Arrien - The second half of life : opening the eight gates of wisdom

Facing New Experiences and the Unknown

Changing Identities, Discovering Ones True Face

Intimacy, Sensuality, and Sexuality

Relationships: The Crucible of Love, Generosity, Betrayal, and Forgiveness

Creativity, Service, and Generativity

Authenticity, Character, and Wisdom

The Presence of Grace: Happiness, Satisfaction, and Peace

Nonattachment, Surrender, and Letting Go

Angeles Arrien maps the Elder Heros Journey and guides the mature person through succeeding gates of wisdom. She offers the archetypal tools to an extended awareness that takes advantage of our extended lifespan.

RABBI ZALMAN M. SCHACHTER-SHALOMI
Coauthor of From Age-ing to Sage-ing

We live in a culture that clearly lays out the paths of education, career, and family that fill the first half of our life. But we have lost the rituals that guide our initiation from a life of ambition to a life of meaning. We have come to fear the second half of life as a place where we will become marginalized and invisible. Through the Eight Gates of Initiation, Angeles Arrien guides us into letting go of the familiar and stepping into the role of the elder, where we will find deeper meaning in life and the ability to answer our soul call.

SOBONFU SOM
Author of Falling Out of Grace and The Spirit of Intimacy

Above all, this is a soulful book for the second half of life. Full of images, metaphors, and wisdom, this is a book to savor.

JEAN SHINODA BOLEN
Author of Urgent Message from the Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World

With the demise of the traditional soul-shelters of myth, religion, and vision, the individual stands naked and bereft in our world of crisis and confusion. It is the achievement of the scholar and anthropologist Dr. Angeles Arrien to excavate our various traditions and return with this lyrical and erudite shelter-book. Woven beautifully from symbol, reflection, poetry, narrative, and astute analysis, it offers the pilgrim who has entered middle age a fascinating landscape of adventure and awakening. This is a rich and enriching book. Anyone who makes its acquaintance has found an intimate inner companion that will open to the heart the secret gates of wholeness. Angeles Arrien is an angel of the gateways beyond, which the treasures await.

JOHN ODONOHUE, PH.D.
Author of Anam Cara, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, and To Bless the Space Between Us: A Collection of Invocations and Blessings, forthcoming in Spring 2008

Other works by Angeles Arrien

The FourFold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer, and Visionary

Signs of Life: The Five Universal Shapes and How to Use Them
(Benjamin Franklin Award, 1993)

The Nine Muses: A Mythical Path to Creativity

The Tarot Handbook: Practical Applications of Ancient Visual Symbols

Working Together: Producing Synergy by Honoring Diversity (Anthology)

Audio learning programs by Angeles Arrien from Sounds True

The Second Half of Life

Gathering Medicine

For all my ancestors,
and all the living elders,
for they show us
the way to wisdom

It is strange to be on earth, never knowing what might happen from one moment to the next, never meeting ourselves fully, always on the way, never arriving. To be here is the greatest adventure imaginable; we are heirs to everything, and possibility beckons permanently. Yet the greatest mystery resides in the inner world of the mind. Each mind is a different shape and holds a different geography. Consequently, each of us has to inhabit his or her own soul in order to find out who he or she is and where the intimacy of his or her heart touches the world. No one else can tell you that; the maps that others have are of no use. Each life must find its true threshold, that edge where the individual gift fits the outer hunger and where the outer gift fits the inner hunger.

Experience is the arena where this whole adventure happens. The hidden structures of experience become the windows of being. This is how we unfold and enter deeper into knowing. Our times are so passionate and absorbed. It is a great era to be in the world; there are so many new horizons opening up all the time. But, as always, the greater the light is, the deeper the shadow. Rather than opening forth into growth and creativity, spirit seems to have turned in on itself and become isolated and hungry. We seem to believe that identity depends on achievement and acquisition. To be is to have. Fatally, in this pursuit, we have turned time itself into our enemy; most of us live under the despotism of stress. Everything has somehow become evicted outward. Meanwhile, inside we become lonelier and desperate. The price of outer exile begins to become apparent in the second half of life.

This is the social and spiritual context in which Dr. Arriens book is to be evaluated. It is a wonderful contribution. Unlike most other practitioners in the contemporary spiritual field, Dr. Arrien is actually a scholar. In other words, she has the learning and skill to read our times and initiate a conversation with our tradition. Her scholarly acquaintance with the imaginative treasures of our tradition has enabled her to deliver a book that is truly luminous and penetrating. Yet this is not an abstract or merely theoretical work; it is written with a lyrical clarity, employing imagery and imagination to touch the heart as well as to invite the mind.

The assumption behind her work is that a human life can be understood in terms of a narrative of its thresholds. She identifies eight of these key frontiers. Each one is sketched in the light of the wisdom of our tradition and named in such an immediate and effective way that lends itself to easy identification. The assumption behind this is that experience does tend toward concrescence; namely, everything does not lie simply side-by-side or remain blurred forever. There are times when life sharpens, things come in to focus and, gradually, you become aware that you are standing before a threshold. There is no way back to where you were before, and there is no way out but through. Angeles Arrien is a scholar who has dedicated a lifetimes work to such frontiers and their crossings. In this book her touch is always sure, enlightening, and instructive. But the book also exhibits a generosity in that it leaves room for the reader to enter into its journey. In the evocation of each threshold, there is space specifically constructed to enable the reader to undertake that intimate work of recognition and transformation. She offers this invitation under five titles: task, challenge, gift, reflection, and practice.

This book would make a lovely companion to any human journey that is interested in creativity and the spirituality of integration and transfiguration. It is wise, even tempered, and generous. If people were to take this book up, work with it and act on its invitations, it would lead to huge cultural change. People would suddenly come into possession of their creative agency, potential, and responsibility. Citizenship would again become a wonderful cultural invitation and invigoration. In a time of anxiety and creeping despair, Dr. Angeles Arrien has offered us a necessary gift, a gift that finds the missing bridge between the inner life and the outer world. Use it deeply!!