An inspiring guide to embracing your mortality and living a fulfilled life
“A moving celebration of life before death, balanced between plangent reflection and exuberant affirmation.”—Kirkus Reviews
• 2025 BIBA® Award
• 2025 Nautilus Gold Award
• Shares the author’s inner adventure to face aging, illness, and death, along with hard-won wisdom on the art of resting, happiness, and letting go
• Draws on stories from different spiritual traditions and offers strategies, tools, and ways of thinking to navigate the challenges of aging
• Reveals how to examine your fears and regrets, declutter the mind of negative thoughts, and reframe reality with the powerful tool of unconditional self-love
Presenting a clarion call to the aging to awaken before they die, Kamla K. Kapur explores how we can become warriors on the spiritual path in order to embrace and prepare for the truth of our mortality and the ultimate triumph of conscious living and dying.
Set in both California and India, Kapur shares her inner adventure to navigate the hazardous battlefield of aging with the aid of spiritual guides that pilot her to safety. She offers hard-won wisdom on the art of resting, happiness, and letting go in order to achieve vitality, satisfaction, and joy in the life we are fortunate to still have.
Revealing the arc of her own self-discovery, she examines her shadows, fears, anxieties, and regrets, decluttering her mind of disempowering thoughts and reframing and co-creating her reality with the powerful tool of unconditional self-love. She describes how to confront, express, and embrace your darkness, consciously and honestly, to move forward into the ever greater wholeness of being.
Drawing on stories from a variety of cultural traditions, Kapur demonstrates the power of self-examination, vigilance, and intentionality to have a successful old age. She offers numerous strategies, tools, and ways of thinking to ensure mental, physical, and spiritual strength so we can meet aging’s challenges and transform from the people we once were to the ones we are becoming on the penultimate stage of earthly life.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
PREFACE The Many Privileges of Aging
1 The Adventure That I Am
2 My Old Age Project
3 What Does It Mean to Be Present?
4 Small Cosmic Dramas
5 The Great Remembering
6 God’s House
7 Allies in the Adventure
8 Ariel
9 Death and Music
10 My Friend Cookie, the Healer
11 The Benefits of Denial
12 Night Sea Journey
13 Stupidity Has a Purpose
14 Memory Is the Root of Wisdom
15 Letting Go
16 Preparing for Death
17 Dance of Kali
18 Mummy, My Mummy
19 Loving Myself
20 Sending Daddy to the Milky Way
21 I Am a Many-Patterned Kaleidoscope
22 Shadows
23 Hanging Out with Kamla
24 Reading, Solitude, Love
25 Entropic Imperative
26 Home
27 What Endearing Fools We Are
28 Living Like a River
29 Learning Love and Softness
30 Leave the Crusty Chrysalis Behind
31 Promises to Myself
32 How We Stay Together
33 Grass Growing Mood
34 Corona Cocoon
Acknowledgments
