Death by Aging: Failing to Thrive
You are the culmination of all incarnations of life on Earth. You are the pinnacle of evolution of your ancestors. You are the highest evolution of all of your incarnations.
What’s that like inside of you as you take that in?
For me, when I read this for the first time, I thought "Oh no! I’m Doomed!" Then, I took a breath and began to sink into the goodness of this truth.
You carry in your DNA the traumas of your ancestors. That’s why many of us are triggered easily by even the thought of violence, rejection, or betrayal. Our circumstances today for most of us in first world countries have so little life-threatening implications, yet we live in fear of the potential horrors that have devastated our ancestors in the past.
For thousands of children in orphanages, death occurred and still occurs because they were not held. On their death certificates it says, "Failed to Thrive." My experience is that many of us carry within us this experience of being left and minimally cared for, until the despair was too much.
I think that death by aging happens more because of this experience of not being held. Isolation, feeling forgotten and insignificant, depletes one’s connection to what is around them. Losing hope and meaning, it’s easy to become despondent, and the point of living becomes irrelevant to just disappearing into the ethers.
Suicide rates have increased by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years. More men then women commit suicide, and interestingly, elderly people tend to be more successful in carrying out their attempts.
Much like orphanages for children, long-term care facilities, for some, become an environment where there is nothing to live for. Any environment a person finds themselves in that cannot nourish the human spirit, will bring about depression and a failure to thrive.
Research has shown, over and over again, that one’s inner environment is the one that truly matters. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl shares the importance that hope and meaning played in the lives of many who survived the Holocaust. To live is to suffer. To survive, one needs to find meaning in the living and suffering.
This is big work for all of us as we lose so many of the freedoms that we thought youth gave us.
As I’m inspired by the various aspects of aging that arise, I realize more and more the importance of this internal environment – where our inner guru resides. To nourish the relationship with our inner guru – our own true self – we need to train ourselves to create meaning that fills our days with delight. The greater degree of truth and meaning that we have access to, the greater our capacity to experience joy in life, regardless of our circumstances and environment. This takes discipline to train ourselves to let go of our ancestral patterns and grow our capacity to know the beauty, love, and harmony that is here in the present moment. It takes training. Lots and lots of training!
As infants, we didn’t have the capacity to nourish ourselves or to create comfort for ourselves. As we age, we do have that capacity – we just have to nurture that capacity so that we experience fulfillment through the end of this incarnation. It is absolutely worth the effort!!!
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For more blogs, books and videos, or if you are interesting in coaching or training with Dr. Rosie, check out her website: www.theparadigmshifts.com
