January 31, 2025 • 56 mins
Air Date - 30 January 2025
Many of us navigating the years beyond midlife report high self-acceptance, freedom, and joy. However, there can also be bouts of second-guessing and regret and the occasional longing to be reminded that you’re not in this alone.
My guest this week on Vox Novus, Carol Orsborn, says “conscious aging” can make spiritual seekers grow older both wiser and fiercer! Carol Orsborn, Ph.D., is a leader in the conscious aging movement and editor-in-chief of “Fierce with Age: The Digest of Boomer Wisdom, Inspiration, and Spirituality.” The author of more than 35 books, including The Spirituality of Age, with Robert Weber, Ph.D., and Older, Wiser, Fiercer, as well as popular blogs on Huffington Post and BeliefNet.com, she has served on the faculties of Georgetown University, Loyola Marymount University, and Pepperdine University.
Her website is http://carolorsborn.com, and she joins me this week to discuss her latest book, Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life.
#CarolOrsborn #VoxNovus #VictorFuhrman #NewThought #Lifestyle #Metaphysics #Paranormal #Spirituality #Interviews
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Many of us navigating the years beyond midlife report high self-acceptance, freedom, and joy. However, there can also be bouts of second-guessing and regret and the occasional longing to be reminded that you’re not in this alone.
My guest this week on Vox Novus, Carol Orsborn, says “conscious aging” can make spiritual seekers grow older both wiser and fiercer! Carol Orsborn, Ph.D., is a leader in the conscious aging movement and editor-in-chief of “Fierce with Age: The Digest of Boomer Wisdom, Inspiration, and Spirituality.” The author of more than 35 books, including The Spirituality of Age, with Robert Weber, Ph.D., and Older, Wiser, Fiercer, as well as popular blogs on Huffington Post and BeliefNet.com, she has served on the faculties of Georgetown University, Loyola Marymount University, and Pepperdine University.
Her website is http://carolorsborn.com, and she joins me this week to discuss her latest book, Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life.
#CarolOrsborn #VoxNovus #VictorFuhrman #NewThought #Lifestyle #Metaphysics #Paranormal #Spirituality #Interviews
Visit the Vox Novus Show Page https://omtimes.com/iom/shows/vox-novus/
Connect with Victor Fuhrman at http://victorthevoice.com/
Subscribe to our Newsletter https://omtimes.com/subscribe-omtimes-magazine/
Connect with OMTimes on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Omtimes.Magazine/ and OMTimes Radio https://www.facebook.com/ConsciousRadiowebtv.OMTimes/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OmTimes/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/omtimes/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2798417/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/omtimes/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Vox Novus, the New Voice, Vox Novus, the New Dimension.
Vox Novus thought and movement leaders who will share from
their experience and offer tools to help us navigate our
rapidly changing world. My name is Victor Furman. Welcome to
(00:28):
Vox Novus, the New Voice. Many of us navigating the
years beyond midlife report high self acceptance, freedom, and joy. However,
there can also be bouts of second guessing and regret,
(00:48):
and the occasional longing to be reminded that you're not
alone in this. My guest this week on Vox Novus,
Carol Orsbourne says conscious aging can make spiritual secrets growing
older both wiser and fiercer. Carol Orsbourne is a leader
in the conscious aging movement and editor in chief of
(01:09):
Fierce with Age, The Digest of Boomer Wisdom, Inspiration and Spirituality.
The author of more than thirty five books, including The
Spirituality of Age with Robert Weber and Older Wiser Fiercer,
as well as popular blogs on huffingtonPost and beliefnet dot com.
She served on the faculties of Georgetown University, Loyola Marramount University,
(01:33):
and Pepperdine University. Her website is Carolorsbourne dot com and
she joins me this week to discuss her latest book,
Spiritual Aging Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life. Please join me
in welcoming to Vox Novis Carol Orsbourne. Welcome, Carol, Hey Victor.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
So good to meet you, and I got a little
glimpse of you, so I feel like we'orld friends.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
There you go, Carol, please share with us your path
and how you were called to the wisdom that you
share with our world.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Oh gosh, I'm gonna have to go way back, because
when I was sixteen, my temple in the North Shore
Congregation Israel invited me to run the youth group. They
decided that it would be great for somebody from the
(02:28):
group to call the people back together, and that when
we went off to college, when we would come back
in the summers, we would gather. And I said, okay,
that's fine, but only if you allow me to go
visit ashrams and mosques and the American Theological Theosophical Society
(02:49):
was there. I was so curious about everything in the world,
and they did. They gave me the van and Kurt
Blanche and I sat at the feet of Mass and
it just was. It put a taste in my mouth,
so that when I got a little bit older, I
got to go off on my own to Europe and
I sat at the feet of Krishnamurdi, and I was
(03:11):
also in an ashram once with Muktinanda. So you know,
I was curious, and I didn't settle anywhere in particular,
but I absorbed a lot from all over the place.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
And specifically about your work with spiritual aging. Where did
that come in.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Well, from that point on, I brought spiritual curiosity and
growth and learning and just gathered like a snowball going
down the cliff. I just kept getting bigger and bigger.
So I really realized that I needed a new idea
about what aging meant to me. When I got to university,
(03:56):
actually I got my master's theological studies, that was fine,
and then I got my doctorate in history and critical
theory of religion and was very interested in spiritual development
and also life stage development. So that's what I studied
with the assumption that even though I was I thought
I didn't know if I was young or old. But
(04:17):
I was forty nine at the time I got accepted
into the doctorate program at Vanderbilt and was highly I
was still publishing books and articles and giving talks all
over the world. I just assumed I would get a
ten year track position. But when I turned fifty, I
couldn't even get an interview. So I aged out, and
(04:40):
I had all these expertise, and oh my gosh, at
that point, I realized that academia and the scholarly approach
to aging hadn't prepared me for the actual experience of aging.
And I slipped and slid over or back into the
world and realm of mystic saints and sages for finishing school.
(05:04):
So I have both the academic training about what the
scholars say about life stages and our spiritual and psychological
development over time, and then I really had my finishing
school with the mystics.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
We often hear about a lifetime being divided into three acts.
The first act is about youth and education, the second
act career and family, and the third act wisdom, self
actualization and legacy. How do you define the third act
and what inspired your body of work at this time?
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Well, that's a very astute question. And you know, I
really love the Hindu conception of the different stages of life.
They put it differently, but you know, you go through
the householder stage where you are running your family and
contributing to society and active and you know, in the mainstream,
and then there's multiple stages beyond that of you know,
(06:00):
first you go out into the forest and it's communal
and you're there to offer wisdom to the people who
come seek you out. And then the stage beyond that
is you're not even You're just communing with with God.
You know, it's just you and your heart, and it's
not even communal anymore necessarily, And for me, I began
(06:28):
to understand that aging held the potential to be a
spiritual experience. So when I started on that track, I
thought that I would bring spirituality to aging and make
aging more palatable. Somehow I didn't understand that for me
and for many mystics, aging itself is the spiritual path,
(06:51):
is the spiritual training, is the spiritual experience.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Absolutely. Before we discuss your latest book, Spiritual Aging, let's
look at some of your earlier works on the topic,
starting with the Spirituality of Age, written in conjunction with
doctor Robert L. Weber. What inspired this book and what
do you and doctor Weber share with readers.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, you know, that was ten years ago, and I'm
very proud because we won a national award for this work.
But we were way ahead of the market. People are
waking up now, and I think actually the last election
and the disappointment that many of us are feeling an
older age that we might not get what we hope
(07:33):
to get for out of external reality in this lifetime
is going to manifest necessarily, so there's kind of a
burgeoning of interest. But back then we were really way showers,
you know, our lamp, way out ahead of the market.
But we met at the American Society of Aging, which
(07:54):
God bless them. They're very involved in the social aspect,
medical aspects, caregiving aspects of aging, but not so much
into the spiritual aspects. And I was so impressed with
this man. He was a psychologist that was from Harvard
and was had a big practice and a big reputation,
(08:20):
and he was talking about aging as a monastic experience
and I was I just love that terminology. I was
coming up with different terminology of my own. And after
his talk, we we bumped into each other on a stairwell,
as sometimes miraculously happens in life, and I said to him,
(08:44):
you know, I would love to know. I feel called,
on the one hand, to like withdraw from from the
world right now and really take the time to develop myself.
So I was sixty seven at the time. You know,
I'd love to back off and really developed myself spiritually.
But at the other hand, I've never known so much,
(09:05):
and I feel really called to continue writing books and
to contribute. And I expected this wisdom to come out
of his mouth. You know, I thought I was just
going to sit there and soak it up, and instead
he said me too. So that started the dialogue. Actually
we were sixty five because we spent two years talking
to each other every week on the phone, and we
(09:29):
turned that dialogue into this book. So the book is
Questions and Answers, the fifty most important questions we think
you need to ask yourself from, you know, as you're
approaching older age. And I think that the richness of
the dialogue is that I was a Jewish academic and
he was a former Jesuit psychologist. And I was a
(09:54):
woman and he was a man. I have children, he didn't,
so we had a lot of contrasts, and yet there
seemed to be a perennial truth that we both kept
centering around. And so, you know, neither of us liked
the pedantic style of teaching, where the guru model, where
you know, I tell you what aging is and then
(10:17):
you do it. And he didn't like that either. So
we thought questions and answers and dialoguing and involving people
was the best way to kind of stimulate some real
change in our society. It's certainly for individuals.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Please tell us about your novel, Angelica's Last Breath.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
I haven't been asked about that book for a long time.
It is. It's a pet book of mine because the
way I learned about aging, I said, I studied mystics
and sages and people like that. I heard about the
book by Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Iliat, and I
(11:00):
probably said that wrong, even on I Lias, I don't know,
but I heard that that that that was like the
definitive statement of what death and dying is about, and
that it was actually taught in medical schools to doctors
so that they would have more compassion for people who
were in those last stages of life. And so I
(11:21):
thought I would read the book, and it's a it's
a little book, but it's it's extremely dense, and it's
written about this middle manager in the eighteen hundreds who
is just this bitter, you know, arrogant guy and goes
through this brutal, long fight against an illness and and
(11:46):
loses his friends. Of fact, it's a horrible book, really,
but I'll give the ending away. You know, in the end,
even he becomes enlightened. It's you know, after his final breath,
or as his final breath is out of him, all
of a sudden he understands the whole scope of his
life and what it was about, and becomes enlightened. And
(12:07):
I thought to myself, Wow, a couple of things. Wouldn't
it be great if? And so many hospice workers say
the same thing. People get it, but they get it
with their last breath. Well why wait until your last breath?
You know, what would it take to have that experience,
you know, in your fifties or your sixties and then
live in that place of being beloved and enlightened? And
(12:31):
I thought it was all in this book because he
really peels away the masks that separate us from from
merger with the divine. And but his language is so arcane.
I wrote Angelica's Last Breath to I put it into
a contemporary public relations professional who is, you know, betrayed
(12:53):
by one of her clients, and it gets diagnosed with
breast cancer and things that I could identify with or
actually had gone through. And uh it was. It was
a personally meaningful book for me because it showed me,
page by page through the eyes of Tolstoy in my
(13:15):
own life. What were the blockages that I was putting up?
What was the masks that I was carrying that was
preventing me from having this sense of acceptance of aging
and the belief that in the end that it would
be this uplifting could be this uplifting experience.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Your book Older Wiser Fiercer is a classic. We can
understand the older and wiser, but why Fiercer?
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Well, I was in a moment of rebellion against the
idea of aging gracefully. First of all, I was not
aging gracefully. I was kicking and screaming, sometimes in protest
against my own aging. But also I was not feeling
the serenity that we were promised at that point. And
(14:09):
I think about Gail she she wrote the book Passages
that mark so many of our You know, I read
that book when I was in my twenties or thirties,
and it was the first. It was my introduction to
life stage and spiritual development. And in her book, you know,
she gave every life stage. You know, midlife got forty pages,
adolescens gets forty pages, she gets to sixty, it's sixty plus.
(14:32):
That's it, sixty plus. And she called it the serene sixties.
And it got a couple of pages. And I know, Gail,
she passed, but she and I became friends, and she
was not a serene older person. She was the kind
of vital, alive, questioning, you know, self looking looking at
(14:55):
her soul, doing, doing life review, all that kind of
stuff that keeps us vital until the end. So I
just didn't. I didn't. To me, it's older and wiser, yes,
but there's something else. And where I got fiercer from
was from Florida, Scott Maxwell, who was a psychologist. She
(15:17):
actually studied with Jung and she was a therapist and
at the age of eighty five, fifty years ago, she
wrote a book called The Measure of My Days and
in it she just journaled what it was like to
be what I wanted to be someday. She was eighty
five and more passionate and more alive than ever. But
(15:39):
she was also truth telling. She was saying how hard
things were and how bad the times were. She wasn't
sugarcoating things. And at that time when I read this book,
I can't remember how many years ago. It was now
around the time that I wrote Older, Wiser, Fiercer. You know,
(15:59):
all the books who were out there in the world
and were things like, here's how you can stay in
mid life forever. Just take more B twelve. You know,
here's my exercise regime. Here's how to stay positive and
happy about aging no matter what you know. Here's how
to control your fate in your future. And you know,
all those books just felt like they were in denial
(16:20):
or romanticizing, and I was craving, craving somebody who would
both tell the truth about reality and still have an
upbeat idea about what it means to be alive to
the very end. And so that's where that notion came from.
(16:41):
She uses the word fiercer, and happily, ironically, I discovered
later so did Ramdas He also talked a lot about fierceness,
being fierce with age.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
That's interesting. Yeah, I assured with you that I turned
seventy two a couple of weeks ago, and for me,
the last five years of life have been probably the
most peaceful years of my life because I'm doing things
that I enjoy doing. Many of the things that I
do help other people. And I I'm in love with
my wife, and I'm in love with my life and
(17:12):
my kids and my family, and I just feel the
sense of peace.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Well, Victor, I admire you. I think that how can
I put this? I have moments like that, I have
extended moments like that, but I also get thrown into
(17:40):
tumult and chaos. And I have come to realize that
my philosophy of spirituality comes from Florida Scott Maxwell's. It
comes to the idea of expanding to embrace the entirety
of the human potential, and if I am peaceful to
(18:03):
be so grateful for that, but not to leave out
for me what has become important. You know, I've been
through long periods of personal denial where I've just checked
out in order to transcend reality, but especially in these times,
I can't. It's just breaking for me. And so I
(18:25):
say a broken heart is an open heart, and what
my heart is open to are some emotions I had
previously denied, like righteous anger, bittersweet sadness, loving myself even
if I feel hopeless at times. So for me, my
(18:46):
definition of spirituality is comes from those. And there's different
schools of mysticism, you know, but the mystics that I
follow believe in two major tenants, and that is the
first is that you have to accept reality for it
can't help for what it can't help being. You know,
reality is going to spin out of our control, and
(19:10):
you have to be able and willing to look at
in the face and say, yes, this hurts, this is bad,
I don't like this. At the same time, and here's
the challenge is to grow spiritually to the point where
you know that even if your life in the world
is not behaving the way you wish it would, and
that you're stuck in powerlessness, that you are beloved no
(19:33):
matter what. So that's, you know, that's more of my reality,
especially at this moment.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
And I agree with you on that. The thing that
changed my life. You and I have the commonality of
both having attended the New Seminary in New York City
many years ago. Yes, I attended in the mid to
late nineties. You attended in the early twenty tens. I
think you had.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Said yes, huh.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
And the founder, Rabbi Joseph Gelberman, used to share an expression,
and there was a Hebrew expression ha call bista. The
literal translation is everything is in order. But he used
to go beyond that. He used to say, everything is
unfolding in divine order. We may not be able to
see it, we may ununderstand it, we may dislike things
(20:16):
that are happening, but ultimately there's a higher purpose in
everything that transpired. And when he said that, that teaching
changed my life because I started seeing it in everything
in my life. And I'm grateful to him for that training.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that a spiritual
perspective gives you is the ability to look at long
spans of time and not to be so self an
ego centric. So you think it's all about you, I mean,
I think my mistake is a member of the baby
boomer generation. And I'm just five years older than you. No,
I'm a little older. I'm seventy six turning seventy seven
(20:51):
next week.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Actually, happy birthday.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Thank you. Now I can't remember what I was gonna say.
I got stuck at my birthday. You know, it is
this idea that it was all going to I felt.
I felt like my life was telling a story and
that was going to have not only my own life,
but the world was going to have a happy, happy
ending in my lifetime. And I see things in a
(21:16):
much broader perspective. Now another mystic that I love said,
you know, we have to see ourselves as you know,
we're like bricks of bricks of a stepping stones. You
know that that that that it's not we're not the
be all and end all that we are rather the
steps upon which the subsequent generations may climb to to
(21:43):
go to higher heights than we were able to achieve.
I mean, our generation did some amazing things. We did
some really really good work, and we can't deny that.
But we did have some hubris, I would say, some
false optimism. And I think for many of us that
sense that we had the will and the vision to
(22:06):
have things work out externally in our lifetime is crumbling.
So the question gets to be to look towards people
like you, Victor, who are finding some groundedness. I love
what you said. You know, some level of acceptance that
doesn't deny reality but transcends it by including it. I
(22:32):
love what you said, and I could say that as
a witness to my own I'll call it agony. Right now,
there's moments of agony. But there's two parts of me.
One is just bemoaning the state of the world. The
other is witnessing bemoaning it, and so in love with
myself for being the kind of person that has values
(22:55):
that transcend the moment and to understand that the ain
I'm feeling is something that is holy, you know, something
that this world needs. We are the beacon, we are
the light onto the future. And as as your Rabbi said,
you know, it's like we don't know the end of
the story yet, but all we can do is be
(23:17):
in the present moment, letting our making, taking care of
our spirits, tending our.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Spirits absolutely, And I think you will share with me
the sentiment that one of the gifts that we have
in this process is extending ourselves to others and extending
compassion and kindness and love in a world that so
desperately needs it.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yes, well, and that comes from that humility that I
was talking about. I think a lot of baby boomers,
people our age and even younger are wasting a lot
of time in self flagellation, looking at where they do,
where they went wrong, you know, or trying to set
these giant purposes and then being disappointed, you know, or
(24:03):
bemoaning bemoaning their limitations. You know, there's just a lot
of time being wasted. And I see, for me, it
starts at the grassroots up. And I know that when
I had big ambitions and was trying to make a
name for myself, you know, both in the business world
and then as even as even as a writer. This
(24:24):
is my thirty sixth book. So I had those books
that you know, coincided with those big ambition years. I
would often be too busy to tender the everyday kindnesses
to the people I encountered. You know, I just I
was too busy, you know, I was, you know, take
care of me because I'm an important person. You know,
I don't feel that way now now, because I've given
(24:46):
up on the big picture. I think I'm a much
better human being. I will take the time to have
a quality conversation and and be kind and compassionate, you know,
let the person with fewer groceries get in front of
me in line. That kind of thing, absolutely, you know,
and I think, I think, especially in times like these,
we have to we have to be content with living
(25:12):
out of our own values at whatever level it's available
to us, and it may be a very very small circle.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
I think that you and I and others of our
generation and are seeing with spiritual eyes what this world
truly needs. And I think that we are harbingers of
the good word and harbingers of kindness and compassion. My
guest is Carol Orsborne. We're going to be talking about
her new book, Spiritual Aging, Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life. Carol,
(25:44):
please share with our listeners with and get your books
and find out more about you.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Oh gosh, okay, Well, first of all, Spiritual Aging is
an easy title to remember, and it's available everywhere online
in bookstores. Don't if they're not carrying it, tell them
to carry it. I am thrilled that the book is
it's two years of weekly readings and reflections, and so
(26:15):
it spawned a grassroots movement that is global, which I'm
so thrilled about because as people are reading this week's reading.
They're getting together online or through various organizations and online
at my website. Excuse me, I'm on substack, So Spiritualaging
(26:36):
dot substack dot com is where people are having an
online spiritual aging study and support group where they're reading
this week's reading and then con conversing twenty four to
seven as they're available to And I cannot believe the
vitality of the conversations that are going on because you know,
the rumor or the stereotypes of aging is that were isolated,
(27:00):
and it's true, you know, those of us who are
on the cutting edge of spirituality are having a hard
time finding each other. And so it's like on my website,
and also there's an organization called Saging International that's s
A G E hyphen i NG, and there's various other
organizations where people are actually coming together globally on zoom
(27:23):
and there is such a collective sigh of relief that
we don't have to do aging alone and that we
could support one another in making aging a spiritual experience.
And if you can't remember any of those, hopefully my
name will be somewhere on your on your website and
(27:44):
just go to Carol Orsbourne dot com, which is an
entryway into all these things that I'm involved with.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
And we'll be back with more of Carol after these words.
On the own Times Radio.
Speaker 4 (27:55):
Network, the best of the holistic, spiritual and conscious world
Ome Times Radio IOWMFM. Ome Times Magazine is one of
the leading online content providers of positivity, wellness and personal empowerment.
A philanthropic organization, their net proceeds are finaled to support
worldwide charity initiatives via Humanity Healing International. Through their commitment
(28:19):
to creating community and providing conscious content, they aspire to
uplift humanity on a global scale. Home Times co creating
a more conscious lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Back on Box Novus, my guest this week is Carol Orsbourne.
We're going to be talking about her brand new book,
Spiritual Aging Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life. Congratulations on Spiritual Aging.
Thank you very much for bringing it to us. We
need this book.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Thank you. I accept your congratulations. I'm at a point
in my life where I'm willing to give myself credit
where credit is due.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Absolutely, you created this book, as you had mentioned in
the first segment, as a series of one hundred and
twenty bite sized weekly readings. What inspired the book and
the concept of the weekly readings.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Well, I wrote the book that I needed and wanted
because I've discovered that for me, spiritual growth is cyclical
or maybe a spiral, you know, sort of a spiraling deeper.
But I keep on touching on the same topics. And
because I journal a lot, I can look back at
(29:31):
a journal I did ten years ago and read something
that I discovered and thought I was going to know forever,
some spiritual breakthrough or discovery or insight, and realized I
had just written down the same thing last week. So
you know, it's like, oh my god, I realized that
(29:52):
ten years ago and here it's ten years later, and
I thought this was a brand new discovery. So I
know that I need reminders. I know that I know things,
and so I don't think of this book as teaching
new things. I think of it as a reminder for
those of us who have been on the spiritual path
for some time of what it is that we know
(30:12):
and can It's every moment is like a hologram, you know.
It's like you can look at it from a prismatic
Every single angle you look at it contains the whole,
and so there's a real synchronicity in this book. You know,
I wrote the book my last writing on It takes
(30:33):
about a year or two of promotion, putting it together, publication,
marketing two years ago, way before what's going on now.
And it's so thrilling to me when when I open
the book and there's a reading and it's incredibly pertinent
to what we need to know right now, Like I
know it's the first week of February where we're just approaching.
(30:57):
Is called you know, broken heart, Open Heart, and you know,
it's how we learn from the things that break our heart.
And there's plenty around the world to break our heart
right now, and how do you turn that into spiritual deepening.
So it's been pretty interesting how the weekly readings have
reflected a reality as unfolding.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
And this is two years worth, one hundred and twenty readings.
Why only two years worth?
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Oh my god, I'm human. The book is three hundred
and sixty four pages as it is, you know, But
the discovery I had first I did a year's worth
of reading and I thought, no, I'm still hungry, you know,
I want more, And so I wrote the second year
(31:49):
and at that point, I felt full. I don't know
how to describe it. I felt done, and then I thought,
you know what helps me feel done is the notion
of cycles. That that what I want to do now
is it's been two years since I wrote the first reading.
I'm ready to go revisit that again. So you're meant
to get to the end of this book and then
(32:09):
start over again. So don't think of it as first year,
second year, and then you're done, thinking of it as
living the rest of your life in two year cycles.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
So maybe there'll be a sequel.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Well, the sequel is and I'm still writing, but it's
a study guide to the book, and I'm posting them
as we go at my substack at spiritualaging dot substack
dot com. So there are reflection reflections based on the reflection,
(32:42):
you know, question discussion, questions and spiritual exercises, and a
lot of people are getting together with three or four
friends and you know, maybe it used to be their
book club, but they want to go deeper, or they're
taking it to their temple or church, or they're at
their senior center, or even some people are at senior
living facilities. And the book is it just leads you
(33:07):
from one week to another with plenty of stuff to
talk about. But if you go on to my website,
then you get the study guide and you can go
that much deeper. So you know this. I've already thought
this through. I haven't done all the study guides for
the second year, so I'm doing those now and I
think I'm just going to continue to run these for
the rest of my life because where the excitement for
(33:30):
me right now is is on the comments and a
discussion that's taking place, you know, online and in the
zoom groups. Not so much what I'm saying as what
it is generating in terms of discussion between.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
People in addition to your personal wisdom and experience. Who
else do you call upon in spiritual aging.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Right now, I'm learning from I joined. They're called spiritual agings,
study and support groups, and these are these small pods
of between you know you and a best friend too.
I think the largest is about ten people, and then
once a month I lead a group for staging that
has like seventy five people, but then it breaks up
(34:18):
into smaller groups. It's learning from each other. I think
that we are on the cutting edge of something new
at the break we were talking about the fact that
there's so many of our generation that are breaking new
grounds spiritually in terms of deepening and you know, getting
over spiritual as spirituality as an egotistical. I'm going to
(34:38):
teach you how to do this thing called transcendence and
be happy forever.
Speaker 5 (34:42):
You know.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
I think there's a real deepening going on, and I
think we're challenging ourselves against real world challenges. And so
for me a teacher would be There's a woman that
responded to my comments today on my study guide who
said something like somebody said, I asked a question, what
are you hoping for? And she said, I'm hoping for
(35:06):
good health for myself and my family, and somebody else responded,
I hoped for that too, but I have a terminal disease.
So now what I hope for is to be beloved
no matter what. So you know, it's like I think
of as as spiritual warriors or adventures, you know, on
the cusp of new learning, and we're sharing we're sharing
(35:28):
it with each other as we go. But that doesn't
say I don't have way shors. So my main influences
would be Florida Scott Maxwell, who I talked about earlier
Ramdas who I mentioned earlier, reb Zalman, who was the
founder of Saging. He wrote this wonderful book called From
Aging to Saging. There's there's in the back of my
(35:52):
book Spiritual Aging is all my sources and influences, and
it goes on for four or five pages. So that
would be or my web site. I also I've run
Spiritual Aging book clubs for a number of years, and
so on my book on my website are the books
that I've read with reflection questions. So that's a great
(36:14):
resource for people.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
I had shared that my spiritual teacher, the founder of
the New Seminary, Rabbi Joseph Gelberman, taught us many wonderful things,
and one of the things that he shared was that
the eleventh Commandment should have said thou shalt have purpose?
What is your sense of purpose? In the third Act?
Speaker 2 (36:36):
I love it, but I'm very easily satisfied. I have
to say I'm not I spent many years looking for
grand purpose. I was one of those people, honest to God,
who believed I could change the world by myself through
my writing and being. So, you know, because I came
out of the box with so much hubris around that
and went as big as I possibly could. I remember
(36:59):
the first book I wrote I thought was going to
change the world. It was a book called Enough Is Enough,
exploding the myth of having it all. I thought I
would write this book and then all of my peers
would suddenly put value above accumulation and understand the importance
of simplicity and having values, you know all that. And
(37:20):
it did. It sold a lot of books, but no,
the world didn't change. So I started out with grand
purpose and grand disappointment and struggled with it for many
years until I seriously started in on the aging process.
And at that point I had a breakthrough of enlightenment
(37:42):
that had to do with understanding that my purpose was
living my life every day as I was living it
out of my values. And you know how, I was
practicing my values in real life, in the present moment,
not not in some future of idealized future. And the
realization I know that you're involved with you've written a
(38:04):
book about the blessing of animals and spiritual animals and
things like that. So my breakthrough came while I was
at the New Seminary studying for my spiritual certificate in
coaching and counseling. Because we were living in New York
City and my husband had a big job. He was
off every day and it was just me and my dog,
(38:27):
and I had just left my big position, so it
was new for me to have this time both to
maul and dread and think about the future and my
age and all that, but also I had a lot
of time with my dog. So I wrote a dog
at that point that was called Fierce with Age, Chasing
God and squirrels in Williamsburg, because that's what we did
(38:51):
all day long. My dog and I bonded, and by
the end of that year, I came up with this
sort of breakthrough notion for me that the purpose of
my life that was that it's enough just to make
one dog happy, and so anything beyond that was a bonus.
And since I've always had dog since then, I've had
a pretty happy life from that point of view.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
You know, it's interesting that you had talked about make
one dog happy. And one of the things that I've
personally found when I put something out there, be it
a piece of writing or some advice or consoling someone,
I never do it with the intent. I do it
because it's the right thing to do, and spiritually for me,
it's the right thing to do. And I never look
(39:36):
for feedback. And once in a while you get an
email or you get a letter, or you get a
comment from someone that says that time that you spoke
to me, or that time that you counseled me, or
that time that you listened to me, especially the listening
was life changing. In that life changing moment, you may
have changed one person, but you've also changed the world
and you've done that.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah. Me, the greatest spiritual gift of older age is
freedom from seeking approval. Absolutely I would if I had
had that earlier in life, that would have been I
would have done things differently. But I personally think that
(40:21):
getting beyond seeking approval is the purpose and the meaning
of older age. That every life stage has its meaning
and purpose. And we talked earlier about the householder, you know,
I think that when we're born, I think there's a
certain amount of we need to seek approval. We're just
we're human and we have psychologies that are molded by
the previous generation. There's a certain amount of fitting in
(40:44):
that's required to get a society to function, you know.
But what joy there is to get to the age
or stage in life when that's what it's not about anymore.
And you may be doing things that accidentally get approval,
but it's not what you're aiming for, you know. I
call us some truth tellers at Spiritual Warriors.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Here you go absolutely. My guest is Carol Orsbourne, her
book Spiritual Aging, Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life. We'll be
back with more after these words on the Own Times
Radio network.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
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(41:39):
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Speaker 5 (41:48):
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Speaker 1 (42:04):
Back on Vox Novus. My guest this week is Carol
or isborn her book Spiritual Aging Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life, Carol,
many of us have lost parents and brothers and sisters
and dear friends as we enter into our late sixties
and seventies. What do you offer for those who are grieving?
Speaker 2 (42:26):
I'm grieving too, so you know, the question is not
that you don't allow yourself a period of grieving, and
not that the sadness will ever go away, but trying
to find that moment when you can start moving back
into the world again without leaving the loss behind. So
(42:53):
I have a spiritual practice that I myself have used
when I've been in the heat of my grieving and
had to still function the world, and again there's sadnesses
that I'll never leave behind. I call it a light,
a crying candle, and that is after you know you
have to devote yourself full time to your grieving. People
that don't take that time to really go through it thoroughly,
(43:15):
it will just haunt them in an unfinished way. But
for those of us who do recognize that moment, what
you can do is say, Okay, I am not completely
done with my grieving, but I know I have to
function again. I have to make a living, or I
have kids to raise, or you know whatever, or it's
just time, you know. So I say, buy a candle
(43:37):
as big as your grief. And some of them are
big floor jobs, you know, you've seen those candles that
are like three or four feet tall. And then determine
to yourself how much of your life you're going to
give to this a day. So some griefs require an
hour or more a day, some are not that big,
and maybe fifteen minutes a day, and then you light
(43:58):
that candle for that amount of time, set a timer,
and let yourself feel those feelings fully. And then when
that hour is done or the fifteen minutes are done,
you blow out the candle and get out with your
life as best you can. And then the next day
you do the same thing until the candle's burned.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
And there's no right way or wrong way to agree.
But it's an individual process.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Oh yes, And I'd like to expand on that and
just say there's also no right or wrong way to age,
and there's no right or wrong way to die. I
love this story from Ramdas He said that the people
that had the hardest problems the spiritual people who had
the hardest times with death and dying are the ones
(44:42):
who thought that because they had done so much spiritual work,
they should just be able to gracefully fade away their
deathbed in a sense of tranquil lady, tranquility and peace.
And when instead they were crying out in pain or
pissed off at God or whatever, they would also turn
against themselves feeling like they weren't dying right. And so
(45:06):
I think that that's a lesson for all of us, really,
that that we have to Whoever, however you're showing up today,
you know, accepting yourself means if you're angry, you accept
that you're angry, You're still angry. The only thing that
changes is you add a witness to it that can
observe yourself being angry, and with that you can extend
(45:30):
love to yourself and say, yes, I'm angry, and I
don't like being angry, but you know, I can love
myself in this anger, as opposed to turning yourself against
against yourself and saying having second doubts about your spirituality,
you know, and and regret and all that. But then
you know you even have to. There's there's times when
(45:50):
you're gonna have to witness yourself having second doubts and
and regrets, second guessing yourself. So and then you have
to love yourself too. So that's to me, that's what
the spiritual journey is at an older age, is learning
how to feel beloved no matter what, and to extend
that to your own self, to grow in that direction,
(46:11):
and to love yourself when you're not there yet.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yeah, and to that extent. One of the challenges for
many in all stages of life is forgiveness, to offer
and to ask for it. How do you approach forgiveness?
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Well, I'm a beginner on forgiveness. I'll just say I
have a lot more to learn, because for me, the
line between forgiveness and complacency is very thin, and I
can sometimes use forgiveness as a place to go to
(46:48):
to not rise to oppose forces that I feel called
to oppose. So, as a spiritual or morals I understand
that if I go deep enough, and I go I'm
talking way, way deep, I can think of the most
(47:11):
odious people in current times in history and have compassion
for what it must be like to be them, to
have been raised in such a way that they can
inflict so much evil seemingly without conscience, and there's a
certain kind of forgiveness or understanding on that level, but
(47:32):
I cannot use that as an excuse to override when
I'm being called to stand up to evil. So it's
a slippery slope. And like I said, I'm a beginner,
and sometimes I think it's I better be very careful
about forgiving prematurely if it's not sincere on my part.
(47:57):
If you understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Yeah, I'm talking more about your personal forgiveness. One of
the things that I've shared at memorial ceremonies and funerals
is that tomorrow is never guaranteed. If you love someone,
tell them today. If you feel that someone has hurt
you in some way, try and forgive them today. And
(48:19):
if you feel you've hurt for someone, ask for forgiveness today,
because tomorrow is never guaranteed.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Oh God, that's gorgeous. I just got to share it
down my spine. Well, it does remind me of the
twelve Step programs, and I have been a part of
the twelve step programs. A lot of my spirituality it
comes from many, many streams, but alan On has been
a big contributor. Alan on the way I experience and
define it is for people who love other people too
(48:51):
much and perhaps unwisely, no, not understanding what real love is,
but inherent and moving forward in life is acknowledging of
when you're holding grudges and seeing that as a character flaw,
(49:12):
you know, and then the serenity prayer, you know, trying
to rectify what you can and accept what you can't.
And for me, the hardest part of forgiveness is the
third part, which is, you know, the knowing the difference.
You know, what are the things that we should go
out and try and fix, and what are the things
that we need to forgive and accept. So that's that
(49:34):
to me is a lifelong learning. But I couldn't agree
with you more. That's beautiful what you say, thank you.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
I've adopted a practice of daily gratitude, expressing it to
those who have extended kindness and for virtually everything in
my life. What do you see as the blessings of gratitude?
Speaker 2 (49:52):
I am feeling more and more God's presence coming through
people and things, answer circumstances, complete strangers. I just I
feel like God is like using the world and the
universe to say at a girl, keep at it. You
(50:12):
know you did it. At the break, I was talking
about something I'm personally scared about having to do with
headline news, you know, and what did you say to me?
Keep the faith? Basically, yeah, that Victor, that was just
a gift. You know. It's like and like I said,
it's not like I don't know these things. It's just
that in the moment, we forget. And so I'll just say,
(50:35):
in this moment, I'm very grand. I'm very grateful for this,
for you and what you said, but also this whole conversation.
You know, it's lifting my spirits out of a place
this morning where I was really more reactive to the world. So,
you know, but I would have to say that I
think my spiritual practice, thank God, concludes. I have certain
(50:56):
friends I talked to and I just commit in advance.
I know we're going to talk every Tuesday or whatever.
Certain groups that I go to, like I mentioned elean
On that I go to on a regular basis, certain
readings I have peppered my life with wake up tools
and reminder tools. And again, you know, you ask why
did I write this book. That's what spiritual aging is.
(51:16):
You know, It's like I need things in my life
to keep me awake. Otherwise I go into a reactive space.
And what a way to start the week with this conversation.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
So thank you, thank you. Is there one reading that
you have personally found beneficial?
Speaker 2 (51:32):
Knowing that this book was gonna I was asking people
to devote a whole week of their lives to each
of these readings. I tried to make each one my favorite,
if you know what I mean. It's like I didn't
want people to come to the clunky week where I
didn't really care that much. So what I did is
(51:53):
I was thinking that you might ask something like this,
and so I just looked at the first week of
February of year one, and this is a reading about
open heart versus you know, is there a difference between
a broken heart and an open heart? Are they the same?
So that's a reading I would suggest people take a
(52:16):
look at.
Speaker 1 (52:17):
What would you like readers to take away from spiritual aging?
Speaker 2 (52:21):
First of all, that you don't have to do aging alone.
And if you are in a dreading, reactive, self punishing,
hanging on denial, brittle place, any of those things that
growing towards the kind of perspective you and I've been
(52:44):
talking about is a choice. You have heard this hour,
and there are lots of resources, not only my own book,
not only your shows, but as I mentioned, page after
page of book reference and says both in this book
and on my website, it's your choice. And if you
(53:06):
think if you're one of those people that are saying, well,
that's true for you or everybody, but here's my exception.
I've got to tell you everybody has an exception. You know,
somebody says they're too sick, or somebody says they don't
have enough money, or somebody says that it won't work
for them because they're too lonely or whatever it's like.
(53:26):
Just know that everybody who's doing this work could use
something as their exception, and don't just take the leap
of faith that there is another way to hold your life,
no matter how daunting a task it seems to you.
Right now you are not alone. Go find other people
(53:49):
that were in your spot and got to the other
side of it. We are growing together. I'm not here
to tell you how to do it. There's no right
way to do it, but you will be inspired by
the people of our generation and generations before who are
waking up to a new vision of aging that is
(54:11):
meaningful and purposeful in and of itself, regardless of external circumstances,
and regardless of what is happening to you right now.
Speaker 1 (54:19):
The wisdom of Carol Oorsbourne her book Spiritual Aging Weekly
Reflections for Embracing Life. Carol one more time, please share
with our listeners where they can get your books and
find out more about you.
Speaker 2 (54:30):
Okay, thank you. The book is called Spiritual Aging, very
easy to remember. You can find it anywhere online Amazon.
Of course we're debuted at number one on the Aging
and Self Helpless, which I'm very proud of. But your
local retailer can order it for you anywhere you get
your books. Spiritual Aging the other resources that I talked about.
(54:56):
You can subscribe for free to my online presence at
Spiritualaging dot substack dot com, and if you join our
paid membership then you'll get the weekly study guides and
join the group online that's conversing. You can also go
(55:17):
to Saging International that's Sage hyphen i ng Saging International
and join online zoom groups that I'm leading and also
that are being led locally around the world, small groups
of ten on zoom. And if you don't remember any
of this, just go to Carolorsbourne dot com and just
(55:39):
remember that my name has an R in it, so
it's O R S B O R N Carol Orsbourne
dot com and that will be a conduit to news
and linking up to everything.
Speaker 1 (55:51):
Carol, thank you so much for joining us and sharing
this wisdom which is so needed in our world today.
Speaker 2 (55:57):
Thank you, Oh my gosh, thank you. I think I
did tell you about how you changed my you lifted
my day to day. So I will listen again when
this runs, and maybe multiple times.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
So thank you, Victor, thank you, and thank you for
joining us on Box Novius. I'm Victor the Voice Erman
have a wonderful week.
Vox Novus, the New Voice, Vox Novus, the New Dimension.
Vox Novus thought and movement leaders who will share from
their experience and offer tools to help us navigate our
rapidly changing world. My name is Victor Furman. Welcome to
(00:28):
Vox Novus, the New Voice. Many of us navigating the
years beyond midlife report high self acceptance, freedom, and joy. However,
there can also be bouts of second guessing and regret,
(00:48):
and the occasional longing to be reminded that you're not
alone in this. My guest this week on Vox Novus,
Carol Orsbourne says conscious aging can make spiritual secrets growing
older both wiser and fiercer. Carol Orsbourne is a leader
in the conscious aging movement and editor in chief of
(01:09):
Fierce with Age, The Digest of Boomer Wisdom, Inspiration and Spirituality.
The author of more than thirty five books, including The
Spirituality of Age with Robert Weber and Older Wiser Fiercer,
as well as popular blogs on huffingtonPost and beliefnet dot com.
She served on the faculties of Georgetown University, Loyola Marramount University,
(01:33):
and Pepperdine University. Her website is Carolorsbourne dot com and
she joins me this week to discuss her latest book,
Spiritual Aging Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life. Please join me
in welcoming to Vox Novis Carol Orsbourne. Welcome, Carol, Hey Victor.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
So good to meet you, and I got a little
glimpse of you, so I feel like we'orld friends.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
There you go, Carol, please share with us your path
and how you were called to the wisdom that you
share with our world.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Oh gosh, I'm gonna have to go way back, because
when I was sixteen, my temple in the North Shore
Congregation Israel invited me to run the youth group. They
decided that it would be great for somebody from the
(02:28):
group to call the people back together, and that when
we went off to college, when we would come back
in the summers, we would gather. And I said, okay,
that's fine, but only if you allow me to go
visit ashrams and mosques and the American Theological Theosophical Society
(02:49):
was there. I was so curious about everything in the world,
and they did. They gave me the van and Kurt
Blanche and I sat at the feet of Mass and
it just was. It put a taste in my mouth,
so that when I got a little bit older, I
got to go off on my own to Europe and
I sat at the feet of Krishnamurdi, and I was
(03:11):
also in an ashram once with Muktinanda. So you know,
I was curious, and I didn't settle anywhere in particular,
but I absorbed a lot from all over the place.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
And specifically about your work with spiritual aging. Where did
that come in.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Well, from that point on, I brought spiritual curiosity and
growth and learning and just gathered like a snowball going
down the cliff. I just kept getting bigger and bigger.
So I really realized that I needed a new idea
about what aging meant to me. When I got to university,
(03:56):
actually I got my master's theological studies, that was fine,
and then I got my doctorate in history and critical
theory of religion and was very interested in spiritual development
and also life stage development. So that's what I studied
with the assumption that even though I was I thought
I didn't know if I was young or old. But
(04:17):
I was forty nine at the time I got accepted
into the doctorate program at Vanderbilt and was highly I
was still publishing books and articles and giving talks all
over the world. I just assumed I would get a
ten year track position. But when I turned fifty, I
couldn't even get an interview. So I aged out, and
(04:40):
I had all these expertise, and oh my gosh, at
that point, I realized that academia and the scholarly approach
to aging hadn't prepared me for the actual experience of aging.
And I slipped and slid over or back into the
world and realm of mystic saints and sages for finishing school.
(05:04):
So I have both the academic training about what the
scholars say about life stages and our spiritual and psychological
development over time, and then I really had my finishing
school with the mystics.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
We often hear about a lifetime being divided into three acts.
The first act is about youth and education, the second
act career and family, and the third act wisdom, self
actualization and legacy. How do you define the third act
and what inspired your body of work at this time?
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Well, that's a very astute question. And you know, I
really love the Hindu conception of the different stages of life.
They put it differently, but you know, you go through
the householder stage where you are running your family and
contributing to society and active and you know, in the mainstream,
and then there's multiple stages beyond that of you know,
(06:00):
first you go out into the forest and it's communal
and you're there to offer wisdom to the people who
come seek you out. And then the stage beyond that
is you're not even You're just communing with with God.
You know, it's just you and your heart, and it's
not even communal anymore necessarily, And for me, I began
(06:28):
to understand that aging held the potential to be a
spiritual experience. So when I started on that track, I
thought that I would bring spirituality to aging and make
aging more palatable. Somehow I didn't understand that for me
and for many mystics, aging itself is the spiritual path,
(06:51):
is the spiritual training, is the spiritual experience.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Absolutely. Before we discuss your latest book, Spiritual Aging, let's
look at some of your earlier works on the topic,
starting with the Spirituality of Age, written in conjunction with
doctor Robert L. Weber. What inspired this book and what
do you and doctor Weber share with readers.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, you know, that was ten years ago, and I'm
very proud because we won a national award for this work.
But we were way ahead of the market. People are
waking up now, and I think actually the last election
and the disappointment that many of us are feeling an
older age that we might not get what we hope
(07:33):
to get for out of external reality in this lifetime
is going to manifest necessarily, so there's kind of a
burgeoning of interest. But back then we were really way showers,
you know, our lamp, way out ahead of the market.
But we met at the American Society of Aging, which
(07:54):
God bless them. They're very involved in the social aspect,
medical aspects, caregiving aspects of aging, but not so much
into the spiritual aspects. And I was so impressed with
this man. He was a psychologist that was from Harvard
and was had a big practice and a big reputation,
(08:20):
and he was talking about aging as a monastic experience
and I was I just love that terminology. I was
coming up with different terminology of my own. And after
his talk, we we bumped into each other on a stairwell,
as sometimes miraculously happens in life, and I said to him,
(08:44):
you know, I would love to know. I feel called,
on the one hand, to like withdraw from from the
world right now and really take the time to develop myself.
So I was sixty seven at the time. You know,
I'd love to back off and really developed myself spiritually.
But at the other hand, I've never known so much,
(09:05):
and I feel really called to continue writing books and
to contribute. And I expected this wisdom to come out
of his mouth. You know, I thought I was just
going to sit there and soak it up, and instead
he said me too. So that started the dialogue. Actually
we were sixty five because we spent two years talking
to each other every week on the phone, and we
(09:29):
turned that dialogue into this book. So the book is
Questions and Answers, the fifty most important questions we think
you need to ask yourself from, you know, as you're
approaching older age. And I think that the richness of
the dialogue is that I was a Jewish academic and
he was a former Jesuit psychologist. And I was a
(09:54):
woman and he was a man. I have children, he didn't,
so we had a lot of contrasts, and yet there
seemed to be a perennial truth that we both kept
centering around. And so, you know, neither of us liked
the pedantic style of teaching, where the guru model, where
you know, I tell you what aging is and then
(10:17):
you do it. And he didn't like that either. So
we thought questions and answers and dialoguing and involving people
was the best way to kind of stimulate some real
change in our society. It's certainly for individuals.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Please tell us about your novel, Angelica's Last Breath.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
I haven't been asked about that book for a long time.
It is. It's a pet book of mine because the
way I learned about aging, I said, I studied mystics
and sages and people like that. I heard about the
book by Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Iliat, and I
(11:00):
probably said that wrong, even on I Lias, I don't know,
but I heard that that that that was like the
definitive statement of what death and dying is about, and
that it was actually taught in medical schools to doctors
so that they would have more compassion for people who
were in those last stages of life. And so I
(11:21):
thought I would read the book, and it's a it's
a little book, but it's it's extremely dense, and it's
written about this middle manager in the eighteen hundreds who
is just this bitter, you know, arrogant guy and goes
through this brutal, long fight against an illness and and
(11:46):
loses his friends. Of fact, it's a horrible book, really,
but I'll give the ending away. You know, in the end,
even he becomes enlightened. It's you know, after his final breath,
or as his final breath is out of him, all
of a sudden he understands the whole scope of his
life and what it was about, and becomes enlightened. And
(12:07):
I thought to myself, Wow, a couple of things. Wouldn't
it be great if? And so many hospice workers say
the same thing. People get it, but they get it
with their last breath. Well why wait until your last breath?
You know, what would it take to have that experience,
you know, in your fifties or your sixties and then
live in that place of being beloved and enlightened? And
(12:31):
I thought it was all in this book because he
really peels away the masks that separate us from from
merger with the divine. And but his language is so arcane.
I wrote Angelica's Last Breath to I put it into
a contemporary public relations professional who is, you know, betrayed
(12:53):
by one of her clients, and it gets diagnosed with
breast cancer and things that I could identify with or
actually had gone through. And uh it was. It was
a personally meaningful book for me because it showed me,
page by page through the eyes of Tolstoy in my
(13:15):
own life. What were the blockages that I was putting up?
What was the masks that I was carrying that was
preventing me from having this sense of acceptance of aging
and the belief that in the end that it would
be this uplifting could be this uplifting experience.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Your book Older Wiser Fiercer is a classic. We can
understand the older and wiser, but why Fiercer?
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Well, I was in a moment of rebellion against the
idea of aging gracefully. First of all, I was not
aging gracefully. I was kicking and screaming, sometimes in protest
against my own aging. But also I was not feeling
the serenity that we were promised at that point. And
(14:09):
I think about Gail she she wrote the book Passages
that mark so many of our You know, I read
that book when I was in my twenties or thirties,
and it was the first. It was my introduction to
life stage and spiritual development. And in her book, you know,
she gave every life stage. You know, midlife got forty pages,
adolescens gets forty pages, she gets to sixty, it's sixty plus.
(14:32):
That's it, sixty plus. And she called it the serene sixties.
And it got a couple of pages. And I know, Gail,
she passed, but she and I became friends, and she
was not a serene older person. She was the kind
of vital, alive, questioning, you know, self looking looking at
(14:55):
her soul, doing, doing life review, all that kind of
stuff that keeps us vital until the end. So I
just didn't. I didn't. To me, it's older and wiser, yes,
but there's something else. And where I got fiercer from
was from Florida, Scott Maxwell, who was a psychologist. She
(15:17):
actually studied with Jung and she was a therapist and
at the age of eighty five, fifty years ago, she
wrote a book called The Measure of My Days and
in it she just journaled what it was like to
be what I wanted to be someday. She was eighty
five and more passionate and more alive than ever. But
(15:39):
she was also truth telling. She was saying how hard
things were and how bad the times were. She wasn't
sugarcoating things. And at that time when I read this book,
I can't remember how many years ago. It was now
around the time that I wrote Older, Wiser, Fiercer. You know,
(15:59):
all the books who were out there in the world
and were things like, here's how you can stay in
mid life forever. Just take more B twelve. You know,
here's my exercise regime. Here's how to stay positive and
happy about aging no matter what you know. Here's how
to control your fate in your future. And you know,
all those books just felt like they were in denial
(16:20):
or romanticizing, and I was craving, craving somebody who would
both tell the truth about reality and still have an
upbeat idea about what it means to be alive to
the very end. And so that's where that notion came from.
(16:41):
She uses the word fiercer, and happily, ironically, I discovered
later so did Ramdas He also talked a lot about fierceness,
being fierce with age.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
That's interesting. Yeah, I assured with you that I turned
seventy two a couple of weeks ago, and for me,
the last five years of life have been probably the
most peaceful years of my life because I'm doing things
that I enjoy doing. Many of the things that I
do help other people. And I I'm in love with
my wife, and I'm in love with my life and
(17:12):
my kids and my family, and I just feel the
sense of peace.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Well, Victor, I admire you. I think that how can
I put this? I have moments like that, I have
extended moments like that, but I also get thrown into
(17:40):
tumult and chaos. And I have come to realize that
my philosophy of spirituality comes from Florida Scott Maxwell's. It
comes to the idea of expanding to embrace the entirety
of the human potential, and if I am peaceful to
(18:03):
be so grateful for that, but not to leave out
for me what has become important. You know, I've been
through long periods of personal denial where I've just checked
out in order to transcend reality, but especially in these times,
I can't. It's just breaking for me. And so I
(18:25):
say a broken heart is an open heart, and what
my heart is open to are some emotions I had
previously denied, like righteous anger, bittersweet sadness, loving myself even
if I feel hopeless at times. So for me, my
(18:46):
definition of spirituality is comes from those. And there's different
schools of mysticism, you know, but the mystics that I
follow believe in two major tenants, and that is the
first is that you have to accept reality for it
can't help for what it can't help being. You know,
reality is going to spin out of our control, and
(19:10):
you have to be able and willing to look at
in the face and say, yes, this hurts, this is bad,
I don't like this. At the same time, and here's
the challenge is to grow spiritually to the point where
you know that even if your life in the world
is not behaving the way you wish it would, and
that you're stuck in powerlessness, that you are beloved no
(19:33):
matter what. So that's, you know, that's more of my reality,
especially at this moment.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
And I agree with you on that. The thing that
changed my life. You and I have the commonality of
both having attended the New Seminary in New York City
many years ago. Yes, I attended in the mid to
late nineties. You attended in the early twenty tens. I
think you had.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Said yes, huh.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
And the founder, Rabbi Joseph Gelberman, used to share an expression,
and there was a Hebrew expression ha call bista. The
literal translation is everything is in order. But he used
to go beyond that. He used to say, everything is
unfolding in divine order. We may not be able to
see it, we may ununderstand it, we may dislike things
(20:16):
that are happening, but ultimately there's a higher purpose in
everything that transpired. And when he said that, that teaching
changed my life because I started seeing it in everything
in my life. And I'm grateful to him for that training.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that a spiritual
perspective gives you is the ability to look at long
spans of time and not to be so self an
ego centric. So you think it's all about you, I mean,
I think my mistake is a member of the baby
boomer generation. And I'm just five years older than you. No,
I'm a little older. I'm seventy six turning seventy seven
(20:51):
next week.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Actually, happy birthday.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Thank you. Now I can't remember what I was gonna say.
I got stuck at my birthday. You know, it is
this idea that it was all going to I felt.
I felt like my life was telling a story and
that was going to have not only my own life,
but the world was going to have a happy, happy
ending in my lifetime. And I see things in a
(21:16):
much broader perspective. Now another mystic that I love said,
you know, we have to see ourselves as you know,
we're like bricks of bricks of a stepping stones. You
know that that that that it's not we're not the
be all and end all that we are rather the
steps upon which the subsequent generations may climb to to
(21:43):
go to higher heights than we were able to achieve.
I mean, our generation did some amazing things. We did
some really really good work, and we can't deny that.
But we did have some hubris, I would say, some
false optimism. And I think for many of us that
sense that we had the will and the vision to
(22:06):
have things work out externally in our lifetime is crumbling.
So the question gets to be to look towards people
like you, Victor, who are finding some groundedness. I love
what you said. You know, some level of acceptance that
doesn't deny reality but transcends it by including it. I
(22:32):
love what you said, and I could say that as
a witness to my own I'll call it agony. Right now,
there's moments of agony. But there's two parts of me.
One is just bemoaning the state of the world. The
other is witnessing bemoaning it, and so in love with
myself for being the kind of person that has values
(22:55):
that transcend the moment and to understand that the ain
I'm feeling is something that is holy, you know, something
that this world needs. We are the beacon, we are
the light onto the future. And as as your Rabbi said,
you know, it's like we don't know the end of
the story yet, but all we can do is be
(23:17):
in the present moment, letting our making, taking care of
our spirits, tending our.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Spirits absolutely, And I think you will share with me
the sentiment that one of the gifts that we have
in this process is extending ourselves to others and extending
compassion and kindness and love in a world that so
desperately needs it.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yes, well, and that comes from that humility that I
was talking about. I think a lot of baby boomers,
people our age and even younger are wasting a lot
of time in self flagellation, looking at where they do,
where they went wrong, you know, or trying to set
these giant purposes and then being disappointed, you know, or
(24:03):
bemoaning bemoaning their limitations. You know, there's just a lot
of time being wasted. And I see, for me, it
starts at the grassroots up. And I know that when
I had big ambitions and was trying to make a
name for myself, you know, both in the business world
and then as even as even as a writer. This
(24:24):
is my thirty sixth book. So I had those books
that you know, coincided with those big ambition years. I
would often be too busy to tender the everyday kindnesses
to the people I encountered. You know, I just I
was too busy, you know, I was, you know, take
care of me because I'm an important person. You know,
I don't feel that way now now, because I've given
(24:46):
up on the big picture. I think I'm a much
better human being. I will take the time to have
a quality conversation and and be kind and compassionate, you know,
let the person with fewer groceries get in front of
me in line. That kind of thing, absolutely, you know,
and I think, I think, especially in times like these,
we have to we have to be content with living
(25:12):
out of our own values at whatever level it's available
to us, and it may be a very very small circle.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
I think that you and I and others of our
generation and are seeing with spiritual eyes what this world
truly needs. And I think that we are harbingers of
the good word and harbingers of kindness and compassion. My
guest is Carol Orsborne. We're going to be talking about
her new book, Spiritual Aging, Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life. Carol,
(25:44):
please share with our listeners with and get your books
and find out more about you.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Oh gosh, okay, Well, first of all, Spiritual Aging is
an easy title to remember, and it's available everywhere online
in bookstores. Don't if they're not carrying it, tell them
to carry it. I am thrilled that the book is
it's two years of weekly readings and reflections, and so
(26:15):
it spawned a grassroots movement that is global, which I'm
so thrilled about because as people are reading this week's reading.
They're getting together online or through various organizations and online
at my website. Excuse me, I'm on substack, So Spiritualaging
(26:36):
dot substack dot com is where people are having an
online spiritual aging study and support group where they're reading
this week's reading and then con conversing twenty four to
seven as they're available to And I cannot believe the
vitality of the conversations that are going on because you know,
the rumor or the stereotypes of aging is that were isolated,
(27:00):
and it's true, you know, those of us who are
on the cutting edge of spirituality are having a hard
time finding each other. And so it's like on my website,
and also there's an organization called Saging International that's s
A G E hyphen i NG, and there's various other
organizations where people are actually coming together globally on zoom
(27:23):
and there is such a collective sigh of relief that
we don't have to do aging alone and that we
could support one another in making aging a spiritual experience.
And if you can't remember any of those, hopefully my
name will be somewhere on your on your website and
(27:44):
just go to Carol Orsbourne dot com, which is an
entryway into all these things that I'm involved with.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
And we'll be back with more of Carol after these words.
On the own Times Radio.
Speaker 4 (27:55):
Network, the best of the holistic, spiritual and conscious world
Ome Times Radio IOWMFM. Ome Times Magazine is one of
the leading online content providers of positivity, wellness and personal empowerment.
A philanthropic organization, their net proceeds are finaled to support
worldwide charity initiatives via Humanity Healing International. Through their commitment
(28:19):
to creating community and providing conscious content, they aspire to
uplift humanity on a global scale. Home Times co creating
a more conscious lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Back on Box Novus, my guest this week is Carol Orsbourne.
We're going to be talking about her brand new book,
Spiritual Aging Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life. Congratulations on Spiritual Aging.
Thank you very much for bringing it to us. We
need this book.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Thank you. I accept your congratulations. I'm at a point
in my life where I'm willing to give myself credit
where credit is due.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Absolutely, you created this book, as you had mentioned in
the first segment, as a series of one hundred and
twenty bite sized weekly readings. What inspired the book and
the concept of the weekly readings.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Well, I wrote the book that I needed and wanted
because I've discovered that for me, spiritual growth is cyclical
or maybe a spiral, you know, sort of a spiraling deeper.
But I keep on touching on the same topics. And
because I journal a lot, I can look back at
(29:31):
a journal I did ten years ago and read something
that I discovered and thought I was going to know forever,
some spiritual breakthrough or discovery or insight, and realized I
had just written down the same thing last week. So
you know, it's like, oh my god, I realized that
(29:52):
ten years ago and here it's ten years later, and
I thought this was a brand new discovery. So I
know that I need reminders. I know that I know things,
and so I don't think of this book as teaching
new things. I think of it as a reminder for
those of us who have been on the spiritual path
for some time of what it is that we know
(30:12):
and can It's every moment is like a hologram, you know.
It's like you can look at it from a prismatic
Every single angle you look at it contains the whole,
and so there's a real synchronicity in this book. You know,
I wrote the book my last writing on It takes
(30:33):
about a year or two of promotion, putting it together, publication,
marketing two years ago, way before what's going on now.
And it's so thrilling to me when when I open
the book and there's a reading and it's incredibly pertinent
to what we need to know right now, Like I
know it's the first week of February where we're just approaching.
(30:57):
Is called you know, broken heart, Open Heart, and you know,
it's how we learn from the things that break our heart.
And there's plenty around the world to break our heart
right now, and how do you turn that into spiritual deepening.
So it's been pretty interesting how the weekly readings have
reflected a reality as unfolding.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
And this is two years worth, one hundred and twenty readings.
Why only two years worth?
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Oh my god, I'm human. The book is three hundred
and sixty four pages as it is, you know, But
the discovery I had first I did a year's worth
of reading and I thought, no, I'm still hungry, you know,
I want more, And so I wrote the second year
(31:49):
and at that point, I felt full. I don't know
how to describe it. I felt done, and then I thought,
you know what helps me feel done is the notion
of cycles. That that what I want to do now
is it's been two years since I wrote the first reading.
I'm ready to go revisit that again. So you're meant
to get to the end of this book and then
(32:09):
start over again. So don't think of it as first year,
second year, and then you're done, thinking of it as
living the rest of your life in two year cycles.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
So maybe there'll be a sequel.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Well, the sequel is and I'm still writing, but it's
a study guide to the book, and I'm posting them
as we go at my substack at spiritualaging dot substack
dot com. So there are reflection reflections based on the reflection,
(32:42):
you know, question discussion, questions and spiritual exercises, and a
lot of people are getting together with three or four
friends and you know, maybe it used to be their
book club, but they want to go deeper, or they're
taking it to their temple or church, or they're at
their senior center, or even some people are at senior
living facilities. And the book is it just leads you
(33:07):
from one week to another with plenty of stuff to
talk about. But if you go on to my website,
then you get the study guide and you can go
that much deeper. So you know this. I've already thought
this through. I haven't done all the study guides for
the second year, so I'm doing those now and I
think I'm just going to continue to run these for
the rest of my life because where the excitement for
(33:30):
me right now is is on the comments and a
discussion that's taking place, you know, online and in the
zoom groups. Not so much what I'm saying as what
it is generating in terms of discussion between.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
People in addition to your personal wisdom and experience. Who
else do you call upon in spiritual aging.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Right now, I'm learning from I joined. They're called spiritual agings,
study and support groups, and these are these small pods
of between you know you and a best friend too.
I think the largest is about ten people, and then
once a month I lead a group for staging that
has like seventy five people, but then it breaks up
(34:18):
into smaller groups. It's learning from each other. I think
that we are on the cutting edge of something new
at the break we were talking about the fact that
there's so many of our generation that are breaking new
grounds spiritually in terms of deepening and you know, getting
over spiritual as spirituality as an egotistical. I'm going to
(34:38):
teach you how to do this thing called transcendence and
be happy forever.
Speaker 5 (34:42):
You know.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
I think there's a real deepening going on, and I
think we're challenging ourselves against real world challenges. And so
for me a teacher would be There's a woman that
responded to my comments today on my study guide who
said something like somebody said, I asked a question, what
are you hoping for? And she said, I'm hoping for
(35:06):
good health for myself and my family, and somebody else responded,
I hoped for that too, but I have a terminal disease.
So now what I hope for is to be beloved
no matter what. So you know, it's like I think
of as as spiritual warriors or adventures, you know, on
the cusp of new learning, and we're sharing we're sharing
(35:28):
it with each other as we go. But that doesn't
say I don't have way shors. So my main influences
would be Florida Scott Maxwell, who I talked about earlier
Ramdas who I mentioned earlier, reb Zalman, who was the
founder of Saging. He wrote this wonderful book called From
Aging to Saging. There's there's in the back of my
(35:52):
book Spiritual Aging is all my sources and influences, and
it goes on for four or five pages. So that
would be or my web site. I also I've run
Spiritual Aging book clubs for a number of years, and
so on my book on my website are the books
that I've read with reflection questions. So that's a great
(36:14):
resource for people.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
I had shared that my spiritual teacher, the founder of
the New Seminary, Rabbi Joseph Gelberman, taught us many wonderful things,
and one of the things that he shared was that
the eleventh Commandment should have said thou shalt have purpose?
What is your sense of purpose? In the third Act?
Speaker 2 (36:36):
I love it, but I'm very easily satisfied. I have
to say I'm not I spent many years looking for
grand purpose. I was one of those people, honest to God,
who believed I could change the world by myself through
my writing and being. So, you know, because I came
out of the box with so much hubris around that
and went as big as I possibly could. I remember
(36:59):
the first book I wrote I thought was going to
change the world. It was a book called Enough Is Enough,
exploding the myth of having it all. I thought I
would write this book and then all of my peers
would suddenly put value above accumulation and understand the importance
of simplicity and having values, you know all that. And
(37:20):
it did. It sold a lot of books, but no,
the world didn't change. So I started out with grand
purpose and grand disappointment and struggled with it for many
years until I seriously started in on the aging process.
And at that point I had a breakthrough of enlightenment
(37:42):
that had to do with understanding that my purpose was
living my life every day as I was living it
out of my values. And you know how, I was
practicing my values in real life, in the present moment,
not not in some future of idealized future. And the
realization I know that you're involved with you've written a
(38:04):
book about the blessing of animals and spiritual animals and
things like that. So my breakthrough came while I was
at the New Seminary studying for my spiritual certificate in
coaching and counseling. Because we were living in New York
City and my husband had a big job. He was
off every day and it was just me and my dog,
(38:27):
and I had just left my big position, so it
was new for me to have this time both to
maul and dread and think about the future and my
age and all that, but also I had a lot
of time with my dog. So I wrote a dog
at that point that was called Fierce with Age, Chasing
God and squirrels in Williamsburg, because that's what we did
(38:51):
all day long. My dog and I bonded, and by
the end of that year, I came up with this
sort of breakthrough notion for me that the purpose of
my life that was that it's enough just to make
one dog happy, and so anything beyond that was a bonus.
And since I've always had dog since then, I've had
a pretty happy life from that point of view.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
You know, it's interesting that you had talked about make
one dog happy. And one of the things that I've
personally found when I put something out there, be it
a piece of writing or some advice or consoling someone,
I never do it with the intent. I do it
because it's the right thing to do, and spiritually for me,
it's the right thing to do. And I never look
(39:36):
for feedback. And once in a while you get an
email or you get a letter, or you get a
comment from someone that says that time that you spoke
to me, or that time that you counseled me, or
that time that you listened to me, especially the listening
was life changing. In that life changing moment, you may
have changed one person, but you've also changed the world
and you've done that.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah. Me, the greatest spiritual gift of older age is
freedom from seeking approval. Absolutely I would if I had
had that earlier in life, that would have been I
would have done things differently. But I personally think that
(40:21):
getting beyond seeking approval is the purpose and the meaning
of older age. That every life stage has its meaning
and purpose. And we talked earlier about the householder, you know,
I think that when we're born, I think there's a
certain amount of we need to seek approval. We're just
we're human and we have psychologies that are molded by
the previous generation. There's a certain amount of fitting in
(40:44):
that's required to get a society to function, you know.
But what joy there is to get to the age
or stage in life when that's what it's not about anymore.
And you may be doing things that accidentally get approval,
but it's not what you're aiming for, you know. I
call us some truth tellers at Spiritual Warriors.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Here you go absolutely. My guest is Carol Orsbourne, her
book Spiritual Aging, Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life. We'll be
back with more after these words on the Own Times
Radio network.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
Humanity Healing International is a small nonprofit with a big dream.
Since two thousand and seven, HHI has been working tirelessly
to bring help to communities with little or no oh.
Our projects are not broad mandates, nor are they overnight solutions,
but they bring the reassurance then no one is alone
(41:39):
and that someone cares. To learn more, Please visit Humanity
Healing dot org. Humanity Healing is where your heart is.
Speaker 5 (41:48):
Let's breathe deep in hell, extend your spine, excel very slowly.
Find mental health resources at loveormind Today dot org. This
message is brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health
Institute and he head counsel.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Back on Vox Novus. My guest this week is Carol
or isborn her book Spiritual Aging Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life, Carol,
many of us have lost parents and brothers and sisters
and dear friends as we enter into our late sixties
and seventies. What do you offer for those who are grieving?
Speaker 2 (42:26):
I'm grieving too, so you know, the question is not
that you don't allow yourself a period of grieving, and
not that the sadness will ever go away, but trying
to find that moment when you can start moving back
into the world again without leaving the loss behind. So
(42:53):
I have a spiritual practice that I myself have used
when I've been in the heat of my grieving and
had to still function the world, and again there's sadnesses
that I'll never leave behind. I call it a light,
a crying candle, and that is after you know you
have to devote yourself full time to your grieving. People
that don't take that time to really go through it thoroughly,
(43:15):
it will just haunt them in an unfinished way. But
for those of us who do recognize that moment, what
you can do is say, Okay, I am not completely
done with my grieving, but I know I have to
function again. I have to make a living, or I
have kids to raise, or you know whatever, or it's
just time, you know. So I say, buy a candle
(43:37):
as big as your grief. And some of them are
big floor jobs, you know, you've seen those candles that
are like three or four feet tall. And then determine
to yourself how much of your life you're going to
give to this a day. So some griefs require an
hour or more a day, some are not that big,
and maybe fifteen minutes a day, and then you light
(43:58):
that candle for that amount of time, set a timer,
and let yourself feel those feelings fully. And then when
that hour is done or the fifteen minutes are done,
you blow out the candle and get out with your
life as best you can. And then the next day
you do the same thing until the candle's burned.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
And there's no right way or wrong way to agree.
But it's an individual process.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Oh yes, And I'd like to expand on that and
just say there's also no right or wrong way to age,
and there's no right or wrong way to die. I
love this story from Ramdas He said that the people
that had the hardest problems the spiritual people who had
the hardest times with death and dying are the ones
(44:42):
who thought that because they had done so much spiritual work,
they should just be able to gracefully fade away their
deathbed in a sense of tranquil lady, tranquility and peace.
And when instead they were crying out in pain or
pissed off at God or whatever, they would also turn
against themselves feeling like they weren't dying right. And so
(45:06):
I think that that's a lesson for all of us, really,
that that we have to Whoever, however you're showing up today,
you know, accepting yourself means if you're angry, you accept
that you're angry, You're still angry. The only thing that
changes is you add a witness to it that can
observe yourself being angry, and with that you can extend
(45:30):
love to yourself and say, yes, I'm angry, and I
don't like being angry, but you know, I can love
myself in this anger, as opposed to turning yourself against
against yourself and saying having second doubts about your spirituality,
you know, and and regret and all that. But then
you know you even have to. There's there's times when
(45:50):
you're gonna have to witness yourself having second doubts and
and regrets, second guessing yourself. So and then you have
to love yourself too. So that's to me, that's what
the spiritual journey is at an older age, is learning
how to feel beloved no matter what, and to extend
that to your own self, to grow in that direction,
(46:11):
and to love yourself when you're not there yet.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yeah, and to that extent. One of the challenges for
many in all stages of life is forgiveness, to offer
and to ask for it. How do you approach forgiveness?
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Well, I'm a beginner on forgiveness. I'll just say I
have a lot more to learn, because for me, the
line between forgiveness and complacency is very thin, and I
can sometimes use forgiveness as a place to go to
(46:48):
to not rise to oppose forces that I feel called
to oppose. So, as a spiritual or morals I understand
that if I go deep enough, and I go I'm
talking way, way deep, I can think of the most
(47:11):
odious people in current times in history and have compassion
for what it must be like to be them, to
have been raised in such a way that they can
inflict so much evil seemingly without conscience, and there's a
certain kind of forgiveness or understanding on that level, but
(47:32):
I cannot use that as an excuse to override when
I'm being called to stand up to evil. So it's
a slippery slope. And like I said, I'm a beginner,
and sometimes I think it's I better be very careful
about forgiving prematurely if it's not sincere on my part.
(47:57):
If you understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Yeah, I'm talking more about your personal forgiveness. One of
the things that I've shared at memorial ceremonies and funerals
is that tomorrow is never guaranteed. If you love someone,
tell them today. If you feel that someone has hurt
you in some way, try and forgive them today. And
(48:19):
if you feel you've hurt for someone, ask for forgiveness today,
because tomorrow is never guaranteed.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Oh God, that's gorgeous. I just got to share it
down my spine. Well, it does remind me of the
twelve Step programs, and I have been a part of
the twelve step programs. A lot of my spirituality it
comes from many, many streams, but alan On has been
a big contributor. Alan on the way I experience and
define it is for people who love other people too
(48:51):
much and perhaps unwisely, no, not understanding what real love is,
but inherent and moving forward in life is acknowledging of
when you're holding grudges and seeing that as a character flaw,
(49:12):
you know, and then the serenity prayer, you know, trying
to rectify what you can and accept what you can't.
And for me, the hardest part of forgiveness is the
third part, which is, you know, the knowing the difference.
You know, what are the things that we should go
out and try and fix, and what are the things
that we need to forgive and accept. So that's that
(49:34):
to me is a lifelong learning. But I couldn't agree
with you more. That's beautiful what you say, thank you.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
I've adopted a practice of daily gratitude, expressing it to
those who have extended kindness and for virtually everything in
my life. What do you see as the blessings of gratitude?
Speaker 2 (49:52):
I am feeling more and more God's presence coming through
people and things, answer circumstances, complete strangers. I just I
feel like God is like using the world and the
universe to say at a girl, keep at it. You
(50:12):
know you did it. At the break, I was talking
about something I'm personally scared about having to do with
headline news, you know, and what did you say to me?
Keep the faith? Basically, yeah, that Victor, that was just
a gift. You know. It's like and like I said,
it's not like I don't know these things. It's just
that in the moment, we forget. And so I'll just say,
(50:35):
in this moment, I'm very grand. I'm very grateful for this,
for you and what you said, but also this whole conversation.
You know, it's lifting my spirits out of a place
this morning where I was really more reactive to the world. So,
you know, but I would have to say that I
think my spiritual practice, thank God, concludes. I have certain
(50:56):
friends I talked to and I just commit in advance.
I know we're going to talk every Tuesday or whatever.
Certain groups that I go to, like I mentioned elean
On that I go to on a regular basis, certain
readings I have peppered my life with wake up tools
and reminder tools. And again, you know, you ask why
did I write this book. That's what spiritual aging is.
(51:16):
You know, It's like I need things in my life
to keep me awake. Otherwise I go into a reactive space.
And what a way to start the week with this conversation.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
So thank you, thank you. Is there one reading that
you have personally found beneficial?
Speaker 2 (51:32):
Knowing that this book was gonna I was asking people
to devote a whole week of their lives to each
of these readings. I tried to make each one my favorite,
if you know what I mean. It's like I didn't
want people to come to the clunky week where I
didn't really care that much. So what I did is
(51:53):
I was thinking that you might ask something like this,
and so I just looked at the first week of
February of year one, and this is a reading about
open heart versus you know, is there a difference between
a broken heart and an open heart? Are they the same?
So that's a reading I would suggest people take a
(52:16):
look at.
Speaker 1 (52:17):
What would you like readers to take away from spiritual aging?
Speaker 2 (52:21):
First of all, that you don't have to do aging alone.
And if you are in a dreading, reactive, self punishing,
hanging on denial, brittle place, any of those things that
growing towards the kind of perspective you and I've been
(52:44):
talking about is a choice. You have heard this hour,
and there are lots of resources, not only my own book,
not only your shows, but as I mentioned, page after
page of book reference and says both in this book
and on my website, it's your choice. And if you
(53:06):
think if you're one of those people that are saying, well,
that's true for you or everybody, but here's my exception.
I've got to tell you everybody has an exception. You know,
somebody says they're too sick, or somebody says they don't
have enough money, or somebody says that it won't work
for them because they're too lonely or whatever it's like.
(53:26):
Just know that everybody who's doing this work could use
something as their exception, and don't just take the leap
of faith that there is another way to hold your life,
no matter how daunting a task it seems to you.
Right now you are not alone. Go find other people
(53:49):
that were in your spot and got to the other
side of it. We are growing together. I'm not here
to tell you how to do it. There's no right
way to do it, but you will be inspired by
the people of our generation and generations before who are
waking up to a new vision of aging that is
(54:11):
meaningful and purposeful in and of itself, regardless of external circumstances,
and regardless of what is happening to you right now.
Speaker 1 (54:19):
The wisdom of Carol Oorsbourne her book Spiritual Aging Weekly
Reflections for Embracing Life. Carol one more time, please share
with our listeners where they can get your books and
find out more about you.
Speaker 2 (54:30):
Okay, thank you. The book is called Spiritual Aging, very
easy to remember. You can find it anywhere online Amazon.
Of course we're debuted at number one on the Aging
and Self Helpless, which I'm very proud of. But your
local retailer can order it for you anywhere you get
your books. Spiritual Aging the other resources that I talked about.
(54:56):
You can subscribe for free to my online presence at
Spiritualaging dot substack dot com, and if you join our
paid membership then you'll get the weekly study guides and
join the group online that's conversing. You can also go
(55:17):
to Saging International that's Sage hyphen i ng Saging International
and join online zoom groups that I'm leading and also
that are being led locally around the world, small groups
of ten on zoom. And if you don't remember any
of this, just go to Carolorsbourne dot com and just
(55:39):
remember that my name has an R in it, so
it's O R S B O R N Carol Orsbourne
dot com and that will be a conduit to news
and linking up to everything.
Speaker 1 (55:51):
Carol, thank you so much for joining us and sharing
this wisdom which is so needed in our world today.
Speaker 2 (55:57):
Thank you, Oh my gosh, thank you. I think I
did tell you about how you changed my you lifted
my day to day. So I will listen again when
this runs, and maybe multiple times.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
So thank you, Victor, thank you, and thank you for
joining us on Box Novius. I'm Victor the Voice Erman
have a wonderful week.
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