that the Quitter is a shameful loser. The message is one of reorientation to the inner world, and our circumstances may also demand the acknowledgement of the shadow character Needy.

Life review is ‘a focused reflection or emotional inventory of the key events of our lives and how we experience them in retrospect’ – including unlived and repressed aspects. After this, we can engage in life repair based on our desire for reconciliation and forgiveness of others and ourselves. I found the interview with Thomas Keating the most interesting in the book. He followed his calling in spite of family resistance though he eventually gains the understanding and respect of his father. He says that silence is God’s first language and that if we keep quiet we can find this out. In this context, ‘we can use old age for contemplative prayer, to surrender the ego, and to abandon ourselves to God’s Will… looking inwardly for divine presence and allowing God’s love to flow into us.’ (p. 187) He continues that awareness without content is home, remarking that the construction of a separate self is the radical problem of humanity.

Emotional and creative repair enables us to release the past and live in the present, including reframing our traumas as severe teachers. Here, the five grief stages of Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross may be helpful as we undertake the process of spiritual repair, reimagining our beliefs and reclaiming or establishing our spiritual practices from a space of greater wholeness and disidentification…. I am not… Becoming an elder is a very conscious transformation where we are not just becoming old, but seek to grow whole (pp. 253, 284). We have to let go of the ego’s agenda, move into liminality where we acknowledge that we can’t control our increasing limitations, then on to new beginnings involving awakening and wisdom. Ram Dass recommends repeating the phrase ‘I am loving awareness’ bringing you into the heart. I also resonated with the call to serve something larger than ourselves, which I have been feeling over the last two years. Such service involves conscious activism that does not seek to dehumanise the other. And I liked the phrase ‘I’m positive, but not optimistic.’

The final part is about life completion and the legacy of the soul, affirming that ‘I too shall pass’ and recognising when it is time to let go and move on into the journey of homecoming. The book ends with a legacy letter to her grandchildren where the author hopes that they will take her love with them and that technology will not distract them from real human connection. She emphasises the transmission of spiritual and moral values through kindness, generosity, empathy, service, personal development and caring for the Earth that sustains us. I highly recommend this book to readers who have reached the point when they wish to shift from role to soul, infusing their lives with a greater conscious sense of being. After all, it is only our essential being that we can take with us.