Transformational Speaking... - Omega

...If You Want to Change the World, Tell a Better Story.


Let's face it - winning the hearts & minds of people, bringing them on board to a radically different, more holistic view of aging, requires authentic communication, soul to soul.  

Gail Larsen's 06/27-29 Omega workshop description seems to say it all - communication requires taking a "powerful and natural step into" my own "magnificence and truth," discovering the place of my "personal power and authenticity."

My psyche would once have cowered at the thought of such words.  Especially authenticity.  Authenticity was an alien concept to me.  

From my earliest years & especially after my early twenties, the people in our family with the most clout on our culture seemed uncomfortable with authenticity.  Frankly, I was pretty warped, growing up with sibs who seemed to regard it as an alien term, cloaking it in interpretations I never grasped.  

Today, I like authentic.  I'm looking for authentic in my life.  

Some people will be askance at the thought of me as an ineffective communicator.  Gibber gabber is not the same as making myself heard - truly heard.  

"The ability to move others has little to do with your facts and information.  It comes from eliminating fear and distrust of expressing your deepest values."  That's another challenge - expressing my deepest values, identifying accepting honoring what they are.  

How true that if you want to change the world, tell a better story.  When you strip down to what is essential, we are more the sum total of our stories than our DNA.  They hold great power & the person who can convey & share them the most effectively winningly convincingly has found the key to success. At this moment in time, that's not me. 

Seeking to be a catalyst to a more holistic aging is a huge task.   It's true, I only taken baby steps, but they are headed in the right direction.  

Still, it won't matter to the many unless I find ways to I successfully quantify what I do, then set them out in ways others can learn, make their own, and use.  

Back in my corporate days, they drummed into us that success is pretty straightforward - identify something of perceived value, find the simplest way to offer it to the public, then duplicate duplicate duplicate. I have something of increasing value.  Now I have to figure out how to transform a personal grace into steps anyone can follow, a way for it to be shared, then repeat & repeat & repeat.  

It's important that my heart's desire organically.  To grow it beyond just a few clients, am seeking ways to team up local resources & elder care communities into mutually beneficial partnerships.

Adlai Stevenson is reported as saying, "When I speak, crowds applaud.  When Jack Kennedy speaks, they march."  Here's hoping Gail helps me set people of all ages marching!

 

Buddha Body Yoga - Omega

It's a good thing I'm comfortable with the topsy turvy, because it turns out that the most effective way to untangle messed up brain circuitry seems counter intuitive - - through & body breath work.  Yoga, meditation, physical exercise.  Who knew!

Actually, makes sense.  And explains why it feels like I've gone as far as I can solo.  I have.  Praise be for all I was able to accomplish basically on my own, but the final part requires connecting with others who can guide me to a wordless inside, a place of boundless feelings rather than limiting terminology.  

My starting place is a late May weekend Omega workshop - Buddha Body Yoga, designed for folks like me, who have difficulty with traditional yoga (arthritis).  Know in the very tissues of my being that I am going.  Financing, figuring out transportation - details.  Will beckon & see what appears. 

Starting at the very beginning - greater clarity of thought - a very good place to start!

Michael Hayes developed Buddha Body Yoga to help everyone enjoy increased flexibility, mental clarity, and better health. This practice is welcoming and accessible to the timid, the overweight, the injured, and the differently abled. Buddha Body Yoga focuses on the basics: connecting with your body, feeling comfortable in daily motion, understanding anatomy, finding a healthy posture, and learning to breathe freely. - See more at: http://www.eomega.org/workshops/buddha-body-yoga#-workshop-description-block

Michael Hayes developed Buddha Body Yoga to help everyone enjoy increased flexibility, mental clarity, and better health. This practice is welcoming and accessible to the timid, the overweight, the injured, and the differently abled. Buddha Body Yoga focuses on the basics: connecting with your body, feeling comfortable in daily motion, understanding anatomy, finding a healthy posture, and learning to breathe freely. - See more at: http://www.eomega.org/workshops/buddha-body-yoga#-workshop-description-block

Michael Hayes developed Buddha Body Yoga to help everyone enjoy increased flexibility, mental clarity, and better health. This practice is welcoming and accessible to the timid, the overweight, the injured, and the differently abled. Buddha Body Yoga focuses on the basics: connecting with your body, feeling comfortable in daily motion, understanding anatomy, finding a healthy posture, and learning to breathe freely. - See more at: http://www.eomega.org/workshops/buddha-body-yoga#-workshop-description-block

Michael Hayes developed Buddha Body Yoga to help everyone enjoy increased flexibility, mental clarity, and better health. This practice is welcoming and accessible to the timid, the overweight, the injured, and the differently abled. Buddha Body Yoga focuses on the basics: connecting with your body, feeling comfortable in daily motion, understanding anatomy, finding a healthy posture, and learning to breathe freely. - See more at: http://www.eomega.org/workshops/buddha-body-yoga#-workshop-description-block

 

Game on!

Pioneer Network, staying-in-place, Conscious Aging - I read about these & other revolutionary elder care initiatives & feel frustrated.  How to get my unique perspective into today's quest for a saner elder care culture?  

It will take learning new approaches that develop untapped personal communication skills, developing my personal profile (the best way to successfully network is to provide perceived value), and learning systems language currently light years beyond my grasp.  

My perspective, experience & skills are needed in the fight against a culture that too often puts olders out on the fringes, too often considers what olders bring to the table worthless rather than priceless.

This is a time-sensitive problem.  Our olders are slipping away.  Every death is one less opportunity to enrich our lives, our culture.  

For me, this isn't a selfless passion.  At 62, I'm invested in turning things around, back to where they were for millenia - until the Industrial & Information Revolutions made anyone that wasn't perceived as productive or flexible to be outdated, pitiful, taking up valuable space on the planet.

How long have I been helping olders ease into being elders?  At least thirty years.  It's time to stop playing around & get into the game.

Never thought of that

As I waited at a grannie client's "senior lifestyle residence" for her to join me for breakfast, someone I'd never met came over & struck up a conversation.  She & others were curious why my client was living there when there is a church-sponsored retirement community in the center of our hometown.  

Hmmm.... Never occurred to me any of her friends there might wonder about that. 

My answer could have underscored that our hometown facility is strictly residential - my client would be responsible for almost all her meals, for cleaning the apartment, for taking her meds - whereas where she lives offers all that, and much more. While I gave a passing mention of that, it wasn't my focus.

The heart of my answer embraced all my client has from being where she is at this moment in her life.  

Although she isn't with long-time friends, she's delighted with her new ones.  She loves hearing their life stories & world views (many of which are vastly different from her own).  She thoroughly enjoys the weekly current events group & Bible study class & many wonderful programs that engage and/or entertain.  

Most of all, she savors being part of lively meal-time discussions.  

Saturday night supper has become special fun.  John & I join her in the facility's spacious dining room, sharing a table with & getting to know her friends.  And she glories in heading out afterward for a night cap.  (One of these days at least one of her friends will accept our invitation to join us!)

Whether it's returning home after her Saturday night cap or after any of our outings, she always wants to take the front entrance rather than the back, even though it is it's three or four times longer to her door.  Small wonder - unless it is very late, there's at least a few friends to whom we give a merry wave & smile; we often come across several hanging out in the comfy chairs that dot the spacious hallways, who draw us into whatever gab is going on.  However tired she might be from a long evening out, I can feel her drawing energy from them.

Why is she there, instead of a hometown residence 

where she'd be with people she's known for all or most of her life?  

In a nutshell, because her loving husband thoroughly researched all their options & saw in it the best place for his beloved.  The one thing he did not foresee was being hospitalized - in the facility's excellent medical center - before they could move in.  What a blessing that when her family did get her tucked into an apartment, he was not far.  It was tragic he passed not long after, but what a comfort for him to know she was in a place that provided  extensive services & support, as well as shelter.

My thanks to her friend for asking WHY my grannie client lives there, rather than somewhere else.  It's such a good match, hadn't really thought about it.  

Smiling, thinking how pleased her husband would be that his choice has worked out so well for his missing-him-yet-happy Own True Love.  

Elder Care Anarchists, Unite!

How beyond cool to find that someone posted an indiegogo crowdfunding request in Dec 2013 also committed to overthrowing our nation's current elder care culture, when older people seem typically minimized & too often left to decline as quietly as possible.

Decades in marketing taught me that having an idea before its time can be as futile as having one after.  Pioneer Network has supported a culture of life-affirming aging since 1997.  It calls for "radical change in the culture of aging so when one goes to a nursing home/ community-based setting it is to thrive, not to decline."  

Glory be, I've been doing it since 1974!  Our ultimate goal is the same, but our methods are wondrously different.  

What ARE my goals for radically changing the experience of aging, from our youngest years to our final days?  Ah, that's the question!

Meddling with Medusa

The older I get, the more astonished I am at the power of personal issues, apparently resolved long again, which - at the most unexpected moments - rear their Medusa-like heads,  Zap!  in a moment, transformed into whatever disempowered self you most feared.

The older you get, the more this experience can take one of several, very different paths.  The best response is to see it for what it is, recognize the emotions as phantoms from your past, recognize whatever served as trigger, file it away in your mental filing case so you can (hopefully) recognize it next time (there always seems to be a next time) it rears its ugly head, then step out of the emotional goo it leaves in its path & move on.  That's the ideal, yet rare, response.

A more common response is to emotionally engage in discussion with one or more of the writhing serpent heads, which can lead to a sorry end if you don't realize what's happening.  If you are able to catch on to that the Medusa head has now turned into a tar baby, then you can go through something resembling the steps above.  If you're not, then you are headed for...

Being stuck in a place you do not want to be, that has no good outcome for you.  Sadly, this the sorry fate for most people facing ancient, unidentified issues rooted in the distant distant past. 

This is true for people of any age, from toddler through centenarians.  And when you get multiple generations doing their best to help & support each other through challenging times, that dichotomy compounds difficulties & frequently obliterates advantages.  

So, where am I rambling with this?  It is often easy for us to forget that people of all ages face these same challenges.  For people with older friends & family, it's especially important to always hold this awareness close to your heart, to realize that just as this difficult reality affects your older friends & family, it affects you too.  If I interacted with my own mother or am with a current day "grannie client," it is important that I am mindful of when my triggers are being touched off and to ever mindful of really listening sensing relating to what the other is saying or feeling.  The results can be surprising.

My mother & I worked together on e-mail postings that she wrote during her last 18 months.  Usually, each writing session - Mom dictating, me tip tapping it online - was a joy.  Occasionally, she'd something unexpected would trigger a deep response & she'd be face-to-face with her Medusa.  That always astonished me.  And every time it happened, we'd face it together & inevitably she came out if it with more understanding of an ancient wound, with one less snake hissing at her.  

It feels to me like an ideal way for most "ancients" (Mom's term, not mine, for anyone up there in years) to deal with these almost always mythological horrors from their past is through friendships with younger people, people who care about them, are interested in engaging with them, learning about & from them.  And that, in this current culture, is rare.  

The all-too-often-missed reality is that older people are in a position to see things in a different light, but my guess is that most of them don't realize that funky fact.  They have the accumulation of years & the hard-won perspective & the TIME to see things differently.  Mind you, I've had lots of friends & acquaintances & even client's families who don't see this, who experience their older loved ones as entrenched in their opinions, unwilling to see a different possibility.  All I can say it that's not my experience IF you get them involved in an engaging discussion peppered with questions.

How do I get older friends to open up to me?  I don't try.  If opening up to me was my goal, I'd fail.  My advantage is that I'm genuinely interested in & engaged with them.  It's not unusual for an incident in my life, shared younger woman to older friend, to help them feel at ease - safe - bringing up something from their own past.  We might talk about stories or we might not.  But they have someone to open up to, if they want.   

It amazes me how personal stories lead into seeing personal myths lead into unexpected moments of clarity.  And clarity coupled with compassion cuts Medusa to the core!

Not what I envisioned

Then again, it's not what anyone envisioned.  Around the middle part of the last century, when we - especially Americans - were hopped up by the gee whiz! promises of science, it was exciting to think of a life that extended beyond the average age of 66.5 (white males) or 72.2 (white females).  Here we are, 60 some years later, and that rate HAS increased, to 76.5 and 81.3 (respectively).

What is considered "old age" has moved upwards over the past half century, yet for some strange reason the age that society tags as "senior citizen" has decreased.  Significantly.   It's the rare store or organization that still makes reaching 65 as criteria for senior citizen.  AARP - the ultimate "senior" organization - lets you join at age 50.  50!  An amazing # of my classmates are or soon will be retired, having been offered too-sweet-too-resist early retirement packages by their employers.  

We're living longer, yet being labeled senior citizens 15 years before our parents were, and a lot of us are being edged out of the business world.  Mind you, a lot of my classmates who are or soon will be retired were able to do so with hefty savings & looking forward to spending time with their kids & grandkids or starting second careers; some will even make more money working part time as consultants.  But a lot of other retirees wind up stocking shelves at Walmart or flipping burgers at Burger King or hauling in shopping carts from the Giant parking lot.  

That is not what I envisioned when social scientists were selling the idea of sweetly extended life.  I doubt anyone did.  Alas, turns out reality is topsy turvy from what we were sold... i mean told way back when.

Mind you, my own life has been blessed.  My gosh, I was unexpectedly leaving employments from my late 20s.  I learned early on that dreams can go pouf! in an instant ~ AND ~ that every  unexpected step has immeasurable value.  John  & I were blessed with older parents who were attentive engaged vibrant through their final days at 87 & 91.   There was more,much more - it seems like all of my older friends, men & women in their 80s & 90s, lived similar attentive engaged vibrant lives.  

But more & more,I look around & it seems so much of our culture's attitude toward the aging & the old is downright topsy turvy. 

Praise be, I've had experience with topsy turvy all my life, experience transforming it into something that somewhat resembles balance.  It's what I'm good at, won accolades for in business & a sense of peace in my personal life.  Who better to get fully involved in the glorious efforts afoot to turn around our nation's whacked-out views about being older & older care!

If a lot of someones don't step up and change how we view & experience aging - not just after we turn 50 or 62 or 65, but long long before - things are going to get incredibly worse remarkably fast.  Hallelujah, a lot of people are.  Count me in!

The life that lies ahead for me is not what I envisioned when social scientists back in the '60s  ballyhooed we'd live considerably longer lives than our parents, way past our grandparents.  

Here we are - X marks the spot where I whole-heartedly dedicate the rest of my life working to the best of my ability to ensure that the years ahead of me - ahead of every "senior citizen" - are something worth ballyhooing! 

Peace with Family

What a surprise to discover that the older I get, the more all the wonderful things I've received from my siblings comes to the fore & the more all the experienced-as-drecky stuff fades to the back.  Unexpected & beyond liberating!

Am fond of telling people that if I shared all the hurts & stressed perceived from my sibs, they could be covered over a short cafe au lait at Be Well , but to share all the amazing experiences & awesome insights learned from & through them...?   Well, we'd be at Be Well from a breakfast yogurt parfait through a late afternoon tuxedo,

Age doesn't mute the pains & heart aches; it gives them a different patina, along with the awareness that as much as they wounded me, it's a given that I did a pretty good number on them, too.  One of the great gifts of turning 50 was life began to gain a deeper perspective.  It was pretty clear that I not only knew very little, I basically knew zip. 

Peace with family, at least in my heart.  Definitely one of the gifts of my older age.

Life Gets Better - Wendy Lustbader

I first learned about Wendy Lustbader last year.  I consider her 2011 book, Life Gets Better, the best book on life experience for anyone, not just folks over 60.  It shifted my view &put more steel in my spine.  

Her article in the Huffington Post - Your Parents Are Afraid of You - is essential reading for anyone with elderly loved ones.  It captured so many experiences that I had with my own mother, both challenging & deeply rewarding. 

ANOMALY ~ or ~ CATALYST?

A posting I wrote on another blog seems the perfect first posting on this one, dedicated to doing everything I can to upset our nation's current woeful approach to elder care.

From dreamweaver.blogspot.com...

03/26/14   anomaly ~or~ catalyst?

Which will it be?

When I die, will I leave a legacy as an interesting anomaly who had a rare talent for engaging empowering energizing a few older friends?  Or will I be remembered as a catalyst for an overhauled expectation & experience of aging?  

It was possible to get to the place that I am, making a significant difference for a smattering of grannie clients, on my own.  Doing more - becoming the elder care anarchist it feels in ever fiber of my being is my truest calling & purpose - will require the help & support of many.  Will I find the courage to ask?  

Anomaly or catalyst - which will it be?