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Age of Miracles By Donna Himel
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
Marianne Williamson, author of A Return to Love, has always been one of my favorite authors and inspirational leaders. I just attended an extraordinary workshop with her in Tampa and wanted to share some of the highlights of my session there. She is an amazing speaker and feels like every word out of her mouth is sacred and divine.
The session was called the Age of Miracles and was about how we can all grow into our spiritual maturity with grace and beauty. She began the session by talking about the importance of daily meditation. As a student of the Course in Miracles, she is a master on the subject. Through meditation and spiritual growth, we can practice what she called “holistic aging” which means we pay attention to the issues of our mind, body and spirit as we grow older.
Reaching middle age is like a second puberty but society has no container for it; there’s no cool transition. There used to be a role for the elderly in the family unit; grandparents had a serious role to play. With the changes in our society, this is no longer the case. For many people, the bottom falls out from under them when they no longer feel they have a purpose or role to play.
We should create our own rite of passage and celebrate the wisdom, experience and knowledge we have obtained through the years. Once we grieve what no longer is, we can begin to celebrate what’s coming! We need to go through an understanding of who we are no longer versus who we are becoming because who we are is so much bigger than the human body. There is a great deal of stress when we only relate to ourselves as a physical body which is why mediation is so valuable. The mind is allowed to free itself from the body and truly understand the bigger picture of who we are. Our eternal being is not bound by our body.
As a young person, you don’t know remorse or regret like we do as older adults, which creates an enormous weight on our hearts. We need to let go of these burdens and learn to travel light. Let go of things that weigh us down and become unattached to the thought that our past should have been different. Life is about you becoming better. Every experience you have been through, no matter how painful, has made you the person you are today. You carry more wisdom because of that experience and it should be celebrated not mourned.
