Life Stage Transitions
If you were to write your own life journey in terms of transitions, what would these transitions be?
- Changes in location of your "home" place?
- Family changes due to marriage, children, divorce, remarriage, death?
- Changes in workplaces or even careers?
- Periods of unemployment or retirement?
- Changing health?
- Beginning or ending stages in your education?
What resources do you use, especially during transition times, to support yourself, nourish yourself, center yourself? Sometimes it can be enlightening to list them or even draw a map or time-line of the different self-care strategies you have used along the way.
We can all use more such self-care practices for times when the old ones don't seem adequate. May I suggest some that I have found helpful for you to investigate and experiment with?
At times of transition, somatic/embodied practices can be useful because they bring us back to core elements of our existence: our breath, our awareness, our sensations and movements.
The arts therapies can also support us through their use of imagination and playfulness. They help us to become at home with not-knowing, the essence of creativity, and the core of transitions.
The insights of deep ecology bring us a bigger picture, an ecological and evolutionary story in which we are embedded, a web of life that holds us even in the midst of transition.
Working to build our inner resilience in transition times can thus draw upon our embodiment, our creativity and our ecological selves. Perhaps this could be called embodied spirituality.
If you were to write your own life journey in terms of transitions, what would these transitions be?
- Changes in location of your "home" place?
- Family changes due to marriage, children, divorce, remarriage, death?
- Changes in workplaces or even careers?
- Periods of unemployment or retirement?
- Changing health?
- Beginning or ending stages in your education?
What resources do you use, especially during transition times, to support yourself, nourish yourself, center yourself? Sometimes it can be enlightening to list them or even draw a map or time-line of the different self-care strategies you have used along the way.
We can all use more such self-care practices for times when the old ones don't seem adequate. May I suggest some that I have found helpful for you to investigate and experiment with?
At times of transition, somatic/embodied practices can be useful because they bring us back to core elements of our existence: our breath, our awareness, our sensations and movements.
The arts therapies can also support us through their use of imagination and playfulness. They help us to become at home with not-knowing, the essence of creativity, and the core of transitions.
The insights of deep ecology bring us a bigger picture, an ecological and evolutionary story in which we are embedded, a web of life that holds us even in the midst of transition.
Working to build our inner resilience in transition times can thus draw upon our embodiment, our creativity and our ecological selves. Perhaps this could be called embodied spirituality.