Autumn Years: Taking the Contemplative Path

Rating:
Summary: Autumn Years: Taking the Contemplative Path
Review: AUTUMN YEARS: TAKING THE CONTEMPLATIVE PATH by Robert H. and Elizabeth M. King is a treasure of a read! The book is an easy and thoughtful combination of autobiographical, spiritual and practical ways of looking at aging. By reading the chapters they had written alternately, I felt as if I had tuned into an intimate conversation between Robert and Elizabeth. They talk of their individual transitions down through the years and how they now work together to deepen their spiritual path as a couple and as elders.
Both authors have many publications behind them and are skillful in sharing their life experience. Gems of information about meditation practice, prayer, and exercise inspired me to revisit long forgotten meditation poses and to explore alternate forms of daily prayer practice.
Because this gentle book gave me a positive look at my own aging process, I plan to use it in discussion groups with others seeking meaningful growth for their senior years. I highly recommend it.


Rating:
Summary: A Pearl of Great Price
Review: If you are like me, you've often wondered where you could find someone wise who could shed light on this journey called life. You'd like to know someone who could help you along in this world so full of pain and joy, heartache and wonder, beauty and mystery and violence.
Perhaps such wisdom can only be found in the later years of life. Perhaps a lifetime's experiences need to be harvested before one can recognize wisdom. Whatever the constellation that brings wisdom about and causes one to recognize it, this book by Elizabeth M. King and Robert H. King contains it.
If we allow them they will take each of us by the hand and lead us to wisdom, too. Their method is the contemplative path, the way of centering prayer as taught by Thomas Keating, the way of Zen meditation as taught by many teachers.
You will find in this slim book many things to treasure, including a story about:
* the growth of a mature, loving couple-relationship;
* the discovery of meaning in the retirement years;
* a path that goes beyond the commercialism of the material
world;
* a continuing of personal growth in the "elder" years;
* the healing of earlier traumas and pain;
* the wondrous rewards to those who meditate/contemplate;
* the finding of something beyond what our culture and its
institutions typically offer;
* hope for those dreading our culture's marginalizing of
those in the later years of life.
This book is a grace to us, a sharing of deeply personal experiences. It is an invitation to make something more of our lives in the Autumn Years. I have found it a pearl of great price, an infinite rose. May you come to treasure it, too.

Rating:
Summary: AUTUMN YEARS
Review: The book, AUTUMN YEARS, by the Kings is a keeper. In my practice, as a psychotherapist. I see more often people who are at retirement age and would like to withdraw from their work. Then they ask, "Retire to what?" The Kings suggest the most important journey of all could be taken at this time, the journey is within, to know ourselves. The Kings give us road maps for the journey. This inward journey is one that we are never too young or too old to start.
Ramona J. Schroeder, L.C.S.W., L.M.P.H.