Author: Rosie

People’s Death Affects Us More than We are Imagine We are affected by people’s departure more than we know. We are often surprised, even though we know that everybody dies. And often we experience regrets and guilt for not engaging with the deceased more while they were alive. Anytime I hear about someone’s passing I’m moved to experience the reality that every one of us dies. Compassion, reverence, and significance of each person’s presence on this planet brings a moment of awareness if you will. It brings emotions and thoughts, grief, regrets, sometimes anger, and feelings of powerlessness. Even though

Get Organized Before You Die – Who Me? My friend Virginia passed about a week ago. She was a great contribution to people’s lives in so many ways. She’d been a psychologist and advocator for people’s well-being on so many levels. She certainly was a gift of joy, love and generosity of spirit until the very end. For the past number of years, after the passing of her partner, Virginia lived alone. One of the cool things about Virginia was that she realized that in the end she’d need to count on her friends to settle her affairs after her

Fear of Living, Fear of Dying – Maybe Both! I find it an interesting question to ask people, “Are you afraid of living?” When we adventure forward in life, we will undoubtedly face many things we have no interest in facing. Facing loss, annihilation, humiliation, rejection are some of the biggies. Courageously living in your truth, though phenomenal to experience takes a lot of strength and conviction. Why the heck did we come into these Earthly forms in the first place? Good question. Joseph Campbell said, "Where there is a way or a path, it’s someone else’s way….” I have

Regardless of Age, I Don’t Know How to Do Me! I’ve never known how to be me. And now that I have a whole repertoire of experience that points to who I’ve been and who I’ve tried to be, it doesn’t really help. Because I choose to do these podcasts I keep having to attend to the truth of me and how it’s been working for me. I’m not by any means a guru. I do practice what I believe gurus might practice, though. Why? Well, I believe essentially that they have trained themselves to have a pretty good life,

It’s Not If You Die, It’s How You Face the Inevitability of Your Death It is said that Japanese Samurai warriors reminded themselves of the inevitability of loss by using the phrase, "Die before going into battle." This practice allows a warrior to enter combat without fear of death because he has brought himself to the acceptance of death ahead of time. Because death is an inevitable outcome, and by accepting the absoluteness of that inevitability, the warrior fully gives himself to his mission without concern for survival or victory. Tracy Goss wrote a book called The Last Word on

When Other People Are Suffering At any age in life, we will see or hear about other people who are having a rough time with their own aging process. It might be friends, family, or our partners. How do we respond? How do we support or help people in need? I think this is a really big question: How do we help others without endangering our own well-being? How willing are we to throw ourselves under the bus for other people? And how are we possibly doing that without even realizing that it’s happening? Listen in to find out and

Solitude or Isolation? Does it matter? YEP! Big Time!! They may sound similar, but there’s a big difference between solitude and isolation, and the difference is what motivates a person to be alone. The bottom line is that quite often as we age we can do with a lot less people time. We need more “Me Time.” We can get kind of bored with all the social pageantry that use to be so important to us. We’d rather binge on a Netflix series, a good book, or a knitting project that we can’t wait to finish. There isn’t fear in

What’s Really Happening When Life Gets Scary? Most of us spend probably 80% of our time being afraid, to one degree or another. We’ve been trained to be afraid of change, of risk, of loss, of success, of failure, of love…. You name it! All because someone, somewhere, has declared that that is something to be afraid of. There’s another group that says we should embrace change, success, failure and the rest of it . . . but you and I both know that that’s so much easier to say than actually do. So how do we face the changes

What Should I Want? What Do I Want? Given that there is so much information that tells us what we should want as we grow up and morph through our “Golden Years,” you’d think we knew how to do this better! Many times, though, all the options available to us actually create more confusion rather than clarity. The question: “What should I want?” comes up in a lot of my coaching sessions with my clients. My answer is always, “What do you want?” So many of us are afraid to truly know what we want, and so we limit our

Should I Be Afraid of Aging? Being aged 67 now, I know I could live well into my 90’s. That could be a good 30 years! Yet when I imagine myself in this process, I realize the degree to which I worry and wonder if I should be afraid of aging. At the same time, I don’t want to spend the next 30 years living in fear. That’s not the way I want to live this last third of my life. Living in Fear I’ve talked to quite a few people lately about aging, and I was surprised with the