Tag Archives: being

Fearless Aging

7 Reasons Why Elders Make Great Lovers (and have better sex)

By Jim Selman | Bio

There is an old joke that says, “Sex after 60 is better than ever, but the mounting and dismounting aren’t so pretty.” If you’re laughing, you know what I’m talking about. If not, you’re still young enough to have something to look forward to. I attended a conference recently featuring Steve Pavlina, the number one blogger on personal development. The topic was about expanding traffic to your blog and one of his ideas was to write about something ‘timeless’, something that lots of people have in common and that breaks the mold of everyone’s expectations. Well, my writing has been about transforming our notions of growing older and to encourage intergenerational dialogue, so what better topic to muse on than SEX.

I know it’s kind of weird to think about our parents and grandparents ‘doing it’, but the fact is that they do. We just tend to avoid discussing that it happens among our Elders. While Elders are usually older than we are, that’s not always the case. In some cultures, the young are the Elders, since they are more connected to what is important to the community than the old. As I have been saying on this blog for the last few years, we need to get real and be open across

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Learning

Not Easy: Just Clear

By Jim Selman | Bio

Yesterday I was coaching a friend of mine. I was sharing a bit of how important it is to ‘come from’ your vision for your life. Our future is always a product of our actions, and our actions are always a correlate of how we relate to the future. When we act as if the future has already happened, then it is only a matter of time before that future is realized or we learn what we need to learn to achieve it. Her response was, “Well, you make it sound so simple, but it is too abstract and I need to know ‘how’ to have what I want in the future.” This was my response. "I understand. Everything is abstract until we learn it.

I
don’t think learning a new way of being or a different way of observing
the world is simple. I think it is clear when we can set aside our
conventional wisdom and ‘try on’ a different mindset. Not easy, but
clear.

If you are 100% focused on ‘how’ and ‘doing’, then it is impossible to learn a different way of being.

We
normally try to BE different (or become resigned that we can’t change
the way we are) by trying to change what

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Leadership

Being My Word

By Jim Selman | Bio

I was working with a group of people last week in Mexico. The session was about planning and they chose as their theme for the year “I am my word”. The idea was to emphasize ‘count-on-ability’ and the importance of delivering on plans. I spoke to them for a bit and shared the following reflections.

My work is about ‘Being’. It is an inquiry into who we are as human beings that is grounded in a great deal of theory, practice, rigorous philosophy, biology and more recently in some of the implications of what we’re learning from quantum physics. This ‘ontological paradigm’ claims that whatever ‘reality is’ (including who we are) is a matter of interpretation—and all interpretations occur in language. Language is to us what water is to a fish. It is the medium

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Wisdom in Action

Polarity

By Jim Selman | Bio

Either/or.

This way of thinking about and relating to life is one of the most persistent and difficult aspects of our culture. Everything is either this or that. And if it isn’t this, it must be that.

We are either independent or dependent.

We are either the part or the whole.

We can be unified and whole or we can be fragmented and incomplete.

If something isn’t true, it must be false.

If something isn’t wrong, then it is right.

And on it goes….

This either/or mode of observing

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Wisdom in Action

Tradition and Heritage

By Jim Selman | Bio

I was listening to a lecture today on the philosopher Martin Heidegger. He is pretty difficult to understand at the best of times, even though I have been a student of his thinking for many years. The lecture today spoke of the distinction he made between ‘tradition’, which he felt was a bad thing, and ‘heritage’, which he thought was a good thing. In fact, he felt heritage was essential to understanding the true nature of ‘Being’.

I won’t pretend to grasp it

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Learning

Listening and Learning

Life happens while we are having conversations with ourselves and other people.

Not learning from others may have a lot to do with not truly ‘listening’ to what others say. Listening is the context that makes life intelligible, allows anything to have meaning, and forms the basis for all communication (both written and spoken). It is a whole lot more than just ‘hearing’ the words that are spoken. I’m always listening, always bringing a prior interpretation or understanding of my world

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Learning

The Lightness of Being

By Shae Hadden | Bio

The green-crested hummingbird is at my window again this morning, hovering in mid-air sunshine and snatching bits of food from the plants as they begin to bud. He appeared in my life a few weeks ago, and has been coming back every day without fail. Today his weightlessness seems like a metaphor for a new way of Being. I have a choice about who I am being in the world, and I choose to be as light and iridescent as this beautiful bird. This isn’t about reducing my body to its less than 115-pound weight or changing my hair color and wardrobe. Nor is it about casting myself differently in different situations or seeing myself from different angles or perspectives.  Lightness of Being is about letting go of all that weighs us down: negative thoughts, beliefs, actions, habitual patterns of pain or suffering…anything from our past that keep us chained to the earth and that limits us from becoming who we choose to be and living the life we want to live.  This is the only way for human beings to fly—by consciously setting themselves free. read more
Fearless Aging

Home

I don’t think it is news to anyone that we experience life through its contrasts. We don’t notice or appreciate hot until we get cold; we can take kindness for granted until it goes missing; we typically put off taking care of our health until it starts to deteriorate. At this moment, I am half-way through the longest trip of my life—mostly work with some vacation thrown in around the edges. Consequently, I am very present to how important ‘home’ is to me now that I am away from it

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Fearless Aging

Madrid

Today is a holiday in Madrid. There must be a million people on the streets.  There is a lots of military pomp, soldiers marching by the review stand near my hotel, and five planes flying overhead. The weather is beautiful and life is good.  I am always delighted to have a day off when I am in a city to just experience ‘being here’. Madrid’s downtown core is beautiful—great old buildings, wide avenues, a magnificent palace with a living monarch, and a great ‘old town’

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Personal Empowerment

Angst

I like this word. I don’t know why…perhaps because it is one of those words that seems to express itself in speaking of it. The word means ‘anxiety’—a kind of generalized anxiety with being alive.
 
The existential philosophers talked a lot about angst. In fact, we normally associate angst with existentialism—existential angst. The word is usually associated with a negative mood such as depression or what Thomas Merton characterized as "the dark night

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