Older and best: 6 tips for authentic aging

Last year, six months before my 60th birthday, I started wondering what it meant to age thanks to a series of newspaper entries that offered several ideas. In a newspaper entrance, I wrote,

Aging has always been something that I celebrated and embraced. It may be because I am younger than what my birth certificate and my driving license say. To tell the truth, that is why I always wanted to be older than me. The wisdom of my sheros, like Dr Maya Angelou, also helped me to embrace aging: “I love to live. I love I am alive to love my age. Many people went to bed as I did last night and I woke up this morning. I love it and I feel very blessed. ” The words of Dr Angelou taught me that I can choose how I relate to aging. I choose to make friends with the aging process with the support of a sacred circle of family, creative and spiritual communities chosen, health and well-being practitioners, financial professionals, tools and resources. I choose to age with consciousness, grace and ease centered on the heart. I choose to age with authenticity, growth and expression. I choose to age with acceptance, gratitude and enthusiasm. In the end, aging has always been a gift, a privilege and a friend that I had the chance to receive since the day of my birth.

Now that I have become a member of the 60 -year -old club, I decided to use my newspaper entries to write an in progress working manifesto that expresses my relationship with aging. It will include my values ​​and my intentions of living authentically and in order.

What is your relationship with aging?

What do you think and feel about it?

Are you afraid?

Do you deny that it happens or tolerated it as an inconvenience or an inevitable disadvantage?

Whether we like it or not, we have all linked to aging because we are alive and age daily. Over the years, “minor forgetting and episodes of lack of mind can be part of our daily life,” explains Jeanette Brown, the creator of Reset Your Life Comass and a experienced life transition coach. “It might have the impression that these moments sneak in us, weaving subtly in our routines. But the interesting part is that they often come to hand with certain habits. Habits that we do not even realize that we feed. “

Brown names eight habits to which we have to pay particular attention because they often “accompany an increase in forgetting and lack of mind as we age”.

They include:

1. Resistance to change can appear as our preference for places, routines and familiar experiences.
2. Lose sight of our fundamental values ​​that guide our actions and decisions
3. To experience a lack of significant objectives that keep us concentrated, committed and determined
4. Have a change in the state of mind that produces a passive approach to life where we abandon control and think that life is something that happens to us rather than something in which we are actively participating and directs
5. Avoid conscious practice of journalization which offers self-reflection and an opportunity to understand us better, set clear objectives and follow our progress
6. Maintain a model of old habits that no longer serve our greatest good
7. Facing a lack of goal that gives meaning and motivation to our lives and supports an active and committed spirit
8. Living inauthestically when we disconnect from our real self and comply with societal expectations or play roles that are not aligned with our true values ​​and beliefs

Brown recommends better confront and manage these habits when we recognize for the first time that they exist.

Our ability to manage these habits begins by claiming and exercising our full -consciousness right, capacity and practice to become aware of our aging process and our relationship with it. Use the steps below to deeply plunge into understanding and reinvention of your aging process and your relationship as a bridge to live in an authentic and deliberately.

1. Be honest with yourself

Engage in self-reflection by exploring what aging means for you and the impact that aging has in your life now. Let yourself be vulnerable. Write or type what you really feel, think and believe. Don’t hold back. Share the subtle habits that you may not have noticed that could increase your forgetfulness and your lack of mind. Include the fears and judgments you may have. Give your truth. All this will help you identify the type of relationship you currently have with aging.

2. Adopt the state of mind of a beginner

Define the relationship you want to have with aging (friendly and harmonious) and the person you want to be as you get older. Include the qualities and values ​​you want to integrate into your being and your relationship with aging (mindfulness, curiosity, kindness, compassion, non-judgment, patience, forgiveness or gratitude). Explore how you want to have an impact by serving others and by sharing your donations, talents, expertise, experience, resources and time. Keep notes on paper, in a newspaper or with your digital device.

3. Open your heart and third eye

Visualize the way you want to age (spiritual, emotional, mental, physical and financial). Include activities, communities and organizations in which you wish to participate. Share the type of support and the resources to which you want to have access. Document your visualization by writing, typing, drawing or creating a vision table.

4 Take your time

Do not try to speed up the knowledge process of the real you and to define the type of relationship you want to have with aging.

5 Make a self-discovery discovery review

Use what you have learned about yourself to create your current work manifesto that expresses your values, intentions and relationships with aging.

6 Kiss your trip

Use your current work manifesto to guide life authentically and deliberately as you age. Celebrate the small, medium and important steps you take daily, weekly, month and year. Remember that, as you change, your work manifesto in progress may change. So be ready to think, examine and reinvent at any time. Aging is a life trip!

Ananda Leeke is a coach, artist, artist, a doula of human design, facilitator to consciously prosper with aging, change, sorrow and imperfection pensions, and author of Troubadours of love,, What wakes me upAnd Digital fraternity. Leeke also hosts the flourishing prosperous podcast