Sandi Peters - Aging with Agency

Aging with Agency is the definitive book on aging, why it matters, how to reperceive it, how to experience it positively, and how to support aging friends and family. Beginning with a history of attitudes on aging, Peters provides thorough reviews of the ideas of the major proponents of positive agingJung, Maslow, Eriksonas well as lesser-known figures like Naomi Feil, Bill Thomas, Viktor Frankl, Allan Chinen, Lars Tornstam, Al Power, and Thomas Kitwood. Drawing on her thirty-plus years of experience with the elderly, Peters offers primers and perspectives on memory loss, and she adds invaluable chapters on activities and practices that can help both the aging and their caregivers to thrive in the afternoon of life. In the final section, she assesses the various options for living environments and identifies the red flags that the elderly and their families must watch for in making arrangements for end-of-life care. This book is a must-read for everyone who anticipates growing older.

Susan Mehrtens, PhD, president, Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences

Sandi Peters has written a practical book on the soulful aging process. She combines many years of service to the aged with integrated wisdom to create a real primer of understanding of critical spiritual passages in the aging process. Grounding her work in Jungian analytical psychology, she challenges the reader to maturation, searching for meaning in diminishment, finding hope in loss and grief, and living our personal myths in depth through the dying process. Her research is available to us in a very readable way. As a formator of spiritual directors, I will advise anyone journeying with an elderly person to read this book for guidance and insight.

Donald Bisson, FMS, D.Min., founder of the Center for Jungian Christian Dialogue

An enthusiastic endorsement for Aging with Agency! This truly transformational work can benefit a wide variety of readers: elders themselves, educators, mental health therapists, pastoral counselors, spiritual directors, retreat leaders, and professional and personal care providers. Even younger peopleincluding millennialswho fear their own aging and are seeking something realistically positive about the later stages of adulting can find hope in these pages.

Sandi Peters has taken a wide-ranging, friendly approach to the process of maturing, with emphasis on the development of the inner life of the person as the ultimate challenge and raison dtre for optimal living in the last decades of human life. Her focus on the potential for growth in the works of Jung, Maslow, Erikson, and Tornstam creates a quality of anticipation that growing old could actually be excitinga process to look forward to.

Peters does more than present theoretical ideas, however. She is very practical and realistic in her presentation and discussion of memory loss and the specifics of living environments. The chapters on meditation and inner-life practices are particularly helpful. The text is rich with references to other works, and the resource guide is an added bonus.

Jane Thibault, PhD, professor emeritus in the Department of Family and Geriatric Medicine at the University of Louisville School of Medicine; author of numerous works on the intersection of aging and spirituality

We live in a society with elderly people, but very few elders. There just have not been enough guides from the first half of life to the second half. 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.

Father Richard Rohr, OFM, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation; author of Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Second Half of Life

Sandi Peterss book 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 Eriksons, and she draws on her own years of experience in working with aging populations. Particularly helpful is her understanding of the challenges, difficulties, and options available at the end 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; founder of Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts; author of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening

This remarkable book presents a profoundand profoundly challengingnew paradigm of 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 is transitioning from ego to Self, as Jungians put it, or more generally, from this world to all worlds.

Allan B. Chinen, MD, psychiatrist in private practice in San Francisco; clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco; author of In the Ever After: Fairy Tales and the Second Half of Life

What a refreshing landscape Sandi Peters, thought leader for our particular era of aging, invites us to explore in Aging with Agency. It reminds me of the beauty and comfort of my garden, without which it would be difficult to live in these critical, changing times. This garden also affords me the seasons of pruning and attending to my nonbearing magnolia tree, which are concrete challenges of growth. So it is with this book, as it opens us to the fruits of being present to our inner world. Peters draws upon her decades of study and clinical care to lead us down secure paths of presence, inquiry, and practice to come upon our own particular inner gardenone that needs our attention and can sustain us through lifes most difficult experiences. Aging with Agency explores how to access this stream of lifes flowing water in challenging living environments and even when undergoing memory loss, where she shows us that our deepest self is not abandoned in memory loss.

Marita Grudzen, MHS, associate director emerita, Stanford Geriatric Education Center, Stanford School of Medicine

This book is more thrilling than its title implies. It presents the possibility of an exploration of vibrant and awakening awareness of the inner life that flourishes even as the body is coming toward the end of its viability. I would have called it Inward Bound.

Sylvia Boorstein, Buddhist meditation teacher; author, Its Easier Than You Think and Thats Funny, You Dont Look Buddhist

Aging with Agency is truly astounding in the way it weaves together theory and practice, personal stories and those of the cultural and theoretical zeitgeist, to inspire the reader to move inward and see aging as a tremendous opportunity to deepen and grow and to connect with self and Self. William James once said, The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes. This book is testament to exactly that discovery! In addition, very practical chapters on the various forms of living, institutional and otherwise, are very informative and timely.