A midlife reset enables profound changes
Meditation promotes the necessary change to help alleviate personal dissatisfaction
Do you need a “midlife reset”?
For many of us we are blessed to arrive at midlife satisfied that we have met life’s professional and family demands and expectations to some degree, yet there is often that nagging question that lingers …“is this IT?”
If this is indeed “IT “why do I feel something is missing? Why is there an emptiness?
We can feel guilty because often our external goals have been met and we “should” be satisfied, the optics look good to us and others. So, what’s missing?
For women this question inevitably arises with menopause when huge hormonal shifts mark the end of one phase our lives. We may have spent 20 + years caring intensively for our children, our own careers, our partners need and often the care of our aging parents. After menopause many (but not all) of these commitments often take a back seat, and we are left with the question “what’s next for me?” or “what do I want?” “what’s my purpose now?”
The dilemma for men can be similar: their clear and driven sense of purpose can start to dim at midlife: what seemed highly important at 30 just does not always seem so at 60. For many people the years just lived have not yielded any satisfaction or joy whatsoever: often our childhood conditioning, life circumstances or poor health mean we have never had time for self-care or exploration of any kind.
If we are fortunate, the gift of midlife is the ability to take that pause and ask that question. “Who am I?”
We are so conditioned all our lives to service our responsibility for others: as we summit 50 and begin to look ahead to the third and fourth seasons of our lives, we start to feel the inner call to attend to the needs of our own deeper selves.
Meditation is a powerful tool to take us beyond our story, world identity and past experiences, wounds, traumas and disappointments to access who we really are at source. From that stillness, the chatter of the mind disappears and the essence of who we really are and every answer we seek awaits us.
Photo by Matthew Henry