BEYOND 63
IMAGINING YOUR RIGHT AGING AND YOUR BLESSED DYING.
Three Intentions and Three Outcomes and the Logistics
What are the intentions behind Beyond 63 and what are the outcomes? Is this what you want?
I just read “Teaching in an Age of Paralysis” by Douglas Gerwin in the Summer-Fall 2022 issue of Being Human, the magazine of the US Anthroposophical Society. Douglas Gerwin has spent his life in high school as a
student, a teacher, and a trainer of teachers. His insights on the three roles of an high school teacher were perfect to describe why we need Beyond 63.
Reaching 63 or soon after, we arrive at a new stage of development similar to
puberty. Like teenagers seeking adulthood, we are mature adults seeking elderhood. Both stages can be anxious and confusing, disruptive and distressing, and full of complexity and a myriad of inner questions.
The Three Intentions
Gerwin writes that that a high school pedagogy requires three types of teachers: a coach for supporting the will, a counselor for support in managing feelings, and a compass for sensitively giving direction to thinking.
Bingo! These are the three intentions living in Beyond 63 - Imagining Right Aging and Blessed Dying. In the course, you will find coaching for what to do to move efficiently and elegantly into elderhood and death. You will find compassionate counseling for managing the complexity of feelings about the
meaning of life and how to experience beauty and peace in both aging and dying. Finally, Beyond 63 provides the spiritual compass for our thinking safely pointing the way beyond the increasingly limiting horizons of space and time to the increasing richness of soul.
There is a fourth intention that
that is to offer encouragement and permission live these years and cross the threshold your way whether that be with wild creativity or calm serenity.
The Three Outcomes
The three outcomes will be an empowered creativity in your will, an equanimity and self-compassion in your feelings, and a clarity and luminosity in your thoughts for a rich journey through our Sabbath Years. The program is about nurturing your soul regardless of what unfolds in your biology and your biography. If it is your etheric destiny to eventually face dementia in
your mind/brain, crippling in your bones, diminishment in your senses, or painful illness in your body, your soul, your higher self will have a sustaining and living imagination of right aging and blessed dying.
I'm still so alive and mobile in body and soul and I
want to use this aliveness and fluidity to imagine growing older and dying with enthusiasm. I didn't incarnate to live forever as Lynn. I want to bring my continuing joy for living into a new joy for my inevitable dying.
Imagine the freedom, love, and wisdom that begins to appear in our
souls with entering the portal of elderhood and arriving at the threshold of death.
A fourth outcome is the forming of a community of souls willing to continue the process beyond the course.
Shortly before his death, Rudolf Steiner wrote this verse for Ita Wegman:
"Grasp the future
Through the past,
Hope for the becoming
Through what has become.
So take hold of being
In becoming;
So take hold of what will be
In the essence of what is now. "
—Rudolf Steiner,
for Ita Wegman, 24 December 1924
Let's grasp the future and take hold of being in becoming.
More on Why Me?
Forty-two years ago, I designed my very first course. I was a co-founder of a birthing center and I shaped the education program on pregnancy, birth, and newborn parenting. Now I have designed this course on aging and dying. The whole shebang of life!
There have been over thirty courses in between these two, all of them intending to recognize, comfort, and support the imagination of self in all areas of living, being, and becoming.
This year will be my 19th series of Inner Christmas Messages during the Holy Nights. These
messages are always about actively dwelling in the Threshold of a spiritually inspired new understanding and manifesting of selfhood.
I see all my years of spiritual research on the task of self-imagining as providing prompts for wondering, not as dictates or
fixed forms. My courses are really more like artists’ studios, scientists’ labs, children’s playgrounds, and philosophers’ studies.
Join me in this Magical Mystery Tour…
Come with me and the other participating souls on contemplating the four tasks of Sabbath Consciousness. They will be truly enlivening for your soul.
Imagine the Meaning of Life So Far and Life Yet to Be as Living Righteously.
Imagine the Process of Dying and the Event of Death
as Blessed Transition.
Imagine the Other Side of the Threshold of Death. What waits there?
Imagine the
Possibility of Preparing for the Next Life and our conversations with our angels.
The Age for Participating
Obviously, you cannot be too old. If you are 63 and confident, thanks to longevity genes, feel you will have another 30 or 40 years, something does shift at 63 and you need to pay attention to it.
If you haven’t turned 63 yet, but feel a deep calling to work with the mysteries of aging, dying and beyond, you are welcome to enroll.
Any Religious Requirements?
None. You don’t even need to believe in anything non-material or airy-fairy. You just need an open mind, a searching soul, and good humor as I will be sharing from a spiritual perspective, but not a dogmatic
one.
The Logistics
The course will unfold in seven modules that consist of Live Zoom Gatherings (around 90 minutes) where I will share questions and imaginations and we will then have open conversation. These zoom events will be on Thursdays at 1PM Eastern.
They will be recorded for replay in video and audio, and there will be transcripts. I will provide supporting materials and worksheets for each module. You will have access to all this content for “life.”
There is also a community portal for connecting with each other, sharing questions, insights, and
inspirations.
To achieve the outcomes you desire, I would suggest you devote 3 or more hours each week to this life sabbath work. (I know the Sabbath is a day of
rest, but it is also a day of inner reflection even for God.)
The Cost
Because this is the pilot offering, the cost is only $197 (or 3 monthly payments of $67).
I am able to give discounts…pay what you
can…just send me an email and let me know what you can afford and I will send you a payment link.)
And if your life has blessed you with wealth and you would like to pay it forward and support the work of the Imagine Self Academy (the tech expenses alone cost me over $400/month) and my life, please get in
touch.
Registration
Registration opens Sunday morning. I will be sending an email with the link to the Course Description page where you can hit another link to get to the payment page. Registration will close at 8:00PM Eastern on Wednesday, September 21.
Our first Zoom gathering will be a 1PM Eastern on the Autumnal Equinox, Thursday, September 22. The final Zoom gathering will be on Thursday, November 17th.
If you have any questions, just hit reply to this email and I will respond to your message.
