Aging with Agency: Building Resilience, Confronting Challenges, and Navigating Eldercare

(Paperback)

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An experiential guide to re-orienting our understanding of old age as one of life's most meaningful and transformative stages. As we become healthier as a society, so too are we living longer. But with aging can come new fears, challenges and concerns. Loss of career, loved ones, or our physical and cognitive abilities can leave us feeling isolated and scared. But in Aging with Agency, Sandi Peters shows us that old age need not mean the end of personal growth. In fact, late adulthood can prove to be the most meaningful and transformative periods of one's life. The key, says Peters, is the development of one's inner life, and with it a shift in one's relation to the aging process. Minimally theoretical and maximally practical, this book draws on history, philosophy, psychology, gerontology, and spirituality to deepen and expand our understanding of what it means grow old in the twenty-first century. Peters shares time-tested contemplative practices such as meditation, active imagination, dream work, and creative writing designed to enhance one's inner worlds and enable us to face life's inevitable changes with equanimity and insight. She offers practical advice on issues such as assisted living and home care, and a refreshingly new perspective on matters of memory and cognitive change.

Reviews

We live in a society with elderly people, but very few elders. There just have not been enough guides from the first half to the second half of life. Great elders reveal both a brightness and a sadness. They mirror you rather than asking you to mirror them.Aging with Agencyis a guide to developing the kind of awareness that moves us from being old to being wise. Through story and example it counsels the reader to ripen rather than decline as the years unfold. It encourages movement toward gratitude and authenticity as the inner work of the second half of life is graciously embraced.
Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, author ofFalling Upwards: A Spirituality for the Second Half of Life,and prolific writer on re-visioning Christianity for our time

Aging with Agencyoffers a wise and pragmatic framework for understanding the universaltrajectory of aging, illness, and death. In charting how best to navigate the many changes of these life transitions, she highlights the seminal work of Jung, Maslow, and the Ericksons, as well as drawing on her own years of experience working with aging populations. Particularly helpful is her understanding of the challenges, difficulties, and options available at the end-stage of life. This wonderful book is an inspiring wake-up call to explore our own relationship to growing old and to be strong in advocating for truly compassionate care.
Joseph Goldstein, teacher, cofounder of Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and author ofMindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening

This remarkable book presents a profoundand profoundly challengingnew paradigm on aging. Drawing on her extensive clinical experience, Peters extends the Jungian view that aging is a time for individuation and spiritual development. She argues that such inner growth continues even with cognitive impairment and dementiabut only if caretakers recognize and foster the process. In losing memory, the elder is not simply disintegrating, but transitioning from ego to Self, as Jungians put it, or more generally, from this world to all worlds.
Allan B. Chinen, MD, psychiatrist and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and author ofIn the Ever After: Fairly Tales for the Second Half of Lifeand numerous other works using myth and psychology to elucidate various life stages

This book is actually more thrilling than its title implies.It presents the possibility of an exploration of vibrant and awakening awareness of the inner life that flourishes even as the body is coming toward the end of its viability.I would have called itInward Bound.
Sylvia Boorstein, Buddhist meditation teacher, storyteller, political activist, mother, and grandmother and author of numerous accessible books on meditation, most notablyIts Easier Than You ThinkandThats Funny, You Dont LOOK Buddhist

Aging with Agency isthedefinitive book on aging, why it matters, how to reperceive it, how to experience it positively, and how to support aging friends and family. Drawing on her thirty-plus years of experience with the elderly, Sandi Peters offers primers and perspectives on memory loss, and adds invaluable chapters on activities and practices that can help both the aging and their caregivers to thrive in the afternoon of life. She also assesses the various options for living environments and identifies the red flags that the elderly and their families must watch for in making arrangements for end-of-life care. Aging with Agency is a book with a triple entendre title: first, aging matters because it is growing phenomenon that families and our society must confront. Secondly, this book draws on the ideas of multiple wisdom figures who recognize that our elder years can be a time of growth, creativity, generativity, and value for both the aging individual and for our society as a whole. Finally, it provides matters in the sense of offering practical information that needs to be widely known in our society as the cohort of aged people increases. This is an essential guide for all who seek to age well.
Susan Mehrtens, PhD, president of the Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences

Sandi Peters has written a practical book on the soulful aging process. She combines many years of service to the aged with integrated wisdom into a real primer of understanding of critical spiritual passages in the aging process. Grounding her work in Jungian Analytical Psychology, she challenges the reader to maturation, searching for meaning in diminishment, finding hope in loss and grief, and living our personal myths in depth into the dying process. Her research is available to us in a veryreadable way. As a formator of spiritual directors, I will suggest anyone journeying with an elderly person to read this book for guidance and insight.
Donald Bisson, FMS, DMin, founder of the Center for Jungian ChristianDialogue and formatorof Spiritual Directors nationally and internationally

Aging with Agency is truly a transformational workone that can benefit a wide variety of reader: elders themselves, educators, mental health therapists, pastoral counselors, spiritual directors, retreat leaders, and professional and personal care providers. Even younger people including millennialswho fear their own aging and are seeking something realistically positive about the later stages of adulting can find hope in these pages. Sandi Peters has taken a wide-ranging, friendly approach to the process of maturing, with emphasis on the development of the inner life of the person as the ultimate challenge and raison detre for optimal living in the last decades of human life. Her focus on the potential for growth in the works of Jung, Maslow, Erikson, and Tornstam creates a quality of anticipation that growing old could actually be something excitinga process to look forward to.
Jane Thibault, PhD, professor emeritus in the department of Family and Geriatric Medicine at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and author of numerous work on the intersection of aging and spirituality

What a refreshing landscape Sandi Peters, thought leader for our particular era of aging, invites us to explore. Yes, it reminds me of the beauty and comfort of my garden without which it would be difficult to live in these critical and changing times. This garden also affords me the seasons of pruning and attending to my nonbearing magnolia tree, concrete challenges of growth. So it is with this book as it opens us to the fruits of being present to our inner world.Through her decades of study and clinical care, Peters leads us downsecurepaths of presence, inquiry, and practice to come upon our own particular inner garden. One that both needs our attention and can sustain us through life most difficult experiences.Aging with Agency explores how to access this stream of life flowing water in challenging living environments and even with memory loss where she shows us our deepest self is not abandoned in memory loss.
Marita Grudzen, MHS, associate director emerita of the Stanford Geriatric Education Center, Stanford School of Medicine

The way Aging with Agency has woven together theory and practice, personal stories with those of the cultural and theoretical Zeitgeist, inspiring the readerwith practical suggestionsto move inward, to see her and his aging as a tremendous opportunity to deepen and grow, to connect with self and Self, is truly astounding. Along with a quote from William James, I remember him saying thatthe greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes. This book is testament to exactly that discovery! It is amajor contribution to our effort to end the insanity we have in our perceptions of aging, of elders, of the way we care for our elders, and the way we look at life.
Nader Shabahangi, PhD, psychotherapist and businessperson, visionary and thought leader in the area of aging and how care is delivered to elders and the animating presence behind innovation programs aimed at assuring quality of life in the later years, most recently Elder Ashram in Oakland, California

Author Bio

After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1980, Sandi Peters pursued her undergraduate love of C.G. Jung and got her M.A. in Jungian psychology. Her research focused on sandplay, a creative modality in which sand and miniatures are used to reveal an individual's inner experience. Sandi has been pioneering this method of therapy for the last eight years. Sandi has worked in numerous capacities in the field of eldercare, including coordinating outreach and educational programs, facilitating support groups, organizing conferences, and managing one of the first adult day health centers for those living with memory loss in San Francisco. Sandi currently facilitates an early stage support group for the Alzheimer's Association in Marin County, SF, offers discussion groups in eldercare facilities, and sees individual clients who wish to explore their aging as a psychological, spiritual process.