The Second Half of Life
On Midlife • Finding Meaning and New Purpose • Aging and Eldering • Legacy
ON MIDLIFE
The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk and Adventure in the 25 Years after 50
Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, Ph.D.
A Harvard sociologist explores what it means to be strong, mature, powerful, and sexy during this ‘in-between’ age when we’re neither old nor young. She tells stories of people who make surprising choices, and how they adapt in midlife, how they channel their energies, confront their fears, and break old patterns to renew intimacy and create supportive relationships. Read our review. Product Details
The Second Half of Life: Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom
Angeles Arrien, Ph.D.
In all cultures, midlife is the turning point in life, it’s greatest adventure, and one that brings forth the fruit of our unique and creative gifts. A master storyteller, anthropologist Angeles Arrien retrieves wisdom teachings from many cultures on the Great Crossing at midlife. They are mythological tales, wisdom from elders and timeless rituals that help you to rediscover regenerative sources of depth, creativity, courage and peace in crossing into the second chapter of your life. Wonderful 6 CD set, her book won the 2007 Nautilus Award for the best book in the category of aging. Product Details
Awakening at Midlife
Kathleen Brehony, Ph.D.
For a Jungian psychologist, the heart and meaning of midlife is letting go of who we’ve become in order to become who we are. The ego we’ve carefully built to navigate life is in crisis, laid bare as hidden parts of ourselves emerge from the shadows to reclaim a voice and an active presence in our lives. Read our review.Their unexpected ‘eruptions’ upset our balance as we feel the pressure of changing roles and the awareness of the limits of life dawns. Spiritual intention brings renewed purpose into focus – and fulfillment. Product Details
Listening to Midlife
Mark Gerzon, Ph.D.
An eloquent series of reflections and insights on the experience of midlife. Gerzon recasts midlife crisis as a myth, and instead likens it to undertaking a quest, and as an exciting and deeply fulfilling time of deep growth and exploration. He demonstrates Jung’s notion that in midlife we are captured by the yearning to live our unlived lives, to not be trapped in settling for a static self-definition that no longer works. He shows that the only way out is through and the best way through is to follow your nose with two essentials: courage and honesty. Product Details
The Breaking Point: How the Female Midlife Crisis is Transforming Today’s Women
Sue Shellenbarger
After writing of her own experience, a Wall Street reporter discovers that with new skills, education and confidence, large numbers of women feel empowered to make radical changes in search of greater fulfillment. After juggling competing demands, and having given away various parts of themselves, they’re shedding outworn roles and taking time to connect to a life that provides greater meaning. Read our review. Product Details
The Third Age: Six Principles for Growth and Renewal after Forty
William A. Sadler, Ph.D.
Third Age pioneer researcher Sadler offers unconventional principles – difficult paradoxes – for midlife renewal and how to develop and nurture them. Not easy by a long stretch, they do provide useful points for reflection. They include: developing realistic optimism, balancing mindful reflection with risk taking, balancing personal freedom with deeper relationships, creating a positive identity while maintaining optimistic realism, creating meaningful work and play, and caring for the self and for others. If you’re completely adrift, it’s a concrete starting point for to-do list, and also validates life’s challenges, while helping as a guide to meet them. Product Details
Transitions, Making Sense of Life’s Changes
William Bridges, Ph.D.
Long time pioneer on transition and change, Bridges first identified the distinction between change and transition: change is an external event, transition the internal process of adjusting and aligning with it. He simply and succinctly defined the three stages of any passage to something new: leaving behind what’s over, navigating the neutral stage (or the wilderness, or Great Void), and new beginnings. Told through stories, with helpful exercises to navigate each stage. Read our combined review. To Purchase
Way of Transition: Embracing Life’s Most Difficult Moments
William Bridges, Ph.D.
After his wife’s death, Bridge’s personal reflections and explorations resulted in this deep and insightful exploration of the inner states and stages of transition. Going more deeply and beyond his previous work, he looks at events that bring about transition, such as marriage, death, change of vocation, tragedy, and crisis, why it’s important to fully experience them, and how they offer opportunities for closure as well as launching pads for enormous personal growth. Product Details
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
James Hollis, Ph.D.,
By a Jungian analyst who has deeply explored the midlife terrain, this is a deep and challenging read on finding meaning in the second half of life. He suggests that the suffering we experience at midlife is an opportunity to embark on a journey to transcend expectations when the traditional roles of adulthood aren’t quite working for us anymore, and to become simply ourselves. He reveals a new path to uncovering and embracing our authentic selves. Product Details
The Art of Midlife: Courage and Creative Living for Women
by Linda Edelstein, Ph.D.
A practical primer to navigate the murky and sometimes turbulent waters of midlife, a psychologist dives below the surface to examine the inner work of women who have successfully crossed midlife to live engaged and happy lives. She sees midlife as a creative – and courageous – process that unfolds in three stages – leaving the past in the past, reconnecting with the reality of today, and refocusing on the future. Read our review. Product Details
Midlife and the Great Unknown: Finding Courage and Clarity Through Poetry
David Whyte
In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood, where the true way was wholly lost. When you find yourself suddenly without bearings, as Dante did centuries ago, where will you look for guidance? Whyte’s poetic imagination holds a power that crystallizes the quandaries and challenges that emerge at midlife. He uses the language of poetry to honor who you are right now so that you can gracefully let go into the next phase of your life. Whyte makes it okay to risk engaging in a conversation with the second half of your life. 2 CDs. Product Details
Embracing Your Power Woman at Midlife: 11 Steps to Coming of Age at Midlife
by Barbara Wilder
An inspiring work, the author identifies a shift in power at midlife, and exhorts women to do the work of recapturing their feminine sources of power. She goes beyond the idea of simply finding a new purpose or meaning, to living powerfully. The workbook follows the ‘heroine’s journey’ and can be done alone or with a group of women to tap into and express the new balance of the feminine and masculine within in the emerging authentic self. Read our review. To Puchase
The Age of Miracles: Embracing the New Midlife
Marianne Williamson
An insightful guide to the inner workings of midlife. After fulfilling what was expected of us in the first half, Williamson sees midlife as a spiritual initiation. If it comes to us as a crisis and weighs us down, making us look and feel old, our job is to realize that even our failures are part of what makes us beautiful. Midlife is less a time to accept limitation and death as it is a time to accept your life. To fulfill its promise, the passage requires forgiving ourselves and others, humility, mercy and compassion. The Miracle Cards deck serves as a reminder of the miracles present in everyday life. Product Details
Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path
James Hollis, Ph.D.
A stark assessment of how therapy unfolds and contributes to resolve crisis at midlife. Hollis suggests that dismantling what you’ve built to defend against your wound or core issues is essential because at this stage, they are the greater cause of difficulties. He emphasizes you won’t be spared pain, guaranteed wisdom or be freed of future suffering. But you’ll find your life much more interesting and come to appreciate its complex riddles. Consciousness is the gift. Product Details
FINDING NEW PURPOSE & MEANING
Claiming Your Place By the Fire: Living the Second Half of Your Life On Purpose
Richard Leider, Ph.D.
If William Bridges is the guru on transition, Gene Cohen on creative aging, and Erik Erikson and McAdams on generativity in our new world, Richard Leider’s books, including Repacking Your Bags: Lighten Your Load for the Rest of Your Life. The Power of Purpose: Creating Meaning in Your Life and Work are each outstanding resources on finding new meaning and purpose for the second half of life. Easy to read, practical and inspiring they are grounded in Viktor Frankl’s seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning. Product Details
Finding Your Life’s Purpose
Discover Your Life’s Purpose with Help from Eckhart Tolle
If you’ve been searching for next steps, this is vintage Eckhart Tolle inviting you to stop struggling, and suggesting that you’ll find new purpose by fully engaging in each moment. From cultivating that inner stillness and silence emerges an awareness of intelligence, synchronicity and creativity waiting to be tapped. Teaching and practice in how to embrace the spaciousness of each moment rather than focusing on the forms it takes. DVD. Product Details
The Shift
formerly named: Find Your Life Purpose: How to Transition from Ambition to Meaning
Wayne Dyer, Ph.D.
Dr. Dyer explores the moment that happens at midlife when people feel uneasy and confused, and seek something more fulfilling and meaningful to define their lives and express their authentic selves. The movie follows the lives of four characters as they search for new purpose in their work and feel themselves shifting into a new way of being, of perceiving themselves and others, and of their place in the world. He sheds light on the transition, and how to rise from it like a phoenix. There’s power in seeing lives played out onscreen. DVD and on demand video. Product Details
Find Your Purpose, Change Your Life
Carol Adrienne, Ph.D.
With a uniquely feminine perspective on reconnecting and discovering what’s important, this author of the Celestine Prophecy workbook, suggests harnessing the twin powers of intuition and synchronicity to get in touch with what’s calling you. She offers helpful exercises, but first reviews ways that these natural gifts may have become buried amidst the business of growing up. Read our review. Listen to our podcast with Carol. To Purchase
North Node Astrology
Rediscovering Your Life Purpose and Soul Direction
Elizabeth Spring, Ph.D.
This Jungian pyschoanalyst and astrologer describes midlife stories through the lens of depth psychology and the point of destiny on astrological charts, called the north node. You can look up your north node based on your birth date for insight (and eerie surprises) to more deeply understand your psycho-spiritual challenges, opportunities and life passages. You’ll find traces of the north node visibly embedded in your changing attitudes towards work, relationships and new purpose as you undertake your life review for the second half of your life. Read our combined review. To Purchase
Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood
Suzanne Braun Levine
Former Ms. magazine editor pulls together research on hormonal and physical changes that begin in the 40s through the stories and in-depth interviews of women. She describes a time of confusion that she calls the “fertile void”, that leads these women to re-sort their lives, revise priorities and to make new decisions about work and intimate relationships. She shows how they improved their lives and touches on the nuts and bolts – and importance – of financial planning. The stories resonate best if you are financially comfortable or have resources. Sometimes gung-ho, at other times inspiring. Product Details
Leap! What Will We Do with the Rest of Our Lives?
Sara Davidson
A quick read, and full of stories and interviews with icons such as Carly Simon, Jane Fonda, and Ram Dass, Davidson gets at the core of midlife transition for many women. A witty social observer, author of Loose Change chronicling three women’s experience in the 60s, it’s a revealing and hopeful look at the choices and challenges we face and the roads open to us. Exploring how to do the coming years well she asks questions, i.e. how does a high-powered person learn to walk down the ladder gracefully? How can women continue to be sensual? How do we arrange to grow old with our friends? Product Details
Life Launch: A Passionate Guide to the Rest of Your Life
Frederick Hudson, Ph.D. & Pamela D. McLean, Ph.D.
These pioneers of change in the 21st century, founders of the Hudson Institute, and coaches, provide a well organized set of tools and conceptual maps to help women author purposeful lives. While many people have heard of – and fear – midlife crises, they suggest that it’s because few people understand the dynamics of natural life transitions. Building on the concepts of adult development they see each LifeLaunch as a graduation from one era of your life into the next. “Society used to tailor our LifeLaunches for us, and guide us down established paths of adult life. No more. Today you must design your own path, and take charge of all your LifeLaunches no matter what your age or situation.” Product Details
AGING & ELDERING
The Ageless Spirit: Reflections on Living Life to the Fullest in Midlife and the Years Beyond
Connie Goldman
Goldman’s purpose in composing this work was to explore the thoughts, experiences, and feelings of public figures on life, and everything in between. This book compiles the reflections 52 people from Willie Nelson and Mary Catherine Bateson to May Sarton, Norman Cousins and Rollo May. There are wonderful stories that succeed in conveying the ageless spirit. A great gift to give to yourself or to others. Product Details
Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life
George E Vaillant, Ph.D.
This Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development believes that we all need positive models for how to live from retirement to past 80 with vitality and joy. He pulled together data from three longevity studies he conducted from his interviews with people in their 70s and 80s, describing their history, relationships, hardships, philosophies, their sources of joy and perspectives, and what makes them want to get up in the morning. We learn what makes old age vital and interesting. He also discusses important adult developmental tasks, such as identity, intimacy, and generativity, all clues on what constitutes a healthy, meaningful, satisfying old age. Product Details
The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain
Gene Cohen, M.D.
Psychiatrist, gerontologist, founding chief of the Center on Aging at the National Institute of Mental Health and author of The Creative Age, introduces the concept of developmental intelligence as a “maturing synergy of cognition, emotional intelligence, judgment, social skills, life experience, and consciousness.” A student of Erik Erikson, he says that positive changes taking place in our minds are not despite aging, but because of it. It’s easy to see yourself in his four-phase framework of adult development – midlife re-evaluation, liberation, resolution and review and “encore. Provides an easily accessible theoretical framework of who we are, and how we grow and develop in the second half of life. Product Details
Juicy Living, Juicy Aging
Loretta LaRoche
With the characteristic humor and practical wisdom about life, love, and the insanity of the modern world seen on her PBS specials, LaRoche asks our youth obsessed culture what it means to age well. What really enhances our life? Can humor, dignity, honesty, wisdom, and other virtues ease the path? Why isn’t every school preparing us for aging, and how to do it well? Her message: aging needn’t be feared or avoided. The path to vitality asks only for authentic connection, playfulness, flexibility, grace, tenacity, resiliency, curiosity, humor and learning. Product Details
The Crown of Age: The Rewards of Conscious Aging
Marion Woodman, Ph.D.
The “crown of age” symbolizes the culmination of our inner and outer development as human beings. From a renowned elder, an archetypal psychologist who has mapped the passages of women’s lives, while traversing many challenges of her own. She describes what it means in the larger scheme of a life to pass through life’s many crossroads and thresholds, and to emerge as an elder, the embodiment of wisdom, wholeness, and truth. Listen to an excerpt. 2 CDs. Product Details
Elderwoman: Reap the Wisdom Feel, Embrace the Joy
Marian Van Eyk McCain
In this evocative and very personal chronicle of aging, the author describes the essence of being an elderwoman. When the busyness of youth gives way, she turns a corner to discover, with some awe, a stark beauty in aging, as a world that teems with a different kind of life. She compels us to see aging as an adventure with few maps, but with nothing in it to fear. Read our review. To Purchase
Crones Don’t Whine: Concentrated Wisdom for Juicy Women
Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.
From this Jungian psychologist, crone, and prolific author who has mapped women’s archetypes through each phase of our lives, as well as recounting her own midlife passage in Crossing to Avalon: A Woman’s Midlife Quest for the Sacred Feminine, a new perspective on the “crone” word. She describes thirteen defining crone qualities that, when taken to heart and cultivated, support authenticity, integrity and soul growth. Includes a novel chapter, Exceptional Men can be Crones, and how crones together can – and must – use their power to change the world. A peek into the segue to her latest work: Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World
Product Details
The Ram Dass Audio Collection
Ram Dass, Ph.D.
It’s hard to overstate how much this spiritual elder has shaped the spiritual landscape of America like no other. Since his psychedelic research at Harvard in the 60s, (psychologist) Ram Dass has taught compassion in action, and how to live in the now. He sees the spiritual journey as culminating in conscious aging, moving beyond the striving of youth to a path of service as way to freedom. Here he continues his conversation about life as a spiritual curriculum that we learn to navigate by trusting your own heart. 6 CDs. Product Details
Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying
Ram Dass
Ram Dass has written this as a guide to help explore the joy, pain, and opportunities of the ripening seasons of our lives. With his trademark humor and wisdom, he shares stories from his own life and meditation exercises to integrate the teachings into daily life. His goal is to make the process of aging a little easier, with new perspectives on aging, changing, and dying. Product Details
From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound Vision of Growing Older
Zalman Schacter-Shalomi & Ronald Miller
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal movement, provides spiritual guidance and transformation. He shows you how to use your life experience to enrich your elder years, face mortality, repair relationships, develop a regenerative spirit and transmit wisdom to future generations. His is a beautiful spirit that comes across in all he writes. It is a book for people of any faith traditions. Product Details
LEGACY
The Life Cycle Completed
Erik & Joan Erikson
Erik Erikson’s pioneering work in delineating adult development theory as part of the eight stages of the psychosocial life cycle deeply influenced the field of contemporary psychology. He was aware there was much left to understand about adult development before he died. This work incorporates new material by his wife, closing the circle of Erikson’s theories. It outlines the unique rewards and challenges for both individuals and society that flows from the generativity of very old age. Product Details
Generativity and Adult Development: How and Why We Care for the Next Generation
Dan P. McAdams, Ph.D. & E de St. Aubin
Erikson coined the term generativity to mean the concern that people increasingly experience as they age for establishing and guiding the next generation. It is a central concept in his 7th stage of the life cycle, and a lens through which one can view (and live) midlife and beyond. This book dissects the complex concept in the context of adult development. Product Details
Make it Count: How to Generate a Legacy that Gives Meaning to Your Life
John Kotre
Generativity is the underlying motivation to the legacies we create. Our legacies, each entirely unique, give meaning to our lives, and can be expressed in literally hundreds of ways, from raising a child to stopping a tradition of abuse, writing a family history, or starting a new organization. You try to “make a difference” with your life, to “give back,” to “take care” of your community and your planet. Through case studies of people seeking fulfillment, and also showing blocks that can stand in the way, Kotre suggests ways to accomplish this, showing those in midlife crises how to matter in the world and create something of lasting value. Product Details
The Wealth of Your Life: A Step-by-Step for Creating Your Ethical Will
Susan B. Turnbull
This is an excellent resource, a guidebook that provides a comfortable, five step path for you, or a loved one, to create an ethical will. Thoughtful questions are followed by excellent prompts, multiple examples and space to jot down your ideas. The guide helps you to “clarify your intentions and focus; shape your words and messages; manage a large volume of material; develop a structure to follow as you compose your letter; and complete the most meaningful letter you will ever write.” Product Details
