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| AgeSong Elders Academy Exploring the Definition of Eldership and Implementing Personal Eldership Practice |
Elders Academy prepares us through education for the second half of life. Whereas societies have found ways to initiate us for the demands of our first half of life through educating us for adulthood and middle adulthood, we are often less prepared to face the second half of life. Here concepts such as retirement and golden years present a limited idea of the potential contained in our second half. Elders Academy re-establishes a truly important role which has been lost in the last few centuries of our industrialization: the role of the elder.
The role of the elder was once the most revered role in our human communities. Eldership as a role and position within a human community started within the tribal traditions. There we find an emphasis on elders as guides and leaders. This indicates that they are experienced and wise and are fit to lead the tribe and teach the young. Elders also resolve social concerns and are expected to make final decisions about the direction communities will take on the many social and individual issues we humans must face.
We need to train elders if we want to help individuals living in our communities and societies with the important tasks of supporting and guiding the younger in age and experience. For being older does not make an elder. As the history of eldership shows clearly, the qualities attributed to being an elder are quite universal. These traits must be acquired through much training, learning and practice. If we recall, for example, how monks in the various spiritual traditions are initiated over many years into becoming a respected member of their communities, then we have a glimpse of what it will take for an older person to grow into becoming an elder.
Michael Meade emphasizes this point as follows:
“Elders, by tribal imagination, and by more recent definition, are those who have learned from their own lives, those who have extracted a knowledge of themselves and the world from their own lives. We know that a person can age and still be very infantile. This happens if a person doesn’t open and understand the nature of his or her own life and the kind of surprising spirit that inhabits him or her.”
However, where do we learn anymore how to ‘extract knowledge’ from ourselves and the world? What places are left where those of us interested in eldership can learn? Where do we turn to allow our elder within to grow out of us?
Elders Academy is this place within which we can learn to become elders at any age. It is a place where the values that often arrive with age are also seen as an alternative to living a life of meaning and depth. As such, eldership provides a different approach to the way our young and middle adults understand their lives, what they deem to be their values. Our second half of life, rather than being a burden or a period of decline, is understood as the most important part of our life for which the first half was but preparation.
It is our elders, their life experience, skill, knowledge and wisdom that will help usher in a new era of understanding how we can live in harmony with planet and people. And it is our elders that will lead the way to teach us younger in age how we can reach a sustainable way of life, both in terms of matter and spirit.
This book is a practical guide for people who work and live with relatives or residents with symptoms of forgetfulness.
In Deeper into the Soul: Beyond Dementia and Alzheimer's Toward Forgetfulness Care, the authors invite us to shift our attitude toward dementia, or Forgetfulness, as they call it. Accompanying us are four characters—a sage, a psychologist, a physician, and an intern—who each sees Forgetfulness from a different viewpoint. The goal is to develop a perspective which includes the basic ingredients of openness, curiosity and acceptance.
Deeper into the Soul reminds us that each stage of forgetfulness is a meaningful part of the life journey, during which people experience important emotional and spiritual experiences. The authors remind us that with each effort to understand others, we expand our view of the world.
Read more about Deeper into the Soul and authors Nader Robert Shabahangi and Bogna Szymkiewicz here.
This book and all Elders Academy Press books are currently available 4 for the price of 3 during our Celebrate Eldership! book offer.
Outside of the United States? please phone 001-415-861-3455 ext. 3 or fax 001-415-431-1012 or email info@pacificinstitute.org.
Deeper into the Soul, hardcover edition $19.95*, plus shipping & handling
Deeper into the Soul, softcover edition $13.95*, plus shipping & handling *During the Celebrate Eldership! book offer the price is 25% off if purchased with 3 other books from Elders Academy Press!
Featured Book: Doing Sixty and Seventy by Gloria Steinem
Featured Book: AgeSong: Meditations for Our Later Years by Elizabeth Bugental, PhD
Featured Book: Encounters of the Real Kind edited by Nader R Shabahangi, PhD
Celebrate Eldership! with Elders Academy Press Book Offer: Buy 3 get 4th book free
Gloria Steinem became a spokesperson for issues about aging quite accidentally after declaring to a reporter on the occasion of her fortieth birthday, "This is what forty looks like. We've been lying for so long, who would know?" Because of this casual comment about her age and about the collective societal pressure to lie about our age she received an avalanche of thanks and support from other women facing age discrimination. This caused her to realize the far reaching dimensions of age oppression.
In her inspiring essay, Doing Sixty and Seventy, Steinem shares her views on age stereotyping, the unexpected liberation that comes with growing older, and defines what she perceives as the fact that women become more radical as they age. The essay also sheds light on the forces that shaped her life and for readers who have only heard bits and pieces about her the essay offers a primer on her bold and logical theories.
Elders Academy Press is proud to publish Ms. Steinem's enlightening and thought-provoking essay — thus allowing it to appear for the first time as an independent volume.
Read more about Doing Sixty and Seventy and author Gloria Steinem here.
This book and all Elders Academy Press books are currently available 4 for the price of 3 during our Celebrate Eldership! book offer.
Buy 3 and get 4th book FREE! enter this coupon code: ELDERSHIP2013 during checkout at the Pacific Institute online store or place your order by fax 415-431-1012 or by phone 415-861-3455.
Outside of the United States? please phone 001-415-861-3455 ext. 3 or fax 001-415-431-1012 or email info@pacificinstitute.org.
Doing Sixty and Seventy, hardcover edition $19.95*, plus shipping & handling
Doing Sixty and Seventy, softcover edition $13.95*, plus shipping & handling
*During the Celebrate Eldership! book offer the price is 25% off if purchased with 3 other books from Elders Academy Press!
Featured Book: AgeSong: Meditations for Our Later Years by Elizabeth Bugental, PhD
Featured Book: Encounters of the Real Kind edited by Nader R Shabahangi, PhD
Celebrate Eldership! with Elders Academy Press Book Offer: Buy 3 get 4th book free
Growing old is not an option. But how we age is a choice. At least we like to think so. AgeSong gives us a pleasurable nudge and a little inspiration to take charge of our aging. None of us knows how many years this final life-phase will last, but it's a pretty good bet that it will last at least as long as our adolescence.
AgeSong can be taken in small doses to direct our thinking toward the possibilities ahead of us rather than the life we've left behind. It offers us a look into a world that, for many of us, has always been available, but which we may not have had the physical or mental luxury of enjoying. It provides us a simple, yet profound, breathing space to take in the richness within our reach that could fill our last days with wonder and gratitude.
Read more about AgeSong and author Elizabeth Bugental here.
This book and all Elders Academy Press books are currently available 4 for the price of 3 during our Celebrate Eldership! book offer.
Buy 3 and get 4th book FREE! enter this coupon code: ELDERSHIP2013 during checkout at the Pacific Institute online store or place your order by fax 415-431-1012 or by phone 415-861-3455.
Outside of the United States? please phone 001-415-861-3455 ext. 3 or fax 001-415-431-1012 or email info@pacificinstitute.org.
AgeSong: Meditations for Our Later Years - $20.00*, plus shipping & handling *During the Celebrate Eldership! book offer the price is 25% off if purchased with 3 other books from Elders Academy Press!
Featured Book: Encounters of the Real Kind edited by Nader R Shabahangi, PhD
Celebrate Eldership! with Elders Academy Press Book Offer: Buy 3 get 4th book free
The AgeSong Institute Gero-Wellness training emphasizes that we need to ‘see’ and care for the whole human being. It teaches that symptoms are meaningful and important signals for a deeper understanding of each person, that these symptoms need to be met with curiosity and respect, with an attitude of wonder and love.
This is not an easy journey. Interns face the complexity of the question of human identity and the fear and anxiety of disability and dying. They begin to understand the difference between being-with and doing-to and learn the art of unfolding a person’s process. They experience the many forms of forgetfulness and states of awareness, the many ways of communication, verbal and non-verbal. They begin to appreciate the quality and subjective nature of time, of slowing down, of being present and of listening deeply. They learn to establish a trusting relationship and experience the richness and challenge of hospice work. They learn about mindfulness, about focused attention, building community, and the meaning of isolation and loneliness. They learn to be with coma, trauma, and the many other forms and meanings of dependencies. They learn about the finitude of life, about what really matters – to them and others. Interns begin to grasp the difference between information and knowledge, between knowledge and wisdom.
Hearing an elder speak about life, sitting quietly next to a forgetful elder holding hands, walking slowly with an elder noticing one’s breath, the breeze on one’s face - these are encounters of the real kind. They present us with an inkling of the dimension of the human soul and spirit. These encounters change your life.
Read more about Encounters of the Real Kind and author Nader Shabahangi here.
This book and all Elders Academy Press books are currently available 4 for the price of 3 during our Celebrate Eldership! book offer.
Buy 3 and get 4th book FREE! enter this coupon code: ELDERSHIP2013 during checkout at the Pacific Institute online store or place your order by fax 415-431-1012 or by phone 415-861-3455.
Outside of the United States? please phone 001-415-861-3455 ext. 3 or fax 001-415-431-1012 or email info@pacificinstitute.org.
Encounters of the Real Kind - $20.00*, plus shipping & handling *During the Celebrate Eldership! book offer the price is 25% off if purchased with 3 other books from Elders Academy Press!
Featured Book: AgeSong: Meditations for Our Later Years by Elizabeth Bugental, PhD
Celebrate Eldership! with Elders Academy Press Book Offer: Buy 3 get 4th book free
