Midlife Mastery

Elizabeth Gilbert  

Awaken Your Magic in Midlife

Spend time with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and All the Way to the River, for a candid exploration of how creativity and purpose can change as we age. She reflects on her own seasons of reinvention and shares how to meet midlife’s shifts with curiosity rather than fear, and how to let wisdom and wonder shape a life that feels more meaningful, connected, and quietly joyful.

Journalist, Television Host, NY Times Bestselling Author

Hoda Kotb

Jump and Find Joy: Embracing Change in Every Season of Life

Learn how Hoda Kotb embraced motherhood after 50, reinvented her career multiple times, and found deeper joy through her life's biggest transitions. The former co-host of TODAY and author shares honest, hard-won wisdom on navigating career shifts, late-stage parenting, and redefining success on your own terms.

Author, Community Strategist, Faith Leader

Raymond A. Jetson

Aging While Black: A Radical Reimagining of Aging and Race in America

Discover how Raymond A. Jetson — community strategist, faith leader, and author of Aging While Black — pushes back on the usual stories about midlife. Drawing on decades in ministry, public service, and community work, he shows how aging can be a time of real influence: a season to shape what matters locally, invest in generational relationships, and build the kind of legacy people actually feel.

Explorer, Author of the Blue Zones, Longevity Researcher

Dan Buettner

Blue Zones: Life Lessons from the World’s Healthiest Communities

In certain pockets of the world, people routinely live past 100 — not because of rare genes or luck, but because of how they eat, move, connect, and make meaning. Dan Buettner,  author of The Blue Zones, has spent decades studying these communities, and shares the surprisingly simple patterns that extend both lifespan and healthspan — it’s less about willpower and more about the habits and social circles you build.

Bestselling Author, Speaker, Podcast Host

Rob Bell

Your Life As a Creative Act: Power & Possibility

Watch how Rob Bell turned midlife upheaval into a creative awakening. At the height of his fame, he walked away from his megachurch and the spotlight, stepping into a season where nothing felt certain and everything was up for question. With curiosity as his compass, Rob began dismantling the beliefs and roles that had defined him and slowly building a new life from the ground up. In this conversation, he talks frankly about doubt as a teacher, endings that don’t feel neat or heroic, and how midlife can crack open a freer, more imaginative way of living.

Clinical Psychologist, Columbia University Professor, Bestselling Author

Dr. Lisa Miller

The Neuroscience of Spirituality

What happens when rigorous neuroscience meets the spiritual dimensions of being human? Dr. Lisa Miller, founder of Columbia University's Spirituality Mind Body Institute and author of The Awakened Brain, has spent decades showing what many people already suspect: our brains come equipped for transcendence. Her research suggests that spiritual awareness isn’t “soft” or optional—it’s a biological capacity that can buffer against depression, strengthen resilience, and activate neural pathways tied to meaning and connection. She explores how, in midlife, awakening this capacity can help us work with psychological struggle as a form of spiritual emergence, turning the questions that unsettle us into a path toward feeling more whole and grounded.

MEA Faculty, Transformation Coach, Meditation Teacher

Ben Katt

The Reinvention Blueprint: Your Hero's Journey Through Midlife

What if everything that’s falling apart is actually falling into place? Ben Katt, author of The Way Home and a transformation coach and meditation teacher, knows the terrain of midlife reinvention intimately. After leaving ordained ministry, Ben took his own leap into the unknown in search of the next expression of his calling. Drawing on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, he explores how the life that’s ending makes room for the life that’s emerging. Ben will share practical tools to help you listen to your life, loosen self-limiting patterns, and face the unknown with courage.

Bestselling Author, Essayist, TED Speaker

Pico Iyer

The Seasons of Life: Lessons in Renewal

Learn how acclaimed writer Pico Iyer finds grace and perspective in the shifting seasons of a life. He draws on time in Japan, conversations with the Dalai Lama, and cultures that see aging as ripening rather than fading to show why autumn can hold a beauty that spring can’t touch. In this conversation, he reflects on how meaning can deepen as the years stack up, how purpose quietly reshapes itself over time, and how watching the small rhythms of the natural world can help us move through change with more presence, humor, and lightness.

MEA CEO | 25-Year Longevity Practitioner

Derek Gehl

Beyond the Biohacks: Becoming Your Own Study of One

We’ve gone from having almost no information about longevity to drowning in it. And most of what’s out there? Someone trying to sell you something. Derek Gehl knows this world intimately. As a former supplement company CEO, he spent 25 years in the biohacking trenches, chasing protocols, trying every hack. After decades of unresolved health issues the medical system couldn’t solve, he realized something that changed everything: longevity isn’t just about your biomarkers. 

Derek shares how new tools, testing, and technology helped him finally unravel a health mystery that eluded his doctors for 30 years — and why these same resources are now accessible to all of us. He'll show you how to cut through the noise, understand your own biology, and advocate for yourself. Because you're a study of one.

Gerontologist, Master Coach, Stanford Advisor

Barbara Waxman

Longevity by Design

See how Barbara Waxman — gerontologist, Stanford longevity advisor, and author of The Middlescence Manifesto — is rewriting the story of aging. After years guiding CEOs and changemakers through the science of longevity, Barbara shows how real vitality comes not from gadgets or supplements but from daily choices that align body, purpose, and connection. She introduces the 'Thirdspan,' a stage of life fueled by curiosity and contribution, and shares practical ways to stretch your healthspan, deepen relationships, and feel fully alive in midlife and beyond.

Longevity & Regenerative Medicine Physician, Co-Founder of Humanaut Health

Dr. Amy Killen

Hormones and Aging: What’s Really Driving Your Healthspan

Physician, Researcher, Author of Invincible: Defy Your Genetic Destiny to Live Better, Longer

Dr. Florence Comite

Reversing Biological Aging with Personalized, Data-Driven Medicine

Florence Comite is a physician and researcher who's spent her career asking one question: What if aging isn't as fixed as we think? After training at Yale and the National Institutes of Health, she founded the Comite Center for Precision Medicine & Healthy Longevity, where she uses clinical data and wearables to detect early signs of biological aging — and reverse them.

Poet, Philosopher, Author of The Fifth Season

Mark Nepo

The Fifth Season: Creativity and Meaning in the Second Half of Life

Beloved poet and philosopher Mark Nepo invites you to see aging as an awakening — a time when the creative fire doesn’t fade, but deepens. Drawing on decades of teaching and deep reflection, Mark explores how life’s challenges become material for beauty, how authenticity replaces ambition, and how meaning ripens when we stop striving to be someone and start being ourselves. He reveals how the second half of life can be a time of awakening, creativity, and quiet joy.

Gerontologist and author of Joyspan

Dr. Kerry Burnight

Joyspan: The Art and Science of Thriving in Life's Second Half

Gerontologist and NYT bestselling author Kerry Burnight, PhD, invites you to see aging as a time of expansion rather than decline. Drawing on her research and her book Joyspan, she explores what it can look like to thrive in the second half of life — when purpose, happiness, and vitality are less about youth and more about choice, connection, and contribution. Kerry shows how endings can become beginnings when we focus less on adding years and more on filling our years with what matters. Through a science-based yet deeply human lens, she offers a grounded way to grow wiser, freer, and more alive through each transition.

Zen teacher, VP of Data & AI at Headspace, author of Buddha’s Diet and Buddha’s Office

Dan Zigmond

Mindful Endings, Better Beginnings

Zen teacher, writer, and technologist Dan Zigmond knows that how we end one season of life shapes how we begin the next. In this session, he looks at the often‑overlooked skill of conscious closure and how to move through transitions with more attention and less turbulence. You’ll learn simple meditation practices for the moments something ends, along with first‑day strategies and portable habits that can steady you through change — whether you’re leaving a job, shifting a relationship, or stepping into a new stage of life.

MEA Partner & Chief Content Officer

Kari Cardinale

The Anatomy of a Transition

Kari Cardinale, veteran facilitator, chief content officer at MEA, and co-author of our Anatomy of a Transition ebook, takes you inside the architecture of change. Using MEA’s transitions framework and the idea of Transitional Intelligence (TQ), she reframes endings as openings for reinvention. In this session, Kari helps you chart where you are in your own transition, navigate the uneasy middle, and start shaping what’s next. Her message is clear: midlife change isn’t about loss, it’s about listening for what’s calling you now and stepping toward it with purpose.