OUR PHASES OF YOUTH ARE LARGELY NOT UP TO US.

I am not going to do a deep dive on our first phases of life, childhood and adolescence, because our childhood speaks for itself. Both our childhood and adolescence are marked by a certain sense of powerless in the world regardless of how obedient or rebellious we may be. We are given what we are given, left with what we are left with, and life begins for us all when we enter the world as independent things. I can and will speak to young adulthood at some point, but there is a certain momentum that guides our young adulthood marked by life being forgiving and giving us room to make some mistakes. Wisdom in young adulthood is testing boundaries, wisely paying our dues, and avoiding the mistakes that could follow us around for life instead of falling into that realm of what life forgives us for being young and learning. What is of note is those phases that life demands we pay attention to lest we fail to embrace critical and necessary times of our evolution. These are often uncomfortable, and pit us against all we have known and learned up to that point in our lives. And we so we will jump straight into our middle age phase, a time truly meant for transformation, evolution and understanding, even if it should feel like a crisis with the walls closing in on us.

UPSIDE DOWN IN A COCOON. OUR MID LIFE DARK HOUR.

We make a lot of jokes about mid life, as we do about old age. We call it a crisis and we mock, sometimes for a good reason, those who age while desperately trying to cling to their youth. Yet this phase is no joke. It occurs somewhere between 35-45. Years in age, for most, and can be incredibly powerful, life changing if not life destroying. I have found the majority of marriages that split seem to happen to people around their early forties. My mid life phase came early and was intensely profound, causing me to take a lot of notes as to what I was going through. Looking back, it was like I had climbed into a cocoon, turned uptake down, waiting and trying to chew may way out, unaware the future in front of me.

So, let’s break this phase down so we can see just why it can be so powerful. I will put bluntly what we all know. We are going to get old and die. We know that. We know when we are 10 years old. What we do not have a clue of is what it means to age. All we know is where we have been. When look at older people n youth, we see a lot of people struggling physically, sometimes bitter people who act like children. People can seem serious, intense distant. And, of course, we can also meet very endearing older people. Then we have our relationship to our parents, our ground zero for interpreting the process of aging, which can go a lot of ways. All this aside, when we are young, age is a thing in the distance as is death. There is no reason to obsess about things in the distance, it will just get in the way with the presence needed in the phase we are in.

To be healthy in our mind or body, that health must be proactive. Healing must become a thing we embrace, not as something we do only when we break down, but something we are constantly in the process of doing, through our living practices. To understand our most powerful processes of self healing we need to pull back the curtain of the fabric of who we are, and that is a humbling yet enlightening thing to do. If there is such a thing as enlighenment, this is a huge part of that state of being. We cannot be aware, create healthy energy, and yet be clueless as to our need and ability to heal ourselves. Deep healing requires us to get a little deep because all things in life that carry us upward and/or forward are the result of some deeper understanding of our nature that we choose to empower. Fearlessly understand your physical system for what it is and embrace your natural ability to heal beyond what you may think you are able to. And know that pursuit is going to take you to a lot of places where people, even experts disagree, science is still trying to figure it out, or certain healing strategies differ and must adapt to different genetic dispositions.

THE ALARM BELL

Our souls have an alarm bell that goes off in mid life. It rings from the depth of our souls and it says in ways we cannot avoid, you are about to get old. It is a long and slow process, but things are going to change. Your time is limited, no reason to panic, but if there is anything you are hiding regarding the process of aging, where you are, what you have been through, where you want to go, it is all going to come up now. Why all now? Because there is still plenty of life to learn and prepare and plant seeds for aging wisely, but if I do not drag you down to the bottom of the ocean to look in your soul, you won’y be able to make decisions understanding the gravity of life, the preciousness of life. The alarm bell of mid life sneaks up us and then hits us out of nowhere. It can feel like a powerful depression fueled by introspection over our sense of purpose and how we have used our life so far. It can feel like we are literally feeling our youth slipping through our hands. It can also fell like an energy charged insanity where we are running around trying to grasp on to anything that gives us energy, flying up and down to extremes in a daily basis.

INTENSITY

The intensity of this process has a lot to do with the individual. People who come from well adjusted backgrounds and follow linear paths in life will feel something, but not be any intense riveting thing. Some people grow up early. There are not obsessed by youth. They fall straight into adulthood and the responsibilities involved with being adulthood without any sense they have lost something. This can lead to a very mild almost unnoticeable mid life phase. Yet, if we are burying any unresolved trauma, or have built a life on unsustainable youthful ideas, or seem way off the mark from where we thought we would be, this phase can turn us upside down. Aging wisely demands we heal anything that is keeping us down or back. We need our mental health more than anything when we age. Mid life is great phase for deep healing, sometimes non negotiable phase for it. In life we go through a lot. We come from a lot. Yet there is window, a very big window we have to heal and address our weaknesses. !0-30 years. That is a lot. At some point life can ask, where have you been? Life does not care about more as we age, it cares about us less. But if we are healthy, positive, and find way to wisely engage in life, we can age gracefully, attracting the company of others through our presence not our neediness. So life takes to the core, the roots of all that is light and shadow about who we are and says, let’s do the work. Own it or pay the price. And if life doesn’t shake us to the core, we may just blow this call to arms off and now we are forging our behavior for age minus the wisdom. So, just how intense can this get? Well my sou literally died in my midlife life phase. It was as close to death as I have ever been and it took me 12 years of my life to climb all the way out. So it can get very intense. Yet those were the most rewarding years of my life and I see them as a blessing. I say we will die more than once in our life if we are ever to become something special. This is a rite of passage as much as it is a phase. It is not how we enter shadow, bit how we come out. It is not what life takes from us, but what we choose take back which defines the wisdom we get out of this monster reboot phase of our life, if we should need such a reboot.

WHAT COMES UP?

Anything and everything. Issues around love and romance. Attractiveness. Health. Career. Even profound spiritual issues that can bring forth our perception of angels and demons. Yet these all come up as if we are running out of time. This phase puts everything on steroids.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

Relax and trust. It is a powerful process that is working itself out. Be patient. A year and half if we are lucky on this phase. Two to three years is more common for the most intense of it. And 5 to 12 years to really put our lessons and notes to work and create best practices that can make this shadowy time perhaps the most rewarding thing we have endured or passed through. Again, we all come here with different work to do. As mentioned, many people do not get such a heavy blow during this phase of life. We will know which one we are.

WHAT SHOULD WE NOT DO?

If are one to have occasional glass of wine or drink, okay. But this phase can really empower any form of substance abuse we have. It is a phase asking us to prepare for aging wisely. If we get drunk. Stoned out of our mind, are step our drug habit to run from this phase of our life, we will only take dangerous habits and turn them into potentially life threatening ones, ones that dictate how we age. This is a time to pay attention to what is healing us and what is killing us and do something about it. It is a time embrace the importance of energy. As we age, life gives us less for free and asks us to create our health, wealth and happiness. That means energy becomes increasingly precious. This phase wants us to teach us that. Value your energy, your health, you’ll need to do this if you want to move forward and bring happiness to the process of aging.

The other thing is clinging. We will, should face fear in this phase of our life. We are headed into the unknown, this idea of aging. If we listen to our wise soul it will tell us, let go. Trust. You can put your self back together later. Don’t try to be young and don’t think that you are old. A wise soul is ageless. Age and youth are not in the vocabulary of the wise soul. Only wisdom, being wise in our time and place. We have to let go of our ideas of youth. IN truth youth is really just energy. We only lose the energy to be young because we get mad we have to create that energy. Breath and exercise and you have energy. The mind of a young person? What is that? That is a lot of misinformation. We don’t want the mind of a young person or a child. We just want health and good energy and to follow principles that can lead to a healthy life. A caterpillar can try to cling to its youth, but how will it become if it does? And after all of our fear, whatever we grow into will always contain the caterpillar. The memories of the old self. We want to be too busy flapping our wings to be able to hang to the past.

WISDOM AGAIN?

We can live without wisdom for only so long. Wisdom is a thing of age and there is a reason. The cost of ignorance and stupidity goes up as we age. There is forgivable ignorance and stupidity and there is neglectful and lazy ignorance. As we age, life begins to say, really? Are you still doing that? And starts pulling the plug on our games and excuses. The pursuit of wisdom, how to live wisely has to begin at some point in our life and what better time than when life drags us to a place to remind us we are mortal and death is inevitable? As mentioned this wisdom is all about energy and energy management. IN the end all we have is the energy we create and how we choose to express that energy. Mother aside. Father aside. All the things we have been taught put away on the book shelf, it is time to find who WE are, what OUR life is about, and how do we embrace this crazy ride and…mange our energy. When I say in caps, WE and OUR, part of this is also just how selfish we are, have been, or think we need to be. Each of us has to decide on this. We can forge into selfish people thinking the answer to this question is in what others are doing for OUR life. A good life must end up becoming an unselfish life. Selfishness has a shelf life. But is there not a wise way to go about anything including being unselfish? If we stand in this phase of life and say I just want to be good and unselfish, life will echo back, not good enough! You still need to be wise, in fact, even more wise. Yes, mid life is great bitter pill for those with kind hearts. We have lived long enough to see all that works against the good intentions of the world. Wisdom says, take the load off. Swallow the bitter pill. Now go find out how to be joyful anyway. In the end all any of us will have is the ability to savor the little things. Get started now. Don’t wait to fall in love with little meaningless things