“To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned what it means to begin.”

Nadine Strain was eighty-five when she wrote the poem “If I Had My Life to Live Over”: I’d like to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have mo

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: But this: that one can contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart gently, and not refuse to go on living, is inexpressible.

It’s not the crow’s feet under your eyes that make you old, Or the gray in your hair, I’m told. But when your mind makes a contract your body can’t fill, You’re over the hill, brother, you’re over the hill.

Aldous Huxley reminds us, “The body is always in time, the spirit is always timeless and the psyche is an amphibious creature compelled by the laws of man’s being to associate itself to some extent with its body, but capable, if it so desires, of experiencing and being identified with its spirit.”

You took this birth because you have work to do that involves suffering and the kinds of situations you find yourself in. This is your curriculum for this birth. Where you are now with all your neuroses and problems is just the right place. This is it, and it’s perfect. Live life fully and richly as a partner with God and accept what comes with ope

When working with pain, give it space, allow it to be, and know that your awareness of the pain is separate from the pain itself. Opening to the pain allows it to be part of the reality you are witnessing and decreases the resistance to it, allowing you to relax around it. Open to what it is, acknowledge it, give it space, bring your awareness to i

In Sanskrit this is called vairagya, a state of weariness with worldly desire where only the desire for spiritual fulfillment is left. The spiritual pull is the last desire, one that really grabs you, but that dissolves on its own because you dissolve in the process.

Trust your intuitive heart. The Quakers call it the still, small voice within. When it speaks, listen. If, as you listen to your heart’s intuition, it feels right to do something, do it.