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Shifting Gears in Midlife.


"The developmental demands of this newly awakening self are enormous, but they are mostly overlooked in our culture. While the awakening of early adulthood, which are mostly about identity, are culturally supported with rituals and celebrations - weddings, graduations, ordinations, baptisms - the more subtle spiritual awakenings of the middle years are culturally invisible." Stephen Cope

Just as a computer and a phone have an operating system, so does our own awareness. Between dawn and dusk of adulthood, this operating system is the ego (as I outlined in this earlier blog post). It is in late adulthood or early elderhood that we must shift from the operating system of the ego—that once helped us individuate and separate—to the operating system of the soul, which allows us to become at one with ourselves and with something bigger.

It’s almost like we’re being asked, in the middle of our lives, to move from driving a car with an automatic transmission to a stick shift. At the same time, we’re also being asked to drive that stick shift car on the steep hills of San Francisco, while trying not to call attention to our cluelessness. Not easy!

This is why we created MEA, to offer you a place where we can help teach you your new operating system amongst a bunch of other midlife beginners. It’s been encouraging that our “driver’s training” has even been alive and well during our Sabbatical Sessions this fall.

We look forward to even more midlife rituals to provide the cultural crucible for us to learn how to curate and drive the second half of our adulthood.

Can you give your transmission permission to shift into your soul-mission?

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