Connie Zweig || Embracing Your Shadow

climate reality leader, and citizens climate lobbyist. She's the co author of Meeting the Shadow, Romancing the Shadow, and Meeting the Shadow of Spirituality. Her latest book is called The Inner Work of Age, Shifting From Role to Soul, which has won both the twenty twenty one American Book Fest Award and the twenty twenty one Best Indie Book Award for Best Inspirational Nonfiction. In this episode, I talk to

doctor Connie is a Wig about embracing the shadow. We often associate the shadow with negativity, but it's not necessarily bad or sinister. The shadow is actually just composed of repressed feelings and messages in our unconscious which can erupt out of control. According to doctor Zuwig, we must develop a conscious relationship with our shadow by doing inner work, especially as we age. As we near the end of our lives, it's crucial that we conduct a life review

to help us repair emotionally and spiritually. It was a real honor chatting with doctor Connie Zewig because I have long been fascinating with notions of the shadow, and I've been a big fan of shadow work and what it can really do to help people bring to the surface things that they really have not accepted about themselves. As Carl Rogers says, it's only when you accept yourself then you can change. I also resonate with her work a lot because I'm really into the notion of the diamonic.

It's not the demonic, but the daemonic, which is the notion that role may talked about a lot. You know. The dimonic is whatever is within us that has the power to overtake the whole person. It can be used for destructive purposes or creative purposes. Doctor's a Wig has really influenced me a lot in many ways, and I found this chapter so inspiring and informative, and I know you will too, So without further ado, I bring you Doctor Connie is a wig. Hi, Connie, thank you so

much for chatting me today. I've been a big fan of a lot of your work, and your book on the Hidden Power of the Dark Side of human Nature has been a perennial resource for me in my work and my attempts to revive humanistic psychology. Oh beautiful, can we start off with you telling our audience a little bit more about how you got into shadow work and why that interested you in the first place. I began meditation when I was nineteen, and I really went for spirituality.

That was what my life was about in my twenties, and there was an experience that I had with my meditation community that was very heartbreaking and disillusioning, the hipocrisy that I encountered, and it kind of pierced the veil of the all good, all light, all positivity paradigm and I had been. I started to read young because it was hard to find psychology that included spirituality. But I was kind of already psychologically oriented because my parents brought

me up going to therapy. So I started reading young, and then I went into Jungian analysis, and my first analyst really initiated me into the shadow in my dreams, and that kind of stimulated my motivation to go back to graduate school and get my doctorate in death psychology. So, you know, there was a whole sort of series of steps. At that time I was working in the publishing industry.

There was Meeting the Shadow as you know, as a collection, and there was a whole series of those anthologies that I love to the publishing house. Yeah, and so then it kind of struck a chord and it sold so well that I realized people wanted to know about the Shadow.

So after receiving my PhD a couple decades later, I wrote Romancing the Shadow with a colleague, which is more about the method of shadow work that we developed to extend Jung's work, which really focused on meeting the shadow in dreams and an active imagination or create creative fantasy work. So we really cultivated this way of identifying when the shadow erupts and then building a conscious relationship with it.

And so Romancing the Shadow then has focused more on sort of everyday life and how to have that connection to your unconscious, primarily in relationships. You know, you keep on having the same fight over and over again, or you keep on choosing the same partner over and over again. That was in my forties. And then I wrote Meeting the Shadow of Spirituality, which will be revised and republished next spring. And then I wrote a novel about Rumy.

And then, you know, I was in my late sixties thinking about retirement from clinical work and starting to feel disoriented like most people, do you know who am I if I'm not doctor Connie the Shadow Expert? And it kind of really sent me into this whole world of conscious aging and the discovery that there were absolutely no books about the unconscious and the agent process. There are a couple of them now, but at that time there was nothing for people like me. So I said to

my but, oh my god, I have to write another book. Yeah. Yeah, And so that's how that happened. Yeah, The Inner Work of Age Shifting from Role to Soul is the title of the book. For our listeners, Before we do a deep dive into that book, this is such a great opportunity for you to introduce to many of our listeners the just what is depth psychology? What is the shadow?

What do we mean by these terms? You know, in the early days of psychology, little more than one hundred years ago, Freud kind of took the first moon trip into the unconscious, and Young explored the unconscious as his Freud kind of mentored Young Carl Jung and Jung kind of eventually broke away from Freud, and one of the differences between them was how they viewed the unconscious, and Jung said, it wasn't only about our negative emotions and

dark impulses. It was about anything at all that was repressed. So our creativity could be repressed in the shadow, Our dreams and aspirations could be repressed into the personal unconscious. The shadow is was Yung's name for the personal unconscious. There are layers of the unconscious, so we're not talking about the collective unconscious. We're talking about just the personal

unconscious in each individual. And so depth psychology refers to the field of psychology that emphasizes and includes unconscious process and most of psychology no longer, does you know, most of psychology is now they call it evidence based. It's now based on brain and neuroscience, cognitive behavioral stuff. It's like another field. It's just very different from death psychology. Yeah,

very different, very different. Yeah. Can we elaborate the connection between the phrase that you hear a lot the dark side and the shadow, because if I'm correct, if I understand this correctly, the shadow is not necessarily the dark side of human nature. Right, it's a much broader collection of unconscious processes, according to Young. Right. And also, you can have conscious dark side that isn't the shadow. Right. You can have your dark side express that isn't part

of your shadow. Right. Are these things true? Well, it's a little slippery. We have associations with the word dark, which also carries certain racist tones. Oh that's interesting. Yeah, I've had African American people say that to me. The terminology for dark side came up because it's not in the light of awareness, not that it's dark negative, right, but that it's a blind spot. Well, it doesn't live

in the light of awareness or consciousness. It's unconscious. So it's dark in relation to a wareareness not dark in relation to negativity? Now, some content, some shadow content, is dark in relation to the or negative in relation to the ego. So when you're growing up, if your father says to you, don't be sad, that's woosy and weak.

I don't want to ever see you cry, then that whole set of feelings gets repressed into your personal unconscious or your shadow, and as you live through life, and all those feelings of sorrow, grief, vulnerability are forbidden to you, are not allowed to be lived out. Then we could say that they're darker negative in relation to your ego, because your ego is telling you not to be sad. Right, They're not darker negative in relation to somebody who grows

up differently and is a allowed to express sadness. And that's part of what happens when people find a partner and mate, is that their shadow material doesn't match. It's not compatible. Wow, if you grow up with the message, don't get angry. I can't tolerate it. You know, your mother says, I can't handle that anger. Settle down, you know, be quiet, go to your room. Then all of that

anger gets buried in the shadow. And what happens when you meet someone who does something that makes you authentically angry, I mean it deserves an angry response. Well, it's forbidden to you, and so you go into terrible internal conflict, you know, and you go into conflict with the other person. And sometimes what happens then is the material erupts from

the shadow out of your control. So you know, in my practice, I had a lot of people who were ragers, and they were ragers because they had no conscious relationship to their authentic anger, and so it just came up out of their control, out of the control of their ego. Does that clarify a bit? Oh, you have no idea how much that clarified. So interesting. We got to bring this stuff back into mainstream psychology. Yeah, but you're right.

I mean I spent my whole dissertation, my whole PhD was on unconscious processes and its relationship to intelligence, but the focus was really on like information processing and implicit learning and of statistical patterns. I mean that's different than like what you're talking about in the unconscious. So I hear you, and I think it's really really profound stuff. And also just clarifying for our audience that what the dark side means in this framework is not necessarily negative.

Is just a wow. I mean that's really mind blowing. Really mind we're evil. It's not easy evil. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not talking about pedophiles, That's not what I'm talking about, or stereo murderers. You know, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about kind of every day outbursts or you know, experiences of a part of us that we feel we can't tame, we can't control. It could show up in addictions,

It could show up in mood and mood disorders. You know, someone is depressed and can't figure it out and can't get over it and doesn't know why, because there's a lot of material that's repressed that wasn't forbiddens, that wasn't allowed self expression. Is meditation a good vehicle for confronting the shadow, bringing it into the light. You know, for as long as I've taught shadow work, I've taught it in conjunction with meditation, and people always ask me why

that is so. For me, in order to be able to really encounter those parts of ourselves that are most scary and difficult and challenging, we need to have a place to center ourselves. We need to have a way to quiet ourselves, quiet the mind, especially calm the nervous system,

and then learn how to watch when the shadow comes up. So, if you really learn how to meditate and find that refuge inside yourself of silence, then when a very difficult thought comes up, or a really difficult feelings comes up, you can go to that center inside yourself and contemplate it and uncover its roots and do shadow work. But if you don't have that, if you're lost inside the noise in your mind, it's much harder to do. And

that's where most people live. Most people live inside the noise. Well, okay, so we can say into your latest work and it's connection to some of the ideas we're talking about. So what is the phrase inner ageist? Like, what does that mean? And how does that affect our health? The way that I teach shadow work is, you know, there's all this shadow content we were just talking about, all the material that's been buried. It's hard, it's amorphous, and so it's

hard to get a grasp of it. So what I do is I help people, or teach people in the books how to personify a shadow character, how to identify repeating internal dialogue, repeating feelings, and repeating sensations, and then turn that into a shadow character, a figure in your unconscious that you can begin to make a conscious relationship with. Let's say it's the food eat or the abandoned child, or the angry boy, whatever it is. Right now, you've

got something you can work with. So in my life latest work, I discovered, first in myself and then in my research that we live in a kind of a sea of agism in our culture. You know, youth is good and old is bad, independent is good, and dependent is bad. Strong is good, weak is bad. You're talking about American culture, yes, in western, post industrial white European culture. In that sea of agism which we see in the movies, we hear in our families. I mean, my father used

to make comments. Even with relatives and with TV shows and everything, we internalize that ageist message that young is good and old is bad. Well, what happens as we age through the lifespan, We're still carrying that unconscious message inside of us, unknowingly. So then all of a sudden, I have seventy three years of life experience. If I hadn't really worked with that, I'd be going, oh my god, I'm old. I don't you know, myrinkles, my body changes,

my this, my that. And what ends up happening is that we then project that agism against ourselves. And I had so many people in my practice who were feeling self hate because their bodies were changing, or their energy level was changing, their productivity was going down, their hair was turning gray, whatever it was, they had such negative feelings about it, about their own aging. So I found

the research of Becca Levy at Yale University. She spent her whole career studying the impact of internalized AI agism on our health interesting and what she yeah, and what she found is that what I call the innerageous, this is a shadow character that I call the inner ageist,

which is epidemic in our culture men and women. And what she found is that that unconscious internalized agism affects our heart rate, affects our memories, affects our moods our emotional health, affects our cognitive health, even affects our longevity. And when I saw that, it just blew my mind. I wrote a whole chapter about the innerageus because I realized that even though there's a campaign to end agism in the culture now, that that social activism is not

enough because it's internal. It requires inner work to really uproot the inner ageist shadow character in us so that we can feel self acceptance and we can find the time to really self actualize at this stage of life. Well, you're not you're speaking my language. I'm all, that's self actualization. Yeah, yes, What are some of the major or some other shadows that you have seen happens to people as they get older that's specific to the aging process. There's a big

one that happens with retirement. Because our culture is all about productivity. It's all about success. What did you do today? Or you go to a party, what do you do? And so we've unconsciously identified with what I call the doer. Some people call it the perfectionist, or the producer, or the dominator, the controller or the CEO, whatever it is, we call it. Our identity is about doing. And what

then happens when the roles fall away with retirement? People are having Millions of baby boomers are having a terrible time with us, feeling disoriented and lost. Some are sort of taking up encore careers, starting new businesses. Some are turning to creative outlets, some are turning to political activism. But what I want to suggest is that there's something deeper, and that is that in all the spiritual traditions, we're

taught that this stage of life is about spirituality. It's about contemplation, it's about turning within, and if we continue to maintain the doing level that we that we had at midlife. I call, you know, the heroic doing on the hero's journey. Then we don't really become an elder. We don't make a shift in identity, out of the doer into a more contemplative, more spiritual stage of life. And you know, the subtitle of my book I borrowed

from Rondas. It's called shifting from role to soul. That was his term, and I just love it because people instantly identify with, Oh my god, that's what I need to do. I need to let go of my identity with my role, whether that's CEO or therapist, or teacher or nurse or mom, whatever it is, lawyer, writer, I need to let go of that identity and shift to who I really am, my spiritual nature that's beneath all

the roles, behind all the roles. And so that was one of the intentions in my book was to teach people how to do that with practices and really deepen their experience of this stage of life. It doesn't mean that we stop doing. Many people want to, like, here I am with you. So many people want to continue to contribute, but we're not so identified with that. It's

not about how much we do or don't do. It's more about the quality of awareness, the stage, the level of consciousness with which we do what we're doing in that stage of life. You strike me as a very spiritual person. Do you see yourself that way? Like you seem very intuitive to me. Well, you know, I've been practicing meditation for fifty three years now, not too shabby too. You know, in the Vedonta lineage had you know, several teachers, and my practice is my favorite time of the day.

And it kind of goes without saying that. That's just essential to me. Do you mind telling me some of your major influences in the meditation world? I mean, some of my major influences are people like Sharon Salzburg, Sam Harris. I'm just curious sort of who who's who've influenced you? Yeah, I don't. You know. The reason I don't typically do that is because I don't want people to follow me. You know, it's really there's a chapter in the book. There's a chapter in the book about how to find

a spiritual practice that fits you. Yeah, well, you know who you are now. So I'm not a Buddhist, but people who are listening may feel resonance with that tradition or with Judaism, or with Christianity or with whatever. So there are mystical streams in every tradition that you can find now that have practices, that have teachers and practices. It's I mean, there's just been this democratization of spiritual teachings and we're kind of blessed to be living at

that particular time with that particular opportunity. So I think it's important for people to find their own way. That's the way of self actualization. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So is there a difference between being or becoming a senior and becoming an elder? Is there a difference in those concepts? For you? You know, we all become seniors with a Medicare birthday. I mean we kind of get this stamp

of approval. Now you get Medicare. It's official. That is, Yeah, but that is not a statement about in at work or internal development or psychological growth. And we've all met people who are sixty five or seventy five or eighty five who are closed minded, rigid, regretful. That's not an elder, right, So for me, elder is a stage not an age. It's a stage of development. It's not chronological. I've met people who are elders at fifty, so it's not chronological.

It's a quality of awareness that results from doing the

inner work that I write about. So, for example, completing emotional unfinished business, Wow, how can you become an elder if you really haven't done that, if you still need to give forgiveness or receive forgiveness, if you feel regret about something, if you feel hurt and haven't really tried to heal it, or completing spiritual unfinished business like we were just talking about, or even doing a life review, which is such a beautiful practice, really reoriented me to

this stage of life. So I go into great detail about how to look back over each decade and examine it what was lived out and what was unlived in the shadow. So you can discover your unlived life in the shadow, and then you can kind of choose whether there's something there that you want to express now. And it might be a feeling, it might be an aspiration, it might be a project, you know, could be all kinds of things. But unless we do this inner work, I think we don't really sit in the seed of

the elder. You know, this isn't this is an archetype. The elder is an archetype that has a kind of nobility to it. And in indigenous cultures, elders are revered, they have a special place. But in our culture, which is you know, as I said, is so ageist, we never think about honoring elders, and we don't have a right of passage to become an elder. And that was one of the things that I really kept in mind as I was writing. I wanted the book to be

a rite of passage to become an elder. So you go through the practices in every chapter, and by the end of the book, you're different, You're changed. And I've got about, oh more than forty groups of people now who have formed wisdom circles, which are like book clubs, and they're reading together and they're doing the practices together in the book, and they're telling me how they're changing, they're telling me about their discovery. So it's very gratifying.

It's just been beautiful for me. Have you thought about teaching an online course? I am teaching so much. Tomorrow I have a workshop on life review, a two hour workshop. If anybody's interested in my online stuff, you can go to Cornie's wig dot com. The links are all there. I've got several really several individual workshops and several large events coming up. Well, okay, as you just mentioned that you're doing a two hour thing on a life review. What is the purpose of a life review? Can you

talk a little bit more? Can we double click on what that means? The purpose of a life review is to really recall the key events and people and gains and losses, births and deaths, turning points that happened in your life, and then as a result of each one, to examine what didn't happen. So if one thing like so I mentioned to you that I started spirituality in my twenties and as a result of that, I didn't

make other choices. I didn't build a career early, I didn't have kids early, right because I was doing that. And so in a life review you look at this was expressed, and so this was repressed, and you begin to see the relationship between your lived life and your unlived life. That's I mean. I'm terrified of like reaching an age where I do a life review and I like regret what I repressed. I mean, I'm scared of that. Let that fear of regret motivate you. Let it motivate

you to live the life you want to be living. Now. I'm sure doing this podcast is part of it. It is definitely part of it. Yeah, so that at the end of your life you can say, you know, I can let go without regret. And I think in my stage of life it's crucial. I have a friend said to me recently in his seventies and he said, you know, if I don't write that novel now, I'm going to die with regret. And he's doing it. He's finally waited until his seventies and he's finally doing it. And so

I think, you know what you just said. Can be a teacher, can be a motivator. And people have different dreams and different aspirations and different callings. But if you tune in to yourself and you really know what that is, it's important to follow it. And so when you do a life review, it's kind of like distilling the wisdom from the life you've lived and what you've learned and

what you can contribute now. You know, like, for example, I really don't think anybody else could have written this book because I have this history of working with the shadow right and it led me and it led me to this moment to write about the shadow and age. But everybody's story has that unique quality. I mean, I've done Life of You with hundreds of people now and they all say, oh my god, Now I know what

I can I know the gift that I can give. Now, what's the age range of people that you've worked with to do life review? What's the youngest that you'll go? You know, some people are doing it at midlife. But it's a different experience right at first, I do it. You can do it whenever you want, Scott. It's a different experience because you'll look at the first half of life and you won't have the shortened time horizon. So for me, you know, death is a teacher. My mortality

is a teacher. And so part of the urgency that I feel is that I don't I might have ten years, I might have twenty years. I don't know, but that's a lot less than what I've lived. And so you do the life review in the context of awareness of mortality. It's a little bit different. Yeah, of course, now I hear you I'm really fascinated with this notion in your book of Emotional Repair. Can you talk a lot about what you mean by emotional repair and particularly in later life.

For many people, emotional repair can follow a life review because you begin to see where your injuries happened on the timeline, who they happened with, whether they were traumas or betrayals or rejections, whatever they were, and then you can begin to see, Okay, what can I let go of now really deeply relief and what needs repair. So I had one woman say to me that she felt regret about how she treated her mother before her mother died, and she couldn't speak to her now, and so she

wrote letters. She wrote a whole series of letters to her mother in order to do that repair, and she kept writing until the regret lifted. So that's an example of emotional repair. Some people can do that with you, face to face with people who were alive. For me, when my dad was in his eighties, he had stopped drinking and he was really an alcoholic when I was growing up. He was an angry guy a lot of the time, and it was traumatic for my mother and sister in me and when he was in his eighties.

He was really mellow and we got to talk about all that, and over a series of conversations and lots of tears, we were able to understand each other more and forgive each other. So, you know, yeah, some people can do this with a therapist or a coach. They don't actually need the other person there. They can do it, you know. And some people can do this through journaling

on their own. So there are all different kinds of ways of of you know, there are a lot of psychology books about this, because emotional repair is really about it's really about therapy. Do you see your your book is right there at the top of my bookshelf. Oh yeah, I can see the bottom. Ye. Yeah. These people, including yourself, are are my inspirations. I mean young of course, Joseph

Campbell amazing Joseph Campbell's work. I mean, why is that not discustom more in modern day suffering, you know, and that kind of arc the role in name. Did you know Nathaniel Brandon at all? Did you ever meet him? I did? Wow, that's legendary who you met. I was in publishing, you know, when we published that book, when I was in the publishing house and we published Nathaniel. Yeah, I won't ask you for any juicy gossip, I promised. Let's say who else. Ernest Becker very much influenced me.

So I'm just thinking if some people contributors here that have had a particularly profound influence on me, I wonder how much you've come across the ranks of Abraham Maslow and or has that influenced you at all, because that's his work has influenced me a lot well. In my early years in psychology, before I really moved toward young I was very much involved in humanistic and transpersonal psychology and always going to the conferences and reading the journals

and all that stuff. So, you know, Maslow was an important teacher. He went to Essalyn in the sixties and really helped to launch that whole stream in the field of psychology, which unfortunately has kind of lost power now, as you know, because the AMA has taken over everything. And I wrote about that in the Age book as part of the context for my retirement, because I'm kind

of really heartbroken about what's happened to the field. Can you elaborate a little bit who's taken over the psychiatrists now? Just dispense medication. Right, Oh, they don't do therapy. They're told what drugs to give and stuff, and the psychologists are now fighting to be able to give medication. And that there are no graduate schools anymore except for pacifica graduate institute in California that really teach s deef psychology. I mean, I don't know of any I'm there, may

be say maybe Saybrook Institute is still there. Yeah, so we've sort of lost the war in terms of, you know, the field of psychology and is kind of shocking and disturbing, and I refuse to lose the war. My stepson, who's forty now, is a psychologist and he may as well be in a completely different field from me. I mean, he says shadow and he mocks me. He hears shadow and he like mocks me, laughs at me. You know, they have no frame for it. He just studied the brain.

So yeah, so I'm glad that you're you know, it's a worthy battle to fight, but I think that the numbers are against us at this point. Well, this is how much of a legend you are. If you go and I'm not trying to boost your ego here, but if you go type in your name on Google. You know, like they have like they'll have people who are associated with you, but the kind of people associated with me are not these people James Hillman, Paul Couger, Carl Jung, Roomy,

Roomy associated with you. So you're there, You're like there with like Carl Young and Rumy. Well, you know that's because I wrote a book about Rumy. I wrote a novel called A Moth to the Flame that's the story of Rumy's life. I think part of this stage of life, just developmentally, that stuff doesn't matter anymore. Scott. In my forties, if you had said that, I would have kind of gotten pumped up. It doesn't matter to me. Now. What really matters is that my work is reaching people. I'm feeling.

I'm living in tremendous gratitude, you know, for the privilege. I have so much privilege as a white person with resources and a most incredible husband, and a really beautiful location and the luxury to be able to write and teach, and you know, so I'm just I live with I like to say I live with gratitude in one hand and grief in the other. I have a tremendous amount of grief for what's happening in the world every day.

I feel just tremendous grief. But you know, like right now I want to go look at the prime of the outcome of the primaries. But you know, I've lived a beautiful life. So I'm just very grateful and you're still living. Yes, I'm still living. I have good health. I mean, there's so many things to be grateful for you. A couple people want to recommend you. I think you

really resonate with their work. Christy Nelson was recently on my podcast talked about gratefulness and existential gratefulness, and she wrote a beautiful book about that. I love the worldview you have and the outlook you have kind of related to this a little bit. Can you talk about the difference between emotional repair and what you talk about what you refer to as spiritual repair. Some of us have found spiritual practices and spiritual teachers and communities and had

a lot of gifts and blessings from them. Some of us have been wounded by them. There are a lot of abusive teachers, and there are a lot of dysfunctional communities. This could be a Catholic priest, this could be you know, a swami, This could be a roshi or a rabbi. I'm not specifying any kind of a lineature. But some of us have had traumatic experiences in a spiritual context

and that needs healing, just like emotional trauma. And so, and that's part of kind of doing the life review, examining the practices we have or don't have now, rethinking intuiting the lineage or the organization that we want to affiliate with, and re examining our beliefs. You know, for many people, they don't believe what they believed thirty years ago, but it actually doesn't occur to them to explore that. It just kind of all happens unconsciously, right. And the

other thing is images. So a lot of us have images of the divine images of God that we internalized in childhood. That white old man shaking his finger at us, you know, right right? Does that fit who you are now and the practices you do now? I mean, if you're a Buddhist meditation practitioner, does that image from your childhood fit? So? You know, spiritual repair is really about getting aligned and congruent from within at all these different

levels of your spiritual life. With lots of different levels. Is a lot of that integration? Is it integration? You know, I'm not such a fan of that word. I worked with one man in his forties who was a mindfulness practitioner and believed in Buddhist concepts. But as we explored, what we discovered was he had that old man in the sky, angry God shaking a fist at him every time he had a sexual thought or a sexual fantasy. Wow, right, that he was going to go to hell because he

was taught that in Catholic school. He didn't know that that was still running in him. He just thought he was a Buddhist, but that was actually influencing his relational life, his intimate life because he felt guilty and ashamed about his sexuality. So, you know, so I don't really look at it as integration. I look at it more as like uncovering and allowing these different parts to kind of go into the right place, the place where they belong

in our psyches. Okay, right, I mean you mentioned Jim Hillman. He used to talk about the pluralistic psyche that we have many parts, and so all these parts kind of have a different place at the table, and they don't so much need to be integrated or blended or balanced. They need to have the right proportionality or position in the psyche for us to be really high functioning. Yes. So are you familiar with Jim Fadoman's work at all? He has a new book out called This Your Symphony

of Selves, which I really like. Yes, Jim's a great guy. He's an elder. Yes, I agree. I agree, he's a friend of mine. He co authored that with Jordan Gruber, so I want to give Jordan credit as well. But yeah, it's a really good book. I recommend people read it. While we're on this theme of spiritual repair and growing, how do you see spirituality in later life as a different how's the flavor of a different than from earlier stages.

That's a good question. You know, in India the stages of life are Brahmacharya, student, and then householder Vana Prasta, and then grandparent gri Hasta and then son yasen recluse. You release, you give away your possessions, you leave your home and you're free to wander and to focus on your spiritual practice. That's what that time of life is

about in Christianity. You know, you go to a monastery, right, you become a monk, you go to a monastery, and some Christian lineages, So each tradition in Judaism, which is not a monastic tradition, there are times of life that

are specifically for spiritual practice. So each of these traditions talks about later life grandparenting and post grandparenting as really about this shift from role to soul or these days what's being called non duality, awareness of non duality, that I and you are not separate, that I'm not separate from the rest of the living world, that I am

not separate from anything. Nonduality is not two one oneness, and that this time of life is for finding that oneness and sitting in that oneness in preparation for death. And so the teaching is that if we die in a high level of awareness, we have a different experience. We can have a conscious death, a conscious dying process, right, And so yeah, I think you know. For me, I wrote about three portals of awareness. There's shadow awareness, the

connection to the psyche. There's pure awareness, a connection to we could call it spirit, the trans personal center. And then there's mortality awareness really living with awareness, and those three qualities of awareness make us an elder, and so meditation for an elder needs to engage those qualities of awareness. From my point of view, taking and you know, all the perennial traditions teach this. This is not making it up.

So this is what you mean by going from role to soul is these three portals of awareness can help you in that trend? Is that is that right? Is that a fair way of saying that? What I mean by role to soul is we shift our unconscious we you know the perennial question who am I? Right? Oh? Yeah? Who who am I? In fact, there's a there's a practice from Ramana Maharshi in India that's just sitting with who am I? For years and years and years? Okay,

So we ask ourselves, who am I? When I'm no longer doctor Connie, when I'm no longer the shadow expert, when I'm no longer Neil's wife, when I'm no longer a writer? Who am I? And to take that identification, that sense of inness and move it into my spiritual nature, my deepest essence. And again, it's not about what we do or don't do. It's not about stopping doing it's

about caring this quality of awareness. In my tradition, we say I am that, meaning I am consciousness, so living, I am that in whatever it is that I'm doing. I'm a soul on a journey, or i am spirit, or I am God. Whatever your language is for this, the language isn't. Don't get hung up on my language. Use your own, you know, the language that resonates with you. You You could say Buddhen nature. I am Buddhen nature. So if I'm teaching, or I'm with my grandkids or

my husband, or I'm writing, i am Buddhen nature. I am Spirit. I'm not the doer. I'm not the one who's doing it all. It's not about my egos agenda anymore. It was in my forties when I wrote Romancing the Shadow. It's not about that. It's not about that anymore. Ye yeah, God, yeah, so interesting. Well, I don't know. I hope that at certain points of this interview today I triggered some of

your earlier ego because you deserve it. I know, I appreciate all your humility, but I hope today you know I activated little least some of that forties energy, which has a time and place in our lives. Absolutely, I feel appreciated. Let's put it that way, Scott. Let's put it that way. I feel appreciated. Thank you so much for being on my podcast today and for the incredible work you've done and that you still will continue to do. And thank you for your efforts to maintain the soul

of psychology really really really important. Try to put that in a verb of a book someday, Scott Grek Goffman's trying to keep the soul of psychology. Yes, definitely. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com. We're

on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast. We also put some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.