So welcome everyone and thank you thank you for listening so let me guess you're somewhere in your late 30s,
40s maybe your 50s and something is off you've done everything right or mostly right or right enough you may have built the career raised the children paid the mortgage showed up for people who needed you you did what you were supposed to do and yet there is this feeling this quiet hum of what dissatisfaction restlessness a low grade sense that something is missing though you cannot quite name what it is you wake up at 3am sometimes and stare at the ceiling wondering is this it?
Is this what I spent my whole life building towards?
So welcome to the midlife unravelling it is not as fun as it sounds actually it does not sound fun at all,
Does it?
And that's terrible marketing so here is what nobody tells you there is a well documented happiness curve across the human lifespan and researchers have studied that across 145 countries and it turns out as per this research that happiness is shaped like a U so you start out reasonably happy in your youth and then it declines slowly but steadily bottoming out somewhere around the age of 47-50 and then this is the good news it rises again as you get older now they call that low point in the middle which is a very clinical way of saying this is the part where everything feels heavy and nothing makes sense being in the middle of that low point is where everything feels heavy and nothing makes sense so if you are in that dip right now I want you to know you are not broken you are not failing you are not uniquely bad at life you are just in the middle of the U and something important is trying to happen here so let me tell you what I think is going on and I say I think because none of us really know for certain I can only share my experience with you but here is my best understanding after sitting with this the first half of life is about building building an identity building a career building relationships building a life that works that makes sense that earns approval and provides security we learn the rules we play the game we accumulate skills,
Possessions,
Roles,
Labels,
Responsibilities and we become somebody whatever that somebody is and this is necessary important and I will also say you cannot skip it but somewhere around midlife the rules stop working the identity you built starts to feel like a costume that no longer fits the goals you chased even the ones you achieved feel strangely hollow the roles that defined you parent,
Professional,
Partner start to shift or empty out children,
If you have them,
They leave careers plateau or they end relationships that once made you feel alive relationships that once felt solid reveal their cracks and in the silence that follows a question emerges usually at 3 am usually unwelcome who am I underneath all of this?
Now if you have heard of Carl Jung the Swiss psychiatrist he had a lot to say about this he believed that the second half of life has a different purpose than the first half the first half is about building the ego creating a functional self that can operate in the world and the second half is about something else entirely he called it individuation the process of becoming who you actually are beneath all the roles and masks and adaptations that you made to survive nobody tells you this at career day by the way first you'll spend 20 years becoming someone then you'll spend the next 20 unbecoming them it's not a very popular message but here is what I have come to believe the unhappiness of midlife is not a problem to be solved it is a signal to be heeded too something in you is outgrowing the container you built for it and that is uncomfortable of course it is uncomfortable growth is always uncomfortable now in my work as a holistic therapist I pay a lot of attention to what is happening in the body and here is something I've noticed the body often knows we are in the midlife passage before the mind does you might notice a tiredness that sleep does not fix a restlessness that no amount of activity satisfies a heaviness in the chest a tiredness in the throat insomnia,
Mysterious aches a sense of being simultaneously wired and exhausted sometimes it shows up as anxiety that seems to have no cause sometimes as a flatness a graying out of things that used to bring pleasure now the medical system will often look at these symptoms and reach for diagnosis depression,
Anxiety,
Burnout and sometimes those are very accurate but sometimes what looks like pathology is actually transition your body is not breaking down it is trying to get your attention and there is also let's be honest the simple fact of aging somewhere in your 40s you start to notice your body is not what it was things take longer to heal the face in the mirror looks increasingly like your parent you start getting those little reminders the blood test comes back slightly off the friend who gets a scary diagnosis and the colleague who dies too young now mortality moves from abstract concept to lived reality you start counting backward as well as forward time since birth gives way to time left to live and this is confronting also of course it is confronting we live in a culture that worships youth and pretends death does not exist nobody prepares for this I mean where is the course facing your mortality 101 would have been useful somewhere between learning to drive and filing your taxes but here is the thing awareness of mortality when we can actually face it becomes a kind of a gift it clarifies it burns away the trivial stuff and it makes us ask what actually matters how do I want to spend this one precious life and remember the body is not your enemy in this process it is your teacher now there is a phrase that haunts midlife the unlived life and it refers to all the roads not taken the dreams that were deferred the parts of yourself you put aside to be responsible,
To be acceptable to fit in and sometimes just to survive maybe you wanted to be an artist but you became an accountant because it was sensible maybe you wanted adventure but you chose security maybe there was a version of yourself wilder,
Freer,
More authentic that you abandoned somewhere in your twenties because it did not fit the society's script so in the first half of life we often sacrifice parts of ourselves on the altar of necessity and sometimes that sacrifice was the right call we had children to raise bills to pay people depending on us but those unlived parts they do not disappear they just go underground and in midlife they start to knock on the door now sometimes they knock politely a wistful feeling when you see someone doing the thing you always wanted to do a dream that keeps recurring or maybe a book that falls off the shelf at the right moment and sometimes they knock less politely illness,
Breakdown,
Crisis,
An affair the dramatic destruction of everything you built and I am not suggesting you burn your life down please do not burn your life down I mean some people need to but most do not most need something a bit more subtle to make room to stop betraying themselves in small ways every way to finally listen to what they have been ignoring for decades now there is grief in this process also real grief for the time that has passed for the versions of yourself that never got to exist for the dreams that may no longer be possible and the grief is appropriate necessary even you cannot move forward without mourning what was lost but there is also something else here something unexpected freedom because when you finally face the unlived life when you stop pretending you do not want what you want something shifts in that moment you stop abandoning yourself and that changes everything we call it midlife crisis but what if we call it something else how about we call it a midlife invitation a midlife awakening or a midlife passage because crisis implies something is going wrong something is to be fixed medicated or powered through but what if nothing is wrong what if this is exactly what is supposed to happen think about it every major transition in life involves discomfort adolescence,
Leaving home becoming a parent these passages are difficult disorienting and sometimes very painful also but we do not call them crisis we recognize them as necessary transformations so midlife is another such passage a developmental stage with its own tasks its own challenges and its own gifts the task of midlife is not to hold on tighter to what you built it is to let go of what no longer serves you to stop performing the self you created for others and start discovering the self that wants to emerge and this is not easy it requires a kind of courage that is different from the courage of youth not the courage to build and achieve but the courage rather to release and become and here is the secret that nobody tells you that the second half of life can be richer than the first not because life gets easier,
It does not but because you get clearer,
More honest less willing to waste time on things that do not matter and more able to appreciate what does the u-curve rises after midlife for a reason because people who navigate this passage often find a kind of peace and purpose that they've never had but you have to go through the valley first there's no way around it only through practice I want to invite you into a practice now if you need to stay alert for any reason you can save this part for later but if you can find somewhere comfortable now sitting up or lying down you can soften your gaze or even let your eyes close if that feels ok whatever works for you now begin by feeling your body not thinking about what I said feeling it the weight of you the places where you make contact with the surface beneath you and the sense of being held by someone or something solid notice your breath now not changing it just noticing your breath the rise and fall the body doing what it does without your effort now whatever age you are it really doesn't matter I just want you to consider this you are somewhere in the middle of your life somewhere behind you there is experience there is choices made there is roads taken and not taken people loved people lost people found there is versions of yourself you have been and you have stopped being and ahead of you unknown territory possibilities you cannot see or imagine and here you are in the middle you are just in the middle at the turning point just feel what it is like to be here not where you were and not where you are going just here just be here notice if there is heaviness anywhere in your body grief exhaustion the weight of all that you have carried so far and notice if there is also something else here restlessness something that wants to move to change and to become now I want you to imagine you can see yourself from a distance just see the person that you have become all those years of effort all those adaptations and compromises and small acts of survival see how hard you have worked to be who you are just see the person that you have become from a distance and now say something to yourself silently or out loud if you are alone I see you I see what you have carried I see what you have sacrificed I see what you have put aside waiting for the right time I see you and now if it feels right ask yourself a question not to answer now just to let it live in you now and the question is what wants to emerge what wants to emerge what wants to be born in the second half of my life what wants to be born you do not need an answer the question is enough let it work on you now slowly gently bring your attention now back to your body feel your feet your legs your seat the solid reality of being here now in this life place one hand on your heart if that feels right for you feel the beat of it still here still going still time now before we finish I want you to hear something the confusion you feel is not a problem it is a threshold the tiredness is not weakness it is the old self preparing to rest the restlessness is not pathology it is life trying to move through you you are not falling apart you are falling together becoming more yourself than you have ever been and that is worth every uncomfortable moment in the middle now whenever you are ready take a deep breath exhale feel the room around you wiggle your fingers and your toes and very gently if your eyes were closed you can let them open so here we are in the middle and I know it is uncomfortable I know there are days when you wonder what happened to your life your energy and your sense of purpose and I know there are nights when the ceiling holds no answers but I also know this you are not alone in this millions of people are sitting in the same dip of the U-curve wondering the same things as you it is part of being human and it is part of growing up all the way and the research says and more importantly the lived experience of countless people says that it gets better not because the questions go away but because you learn to live inside them differently not because you figure it all out but because you stop needing to now the second half of life is not a consolation prize for losing your youth it is its own thing its own gift a chance to become the person that you always were underneath all the noise so be very patient with yourself be kind to yourself and let the unravelling do its work you are not broken you are becoming and that is exactly where you need to be thank you very much for joining me today and until next time Namaste
