Aging with Agency

Building Resilience, Confronting Challenges, and Navigating Eldercare

By: Sandi Peters, Drew Leder MD PhD - foreword

Narrated by: Diana Gardiner

An experiential guide to reorienting our understanding of late adulthood as one of life's most meaningful and transformative stages.

Aging can bring new fears, challenges, and concerns. Loss of career, loved ones, or changing physical and cognitive abilities can leave us feeling isolated and scared. Sandi Peters shows us that growing older need not mean the end of personal growth. In fact, late adulthood can prove to be the most meaningful and transformative period 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.

The audiobook draws on history, philosophy, psychology, gerontology, and spirituality to deepen and expand our understanding of what it means to grow old in the 21st 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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2020 Sandi Peters (P)2020 North Atlantic Books

Critic 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 Agency is 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 of Falling Upwards: A Spirituality for the Second Half of Life, and prolific writer on revisioning Christianity for our time)

“Aging with Agency offers a wise and pragmatic framework for understanding the universal trajectory 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 of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening)

“This remarkable book presents a profound - and profoundly challenging - new 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 dementia - but 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 of In the Ever After: Fairly Tales for the Second Half of Life and numerous other works using myth and psychology to elucidate various life stages)