This retreat seeks to navigate the realities of growing old and the challenge to live with purpose until the end.  While the “realities” of aging include diminishment and loss, this last phase of life comes with far more wisdom, experience, and strength than we imagine.  What we learn from our stories, if we are purposeful, enable us to engage four formative forces:

• First, we are better equipped to reckon with what we had hoped for versus what is.
• Second, we deepen our capacity to release dreams we once had, regrets we still carry.
• Third, we recognize ways to reframe the fact of diminishment and loss as a call to adapt.
• Fourth, we realign our sense of a worthwhile life to include what we can still contribute now.

During the retreat, we will use guided meditation, reflective conversations, and excerpts from various authors to help us develop a way to talk about getting old that neither fixates on what one loses in the process nor pretends getting old is “just another phase” in life.  It is indeed a phase, a critical one that ends in death.  But along the way, we have the invitation to be fully present to what is happening and to our readiness to respond with a sense of hope.