When people come to me for help, they often express a sense of feeling lost or ungrounded.
Maybe they’ve recently experienced a significant loss or are moving through an unexpected life transition.
On the surface, the change may have impacted their intimate relationships, their career, their family stability or their faith…but deep down, the change has begun to unravel their deepest sense of self, and this feels universally terrifying.
Who am I?
What do I want out of life?
Am I truly living my purpose?
In my experience, most humans will inevitably face such a moment—usually sometime between their thirties and sixties.
In my view, these are not questions to be avoided. These are questions to be embraced.
Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Friar, teaches about the two halves of life in his beautiful book: Falling Upward.
In the first half of life, we spend most of our time building our box: we’re focused on all the things we’re supposed to do and meeting the expectations we’ve been given by others. We’re creating an identity that gives us stability and a clear path to follow.
But sooner or later, most of us will hit a point that has the potential to propel us into a new way of being: a more personal spirituality, a more imaginative and expressive way of operating, a more fulfilling and authentic path, defined by our own values and Highest joy.
This potential is called “The Second Half of Life” by Father Richard, and in contrast to all the striving and doing of our early years, it is defined by the courageous decision to allow ourselves to be un-done.
What is it to be undone?
It is to allow all the conditioning, the ego identities, the facades, the unconscious coping, the primal reactions that have helped us survive in the past to unravel…to be seen as the illusions they are.
It is to learn how to let all the noise and clutter fall away and awake to the fact that your human heart, in partnership with your wise and miraculous body, has always been beating inside you since the moment you were born, trying to guide you to the truest and most expansive version of your true Self.
It is to accept the reality that nobody outside of you could find this place for you, which means you must take full responsibility for the life you create in each moment. And that you have the strength, wisdom, and ability to do just that, if you only learn how.
If you are a human being facing the precipice of a “Second Half of Life” undoing, don’t despair.
Don’t hide from the very emotions that are so insistently trying to communicate the most important information you will ever come to know:
There is more for you! There is more to life than this!
Everything you are looking for is already here, within you, exactly as you are.
The problem is that most traditional methods point you to an incomplete toolkit and often come from misguided intentions, a sure sign that they have not themselves actually traveled the road that they’re attempting to help you navigate.
1. They are missing essential pieces to a truly transformative outcome. These essentials include: embodied awareness, clear, trauma-informed education and mindfulness tools, personal meditation practice, and supportive community that provides both support and real-time feedback to measure and learn to skillfully apply your learned skills.
2. They are working with you from the misguided intention that stability or comfort is the goal. The truth is that you can’t truly step into a Second Half of Life without facing your pain: in other words, you have to “feel it to heal it,” and things often get more uncomfortable before they get better. But this kind of healing is a permanent solution, a life-changing awakening, an expanded freedom that nobody can ever take away from you once you’ve done the work to find it in yourself.
We don’t preach temporary fixes or offer creative strategies to numb, avoid, or distract. We won’t encourage you to paint over the problem or come up with new ways to try to control your surroundings.
We’ll simply support you, one step at a time, with the kind of love, insight, and compassion that can only come from a fellow-journeyer, as you face your fear and learn to surrender, taking full ownership of your actions and reactions, of the state of consciousness you bring to each interaction, of the open heart and absolute integrity you’re trying to cultivate in each moment.
When you’re ready, we can help you step into a truly transformative Second Half of Life with a more complete toolkit than any other approach I’ve ever seen in the healing and transformational space.
It has become so very apparent to me–there is something truly special that wants to be borne into the world through the Body & Soul programs.
Are you meant to be a part of it?