Becoming a Wisdom Elder:
A Teaching on Conscious Aging
with Cynthia Bourgeault
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What does it mean to age consciously? The 2024 American election season brought this question to the national fore, but the topic is much bigger than one presidential candidate. With 73-million Baby Boomers increasing in years and creating what is being called a “gray tsunami,” what is our cultural roadmap for aging with grace and dignity, while also unlocking a position as a Wisdom Elder? How do we access something, as Cynthia writes: “purer and more primordial than even [our] deepest realization” as we make ourselves “malleable into the hands of the Mercy.”
Expanding on her “10 Practical Guidelines for Conscious Aging,” Cynthia shares with us both the responsibilities and the deep spiritual possibilities coiled within this inescapable process. Drawing on two of her trusted spiritual classics, Helen Luke’s Old Age and Ladislaus Boros’ The Mystery of Death, Cynthia pulls from her own experience of aging as “what once seemed far off now becomes the intimate landscape of my day-to-day life.”
As Cynthia writes, “within the world’s Wisdom teachings, ‘conscious aging’ is not simply a polite euphemism but an active pathway of spiritual metamorphosis: in a sense, the capstone project of an entire life’s journey.” Listen in as Cynthia engages this timely topic which arrived dramatically on our political stage, but continues to unfold each day, with more subtle implications, in our families and homes.
This course offers a three-hour video recording of a live online event which primarily features Cynthia’s teaching presentation, but also includes a rich conversation with 90-year-old Wisdom Elder Mahan Siler, a retired Baptist Pastor and social justice activist, who engaged this topic with his blog “Positional Power vs Relationship Power.” After the event, Cynthia sat down again with Heather Ruce to answer additional viewer questions. This 45-minute continuing conversation is included in the course as well.
