Introduction
Part I Aging: Reflections, Stories, and Mysteries
Tectonic Shifts
A New Vision
Honoring the Life Cycle
ElderSpirit
The Cycle of Life
Archetypes of Aging
The Mind of Great Compassion
A Grandmother’s Gift
The Mystery of Time
A Wordless Encounter
Unbroken
All You Need
Part II Wisdom Treasures
Lighting the Way: Personal Weavings
The Sacred Circle
Know Your Refuges
A Jewel of Wisdom
Practices of the Heart
The Moments in Between
With Softness and Ease
Who Are You Now?
How to Dance in the Rain
Compassion for Yourself
Pure Perception
The Old Woman and the Starfish
Memorable Messages
Part III Passages: Dying Into Life
Life, Love and Death: Personal Weavings
Dhumavati: Goddess of Aging and Death
The Five Remembrances
The Ultimate Mystery
Between Realms
The Thin Place
Who Spoke?
The Gift of Death
Bleached Bone
A Gift of Life and Death
Part IV Wayshowers
Personal Weavings
Polly Thayer Starr For All Shall Be Well
Emerson Stamps Brought Here To Love
Stella Fox The Gift of Recognition
Alice O. Howell Living the Symbolic Life
Maud Morgan The Search For Freedom
Father Bede Griffiths Overwhelmed by Love
Conclusion
End Notes
Selected Bibliography
$10,000 marketing and publicity budget
National drive-time radio tour
National radio and TV interviews
Features, interviews and excerpts in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review,
AARP Journal, Turning Wheel, Lion’s Roar (formerly Shambhala Sun),
Utne Reader
Advertising in Tricycle,Shambhala Sun and Parabola
Publicity and promotion in conjunction with the author's speaking
engagements
Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle is a writer and dharma teacher. For over
forty years she has devoted herself to spiritual practice,
primarily Buddhist meditation, which has deeply influenced her
professional life, in particular how to integrate psychology and
meditation.
After practicing as a psychotherapist with individuals, couples,
and groups, she taught in the field of Behavioral Medicine where
she pioneered the integration of meditation, yoga, and cognitive
therapy with traditional Western medicine. As a Teaching Fellow at
the Mind/Body Medical Institute, she developed and taught training
programs for health professionals in new approaches to health and
healing through Harvard Medical School. During her career, she has
introduced contemplative practices in a wide variety of settings:
government agencies, businesses, hospitals, organizations,
churches, and most extensively in school systems to both teachers
and students.
Her first book, "Ten Thousand Joys & Ten Thousand Sorrows: A
Couple’s Journey Through Alzheimer’s", is an award-winning book
that has sold close to 15,000 copies and has been translated into
four languages. As mentioned earlier, she has done extensive
promotion; many talks, conference keynotes, book events, radio and
TV interviews as well as written articles and other pieces
(introductions, chapters, etc.) for books and periodicals.
As part of her commitment to contemplative life, Olivia has served
on the boards of three organizations whose missions are to
encourage Buddhist teachings and practices in the West: Insight
Meditation Society, Trijang Buddhist Institute, and Dharma Friends.
With her enduring commitment to peace and social justice, she was a
founding board member and board chair of the Karuna Center for
Peacebuilding. A lifelong educator, she was on the board of the
Putney School and the Karuna School.
Now an elder with two grown children and four grandsons, she lives
in Massachusetts and spends as much time as she can in Vermont
where she grows vegetables, welcomes family and friends, and steeps
herself in the glories of nature. She is also an artist committed
to exploring the creative, spiritual, and healing dimensions of our
lives. OliviaHoblitzelle.com
"Drawing deeply on her own experiences as well as stories and
studies about aging from other cultures, Hoblitzelle (Ten Thousand
Joys & Ten Thousand Sorrows) explores the ways that readers can
nourish their inner lives and spirit even as their bodies age and
facilities diminish. Hoblitzelle stresses the reflective nature of
the aging process: noticing how the body changes can provide space
for reflection on life’s gifts and challenges, and aging often
brings family members together, creating an opportunity to heal
broken relationships. She offers seven guidelines to being
attentive to the gifts that grow more valuable with age: spiritual
orientation, practice of silence, practice of mindfulness, practice
of stopping, finding the sacred in the commonplace, meditation, and
the practice of gratitude. She also shares the stories of six
'wayshowers,' individuals whose stories illustrate aging with
compassion (Emerson Stamps reflects on his enslaved African
ancestors while writing a memoir in his 80s, and Maud Morgan finds
solace in the words of Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
'The world is filled and filled with the absolute—to see this is to
be free'). Hoblitzelle’s heartfelt book invites inspiring
reflections on finding beauty in aging, facing death with dignity,
and rejoicing in earthly blessings." —Publishers Weekly
Navigating the changes that come with age and the inevitability of
death can be difficult, especially in cultures where the wisdom of
elders is not typically revered. As a counter, Olivia Ames
Hoblitzelle offers comforting and empowering reflections, readings,
and lessons on growing older in her book, Aging with Wisdom.
Hoblitzelle’s previous book explored her and her husband’s
experiences after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, through to his death
six years later. This book widens those explorations of aging and
death to include many other examples of people who chose to live
their later years on their own terms.
Hoblitzelle’s is a heartfelt, heartening guide to the later years.
It shares approaches for opening up to the aging process, for
finding beauty and grace in the inevitable decline and losses of
old age, and for seeking gratitude, humor, and joy in the final
stages of life.
The time of life after children have grown up and left their
childhood home is referred to in Hindu philosophy as the “forest
monk” stage—when contemplation and a potentially more spiritual
life can come forth after the busyness of career and child-rearing
have calmed. This period should not just be seen in terms of loss,
Hoblitzelle argues, but as a time when personal development can
come to the forefront.
As much as it is about living well, the book is also about dying
well. It includes stories about people who have served as the
author’s guides in her understanding of what it means to age with
wisdom. It explores a variety of spiritual traditions and includes
loving profiles of people who have served as wayshowers to the
author as she navigates the challenges and opportunities of growing
older.
These stories should help readers to understand what’s happening in
the final transitions of life and guide them to having a more
meaningful and graceful experience of this time, whether with aging
parents or family members or in their own lives." —Sarah White,
Foreword Reviews
When Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle’s husband was diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s disease, the couple decided they would weather his
illness with all the wisdom they had gained as psychologists and
teachers of meditation. “We approached it consciously and
lovingly,” Hoblitzelle said, and “we became wiser.” She wrote about
the end of her husband’s life in her book, “Ten Thousand Joys and
Ten Thousand Sorrows: A Couple’s Journey Through Alzheimer’s.”
With her husband’s death nearly 20 years behind her, Hoblitzelle
has a new book out, “Aging With Wisdom,” in which the 80-year-old
Cambridge resident, a longtime therapist, teacher, and speaker,
counsels readers on “how to age gracefully, how to age consciously,
and how to have a more open approach to death and dying than our
culture does.” While the book is not a memoir, Hoblitzelle said,
“it came out of a very personal place. I’ve always loved older
people,” she added, laughing, “and now I am one!”
Many cultures revere and honor their elders, Hoblitzelle said, but
“our culture is all screwed up about age. It’s very harmful for
older people. We know how much our perceptions of aging affect how
we age.”
“Obviously the body goes through its diminishment. But that doesn’t
have to touch the spirit or the energy or the inner resilience.”
With age comes “a kind of tectonic shift in the psyche,” she said.
“We want to simplify; we want to cultivate our inner life more than
we have; there’s a call to some of life’s deeper questions.”
Meditation can nurture resilience, she said, and so can an
awareness of what she calls the heroic aspect of aging. “The later
years come along when our energy is declining; we don’t have the
energy we had when we were 30, 40, or 50. I think it’s heroic to
deal with what comes to us at a time when we’re increasingly
impaired,” she said. “It’s all about how we live with the
challenges that come to us.”
—Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe, president of the National Book Critics
Circle
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