In-lightened Enterprises - Midlife Blog

Mrs. Astor Regrets

Mrs. Astor Regrets by Meryl Gordon (Houghton Mifflin)

The thrice-married Manhattan socialite Brooke Astor — she wed John Dryden Kuser at 17, Charles “Buddie” Marshall at 31 and finally, at 52, fur trade and real-estate heir Vincent Astor — had a lot to show for her unions, including acting as chairwoman for the Vincent Astor Foundation. She bore only one child, Anthony Marshall. What most Manhattanites — and perhaps most of the nation — will remember about Astor, who died in 2007 at age 105, are the headlines splashed across newspapers in her final days: her dutiful grandson Philip had sued his father for neglecting his grandmother, and Anthony Marshall was later arrested on charges of looting her estate. Author Meryl Gordon, a master of celebrity profiles, provides the reader with insight into the details of that scandal and the turbulent nature of her marriages — Kuser was an abusive drunk and adulterer, Marshall died suddenly, leaving her without an inheritance, and Astor was a suspicious man, believing everyone was out to get him. His paranoia resulted in the couple spending a lot of time alone. But her life wasn’t all gloom. Famous voices like Nancy Reagan, Tom Brokaw, and Barbara Walters recall a woman who was flirtatious and fun, and active well through her 90s. “At an age when few people are healthy or even ambulatory,” Gordon writes, “Brooke Astor was still in the thick of high society….” From where I’m standing, Mrs. Astor really shouldn’t have had any regrets. Yes, she fell victim to gossip and scandal, but she also had money and friendships, and a legacy of philanthropy that will long outlast the headlines.

– Cheryl Lock

Midlife is more than a crisis. It is a summons to grow and a challenge to change. Midlife beckons one inward. It is a move to interiority, a passage to the deeper places where we discover our authenticity, where we realize both our limitations and our grandeur. It is here that we come home to our truest Self. We take our external experiences with us to the inside and look at our life. We evaluate our goals, hopes, dreams, beliefs, behaviors, experiences - all that has marked us and contributed to the person we have become - and we ask ourselves: “Is this the person I want to be in the future?”

Preface

the persistent voice of midlife
wooed and wailed, wept and whined,
nagged like an endless toothache,
seduced like an insistent lover,
promised a guide to protect me
as I turned intently toward my soul.

as I stood at the door of “Go Deeper”
I heard the ego’s howl of resistance,
felt the shivers of my false security
but knew there could be no other way.
inward I traveled, down, down,
drawn further into the truth
than I ever intended to go.

as I moved far and deep and long
eerie things long lain hidden
jeered at me with shadowy voices,
while love I’d never envisioned
wrapped compassionate ribbons
’round my fearful, anxious heart.

further in I sank, to the depths,
past all my arrogance and confusion,
through all my questions and doubts,
beyond all I held to be fact.

finally I stood before a new door:
the Hall of Oneness and Freedom.
uncertain and wary, I slowly opened,
discovering a space of welcoming light.

I entered the sacred inner room
where everything sings of Mystery.
no longer could I deny or resist
the decay of clenching control
and the silent gasps of surrender.

there in that sacred place of my Self
Love of a lasting kind came forth,
embracing me like a long beloved one
come home for the first time.

much that I thought to be “me”
crept to the corners and died.
in its place a Being named Peace
slipped beside and softly spoke my name:
“Welcome home, True Self,
I’ve been waiting for you.”

—Joyce Rupp

Copyright 1996 by Joyce Rupp All rights reserved.

Physician-author Christiane Northrup tells women that midlife can be a good thing, especially for those who boost their nitric oxide and foster their sexuality.
By Kathleen Doheny
WebMD Feature Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD
As an obstetrician-gynecologist, Christiane Northrup, MD, of Yarmouth, Maine, has spent years caring for women when something went wrong with their bodies.

These days, she doesn’t see patients anymore, devoting her time instead to speaking and writing. At midlife, she has a new plan and a new mission: teach women everything that can go right with their bodies when they reach midlife.

What she is proposing may seem nonsensical to some and like a breath of fresh air to others. She wants midlife women to discover the secret pleasures of menopause. She’s convinced that menopause — traditionally viewed as the signal a woman is washed up and over the hill — is overdue for a brand new spin.

“The truth is that women over 50 are just hitting their stride,” she writes in the introduction of her new book, The Secret Pleasures of Menopause, published this month.

The new book is meant to be “fluffy,” she says, much less serious than her previous books, including The Wisdom of Menopause and Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom.

Northrup is well aware that women going through menopause often focus on hot flashes, hormonal and mood swings, and viewing themselves as washed up.

She actually had to do a bit of talking to herself along those lines, as she admits in the book.

Slowly but surely, she came to view the transition as a good thing — to see and appreciate the secret pleasures of menopause.

Look at the benefits of menopause, she suggests. “You become far more intuitive, you are no longer satisfied with the status quo, and you find your voice in a different way,” she says.

The Nitric Oxide Connection
One of the points of Northrup’s chatty new tome is getting women to say yes to pleasure.

“You can turn yourself on,” she tells women approaching midlife. “You can rewire your brain and your body to feel more pleasure. The brain is the biggest sex organ in the body.”

Getting to all this pleasure, she says, depends on paying attention to your nitric oxide levels, which she’ll bet are probably too low.

Nitric what? Many midlife women may never have thought about — or heard about — nitric oxide.

Nitric oxide is a colorless, odorless gas that tells blood vessels to relax and to widen, in turn resulting in a lowering of blood pressure. Discoveries about nitric oxide that led to the development of the ED drug Viagra earned three scientists a Nobel Prize a decade ago.

Although it’s the stuff by which erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs work, it’s not the exclusive domain of men, Northrup says. (Indeed, one of the 1998 Nobel recipients, Ferid Murad, MD, co-wrote a book, The WellnessSolution, published in 2006, promoting a regimen of diet, exercise, vitamins, and antioxidants that works by increasing nitric oxide levels.)

Northrup says it’s time midlife women discovered the benefits of boosting nitric oxide levels as their own gateway to better sexuality and sensuality at midlife and beyond.

“Most of us don’t produce enough to keep us vibrantly healthy,” she says.

Practicing her suggestions will boost levels, she says. Simply thinking joyous thoughts can boost it, she claims. “A joyous thought would be: ‘The best times of my life are yet to come.’”

Boosting nitric oxide can also be accomplished by exercising regularly, meditating, and having sex regularly, she says.
orthrup’s Rewiring Plan
Northrup gives plenty of commonsense suggestions on how to find the secret pleasures of menopause, the kind of stuff everyone has heard before — eat a balanced diet, take supplements to get enough vitamins, find a workout you enjoy and stick with it, reduce stress.

But the new message is the importance of maintaining — even expanding — sexuality. Out goes the idea that a woman in her 50s and 60s and beyond can’t be sexy — or have plenty of sex. For the doubtful, she offers ideas on how to go from feeling frumpy to sensual first by changing your mind-set. Among the suggestions:

Buy great underwear, even if you’re without a partner. Quiet the voice that says, “But no one but me will see it.”
Redefine yourself. (If your grown-up kids balk or snicker, ignore them.) After she got divorced at midlife, she jazzed up her wardrobe with a bit of leopard print, which her youngest daughter initially balked at — a reaction Northrup ignored.
Learn to love yourself. Buy yourself flowers every week. Get a massage. Or offer to trade foot rubs or massages with your partner.
Get to know yourself up close and personal. In a section subtitled “To Know Thy Clitoris Is to Love Thy Clitoris,” Northrup talks about how to explore and find out what specific area of the clitoris is most a turn-on for you. (Hint: she says to try your 1 o’clock position, as you look down).
Rewire negative thoughts. Instead of “Ugh, my thighs are heavy,” Northrup suggests focusing on more positive facts about them, like they are soft and smooth and your partner likes to caress them.
Sex after menopause can be the best ever, Northrup insists. She offers her “7 secret keys that will open the door to wonderful sexuality and sensuality after menopause.”

Among them: she advises women to explore their own pleasure, learn to turn themselves on, release negativity, and live in a way that motivates others to be at their best and their healthiest.

Second Opinions
“The advice is good,” says Wulf Utian, MD, PhD, a consultant in women’s health for the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and executive director of the North American Menopause Society, who tells WebMD he is not speaking on behalf of either organization, rather offering his own opinion.

But whether nitric oxide can be given all the credit, he is not so sure. “We know nitric oxide is extremely important in bodily functions,” he says. “The advice [in the book] is good, but there is nothing new about the advice. She is trying to add a scientific hook.”

“If her book is successful at getting people to develop a positive attitude and improve their quality of life, than I say more power to her,” he says. But he says research on nitric oxide has a ways to go before proving that it is as important to well being as Northrup contends.

For most women, feeling better about menopause may be enough, he says. How it happens is probably irrelevant.

by Richard Patterson

Midlife crisis has unfortunately become the stuff of made-for-television movies. The weekly crisis of a middle-aged man leaving his wife of twenty years for a woman half his age has become almost a cultural stereotype. Sadly, the profound quality and significance of midlife crisis becomes lost in the process such that men and women in the midst of this upheaval minimize its significance.

Midlife crisis is a fundamentally spiritual event of great power which can lead to either tremendous spiritual growth or can generate more chaos. To emerge from the dark forest of midlife crisis, we need to understand the substance of the crisis and we also need to be aware that the healthy resolution of midlife crisis brings with it a newly discovered gift.

What provokes a midlife crisis? First of all, there is age. Midlife tends to be viewed as stretching from ages 35 to 50, sometimes beyond 50, given the increasing chances of longevity. It tends also to be precipitated by loss of some sort — a health problem, a missed promotion, and especially the departure of adult children. Suddenly our life seems frighteningly devoid of meaning, empty, without direction. Everything that we felt was important seems insignificant. We believe we have missed out on something. To relieve the fear and turmoil, we begin searching for what we think is missing. It is at this point that we can get in trouble. If we fail to recognize the spiritual quality of midlife crisis, we opt for quick solutions which end up fostering even more chaos.

There are three aspects to midlife crisis, three themes around which the turmoil revolves. The first of these is vitality. By vitality, we mean energy and passion. At midlife, we notice that our bodies slow down. Perhaps we begin to deal with health problems or simply bodily changes due to aging. We also can find ourselves devoid of passion. Sexual passion may be an infrequent event. Our passionate juices simply seem to have dried up. Thus, the misguided attempt to resolve the crisis of vitality at a strictly sexual level.

The second facet of midlife crisis is intimacy. At midlife, we may have been in a relationship for some length of time. We may have experienced the dissolution of relationships. Or we may simply become aware of spending a great deal of time alone. In any case, at midlife, we tend to take stock of the quality of intimacy in our relationships. We may conclude that the relationships come up lacking. We long for a level of closeness. We long for romance. We may simply long for friendship. Thus we have the image of a man or woman of forty paging through his/her high school yearbook.

The third theme of midlife is legacy. Perhaps a parent or friend has died. Perhaps something such as the Oklahoma City bombing forces us to recognize how vulnerable we are. In any event, it finally dawns on us that we are not going to live forever. We may then find ourselves quite fearful that nothing of value will live on after us. We may take some comfort if we have children but then again if we have successfully parented we have already made peace with the fact that our children’s lives are theirs to unfold and cannot be manipulated to be a testimony to our own worth.

To work with midlife crisis in a positive manner, we must first understand it to be a search, a quest if you will, in which we are looking for new sources of vitality, intimacy, and legacy. We need to be willing to look directly at that which we have put off and be prepared for the possible need of grieving. We need to see if we have lost the capacity to dream about the future. We need to assess whether there is any element of the spiritual active in our daily lives.

In addressing issues of vitality, we need to nurture our creative side, perhaps even get to know it for the first time. We need to allow ourselves enthusiasms which may not necessarily be “productive.” We need to assess how responsible we are in maintaining a lifestyle which is kind to our bodies. And we need to assess how mechanical and habit-bound we have become as far as the sexual aspect of our lives is concerned.

In exploring the theme of intimacy, we must confront the many walls we may have built to keep others out. We need to examine the many ways we may have been taking significant others in our lives for granted. We need to reach out.

In working with the theme of legacy, we need to honestly consider that which we have put off because of assuming we have many tomorrows. We need to assess that which is going unspoken. (There is nothing worse than having someone in your life die and to realize that you never said certain things to that person, even simple things such as “I love you.”) We need to honestly evaluate whether our work is in any way satisfying.

The resolution of midlife crisis includes a gift. It may be the acquisition of a previously unknown creative ability. It may be a new friendship or a deepened marriage. It may involve a return to school to pursue a long-delayed career goal. It may be a deeply enriched relationship with the God of one’s understanding.

In his journey into the forest, Dante had the benefit of guides. We can do well to follow his example. Such guides can include a therapist, a rabbi or pastor, or simply a friend.

I have experienced two clear instances of midlife crisis. The first at age 35 resulted in sobriety. The second at age 40 resulted in publication of my first book. They were both terrifying times when I thought I was going insane. While I am grateful for the gifts, I am not anxious to reenter the forest.  

Richard B. Patterson is a clinical psychologist in private practice in El Paso, TX. He is the author of three books on psychology and spirituality.

From Debbie Ford’s blog  –
I woke up this morning thinking about how I was going to make today the best day of the year. Here it is — Thursday December 4th. I have a full day of opportunities and possibilities. I get to talk to people I love. I get to share in intimate moments. I get to appreciate my family, my friends, my loved ones, my son, my staff, and all of you who I get to contribute to and be with on this journey.

I started thinking that if today were going to be the best day of my year, how would I have to feel? I would have to be completely grateful for everything as it is. I’d have to give up wanting anything to change about the past or the future. I’d have to give up any wants or needs that couldn’t be satisfied today. I’d have to give up any hopes for anything to be different. I’d have to appreciate the toes on my feet that keep me upright, the parts of my body that are functioning perfectly, my ability to see, smell, and hear the voices of those I love. I’d have to have my heart wide open to the love that exists for everyone and everything. I’d have to have deep appreciation for the challenges I’ve endured, the limitations I’ve met, and the breakthroughs I’ve experienced. Most importantly, I’d have to remember that the best day of the year is made up not of one special event but of hundreds of special moments and I can choose each moment to have it be an incredible day.

So I ask you to join me today, December 4th, an ordinary day for most people. What would you have to do to find some love in your heart? Who could you think about that would bring a smile to your face? What memories could you bring into your awareness? What photos could you look at to remind you how good life can be? Who could you call to share love with? Who could you appreciate? What affirmation could you give yourself or pass on to another?

Just for the next 12 hours, make this a spectacular day by looking for what’s right, what’s working, what’s magical, what’s holy, and what’s possible!

With love and blessings,

Help make the world a better place by sharing this message of love with friends, family, loved ones by click the link below “If you wish to forward this message to a friend…” And if you’re getting this newsletter from a friend, be sure to subscribe.

http://www.debbieford.com/index.php?p=Signup&c=3

I notice this year, more than others that traditions no longer work for some families.
Children are far away. In-laws have rights, too. Divorce means sharing. Grandparents and parents have died. Military families are separated. Illness causes limitations. Economic challenges affect travel, menus, and gift giving.  

How do you still have a celebration?

1. Lower your expectations…food burns, weather makes you late, sadness can’t is unplanned; perfection is only a romance in movies.

2. Name your fears….you will feel overwhelmed, you will get stuck in the losses of who isn’t at the table, fights will emerge.

3. Make time for you…get outside and walk, read a magazine, short story, poem, listen to relaxing music and have a warm bath with candles.

4. Say what you are grateful for out loud…I know you say you always do that or will do that, but this time drop in deeper and share with the people you are celebrating the holidays. Maybe name specifically what you appreciate about someone who is right in front of you.

5. Have a box of games that everyone can play together, Pic-up Sticks, Jacks, cards, Slinkies, Apples to Apples (game of funny comparisons for all ages)

6. Get people involved and connected in the kitchen; chopping, washing, pouring.

7. Make something together for dessert or treats like pretzels rolled in chocolate or smoothies to sip.

8. Talk about those who have passed or aren’t at the table who you wish could be there. Stories are healing.

9. Share family videos and rent videos for sit and be time, as well as, a good laugh.

10. Get everyone up and out for a neighborhood walk. Some may want a bag to pick up nature pieces on the way to bring back and make art or to remember the gathering time.

A little pre-time with self in meditation or silent walking, or writing in your journal will center you; get you in touch with what matters and what doesn’t. You can do this the day before and then have a post it to remind you to breathe.

It may work better for you this year to celebrate on a day that isn’t on the calendar, therefore, making a time to still have your rituals but not at the time you use to have them. Thanksgiving on Saturday, not Thursday. You can even make your own Christmas Eve and day celebration that is not the tradition on the calendar.

Find out what your community offers that you might join this year by goggling events in your area, reading the throw away papers, asking the churches and temples, food banks, shelters, orphanages, tree planting, singing etc.

Donate what you know someone would appreciate in a hospital, nursing home, shelter.

I know when I am in a funk, sad, and uncertain it helps if I name what is…example…These are just feelings; these are just behaviors punching my buttons, this is just a disappointing day because you aren’t here.

There is no one like you and that is miraculous. Appreciate your life. Value what you have given and received.

I deeply appreciate all of you being part of my community. The way you share your vulnerabilities and joys is inspiring.

Take care,
Natalie

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