Why Letting Go Is the Path to Happiness...

‘The Ecstasy of Surrender’ author says it’s an anti-aging secret, too Bestselling author and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA Dr. Judith Orloff is a model for balancing fierce left-brain intellect and right-brain compassion. She calls herself an “empathic psychiatrist,” and it’s her ability to connect with her patients on an emotional level while supporting them and offering wise life strategies that puts her in a rarefied league. As a follow-up to her 2009 book, the wildly popular Emotional Freedom, Orloff has penned The Ecstacy of Surrender: 12 Surprising Ways Letting Go Can Empower Your Life . She gave readers a taste of it in a TED talk. , which garnered more than half a million views on YouTube. In the new book, Orloff shows why surrender is a more effective approach to life than trying to control or force things. She offers examples and exercises to help us make that simple, yet super-challenging, leap when it comes to power, money, communication, relationships and mortality. I had the pleasure of chatting with her about these subjects and others and was especially eager to hear whether she felt surrender was more important to boomers than other age groups. Highlights from our conversation: Next Avenue: You’ve said you write about what you want to learn about. How did you pick the subject of surrender? Orloff: Well, because I’m a control freak and I tend to fight with life sometimes, and worry, and get attached to patterns and relationships that aren’t good for me and I can’t rid of them … my deepest desire was to learn surrender on a deep, deep level so I could shed what wasn’t working for me and learn how to trust and flow instead of...

The Unexpected Benefits of Volunteering in Nature...

When ‘citizen scientists’ help gather data, they don’t get paid, but the rewards are priceless There’s something innately restorative to the human spirit about watching the flow of water in a stream, and this is especially true in spring. The frozen landscapes and frigid temperatures of the winter months can cast a stillness across one’s interior terrain as well, so to watch the current of a river in May is surely to come alive again. That sense of renewal is even greater, though, when it extends from one’s own spirit to the larger environment. Which is just what happens when I go to watch for the herring in the annual spring monitoring program. Herring spend most of their life at sea, returning to the freshwater rivers and streams they were born in once a year to spawn. In recent times, however, their numbers have declined dramatically, possibly because of overfishing, diminished water quality and/or habitat loss. Or maybe something else entirely. Fishermen, researchers and environmentalists would all like to understand what’s causing this. To this end, volunteers help scientists monitor the herring’s arrival into the tributaries of the Hudson River and collect baseline data about these changing migration patterns. And while we citizen scientists know we’re helping out, what we get in return is worth far more than the time we give. The Call of the Wild This is not difficult work. It requires only that one stand at a bridge or the edge of a waterway for 15 minutes twice a week in April and May, look for signs of the herring, then write down what is seen — whether herring are there or not. This is about absence or presence. And if those minutes spent watching the...

Declutter Challenge: What Works Best for You?...

Next Avenue readers share their top tips for getting rid of junk My 30-Day Declutter Challenge ended in a flurry as I scrambled to complete the last three days of clutter collection. The goal of the challenge, started on Aug. 1, was to collect one item on Day 1, two on Day 2 and so forth for 30 days. By the end, on Aug. 30, I had culled more than the requisite 465 items, really closer to 500. My declutter pile is big (see ugly photo) but not as big as I imagined when I started the challenge — maybe because I didn’t have large items like furniture to shed. Instead, I have amassed a large pile of small items like books, toys and electronic flotsam and jetsam. The challenge was well suited to a declutter procrastinator like me. Having rules to guide (and force) me to collect a certain number of items per day was really helpful. It occurred to me that you might also do the challenge backwards starting with 30 items when you are most fired up and work down to one item for Day 30. However you get there, you’ll be glad you did. Readers Share Their Declutter Tips We invited readers to join the challenge (it’s not too late to start now) and asked them to share their best tips for paring down their possessions. They had some great advice: “I keep a shopping bag and fill it with things to give away, and donate that full bag every week to a local thrift shop. Then I open a new shopping bag to fill.” Pamela Koller, Queens, N.Y. “I decide what has value for me today. What do I really need and want in...

How to Go Gray Naturally...

It’s not easy, but it is possible. These tips can break your cycle of monthly dye jobs. My friends tell me I should consider myself blessed, because at nearly 52 years of age, I’m just beginning to show my gray. And while it doesn’t bother me — yet — I’m starting to think about color for the first time in my life. The odds are, though, that I won’t go there, for a variety of practical reasons: the chemicals, the cost and the hassle of upkeep. But mostly I just don’t want to mess with Mother Nature. I came close to coloring my hair last year, when my father passed away. My sisters and I contemplated dyeing our brunette hair red in solidarity: My father went into the great beyond at 84 with the same gorgeous copper-red hair with which he came into the world. How Women Used to Grapple with Gray Until recently, women fell into two basic camps: those who colored and set their hair until it didn’t, or couldn’t, move (think “helmet head”) and those who went gray naturally. “Several decades ago, when women decided not to color their hair, they just grew it longer and pulled it back,” says Elizabeth Cunnane Phillips, a trichologist at Philip Kingsley salon in New York City. “You got away with having gray hair because that’s what the norm was — it was either done and colored or it wasn’t.” Today, women who want to hide their grays have many options. There are demi- and semi-permanent hair color options that are ammonia-free, and therefore less damaging, as well as permanent color, a stronger cocktail of chemicals that keeps the color longer. (Semi-permanent color typically fades in about a dozen shampoos,...

How to Fall in Love With Your Spouse All Over Again...

Experts and couples reveal five secrets of successful long-term relationships Last month my daughter got married. During the ceremony, she and her husband gazed at each other adoringly and joy seemed to exude from every pore in their bodies. I found myself wondering, Have any two people ever been so in love? Even as I squeezed the hand of my darling husband of 32 years, I felt as if I could never have been as much in love with him as my daughter was with her man on their wedding day. Or maybe, I mused, love just looks more radiant on young faces. Could love possibly have a shelf life? Does it have “planned obsolescence,” like modern technology? So I did a little research. What I learned boils down to this: Even a marriage that’s about to smash up against the rocks (barring physical or emotional abuse or criminal acts) can tack its way back into calm and pleasant waters. We’re not just talking about doing damage control. “It’s almost never too late to start the process of falling in love all over again,” says James Córdova, Ph.D., chair of Clark University’s psychology department and head of Clark’s Center for Couples & Family Research. Taking Too Much for Granted “One of the things that happens in long-term marriages is that the demands of everyday life steal our attention away from our partners — and paying attention to the other is crucial for happy relationships,” Córdova says. This lack of focus on your spouse slowly unravels the fabric of a solid relationship. Sometimes the disintegration happens over a number of years, during which the couple exist in a kind of emotional limbo. Córdova notes that, statistically, it takes couples up...

5 Tips to Find Meaning and Purpose in Later Life...

How to program your internal GPS in retirement Throughout my middle years, I never questioned what held meaning in my life. The scaffolding of my identity as a successful college Chief Financial Officer and owner of a thriving software company was built into the job. What I did was who I was, and that was the end of it. Then, once I moved over to the other side of full-time work, the picture became less clear. Take the job away and who was I? Stepping aside, I was more than ready to bequeath my left-brained razzle-dazzle to the young Turks whose beta-wave-oriented brains were just reaching full-flourish mode. I could also sense that new personal capacities were opening up for me, which could change my sudden sense of loss to a sense of gain. I felt something stir within me: The potential of moving forward with vitality and purpose. Yet I had only the slightest awareness of how to construct such a new reality. Six years later, life is again a happy adventure and my mission is clear. (I captured that journey towards wholeness in my recent memoir, Sailing the Mystery.) Here are five tips that will hopefully ease your passage into a purpose-filled later life: 1. Identify the activities that provide you with a sense of purpose. There is no objective reality when it comes to defining what we find personally meaningful — we’re all wired differently. Some of us feel purposeful when we experience a sense of direction, others when we’re engaged in nurturing and still others when we are immersed in nature. The key is to know what works for you. My favorite process of gaining discernment is to keep a notebook over a month (or...

Paul McCartney, Speaking Words of Wisdom...

6 life and work lessons from the latest show of the legendary Beatle After telling friends I’d seen Paul McCartney’s sold-out show in Minneapolis recently, I heard these questions: Was he still good? Did you smell pot? Did he play (insert your favorite Beatles song here)? To answer: McCartney, 72, looked and sounded fantastic. I did not smell pot where I was seated. Yes, he probably played (insert Big Hit here). He’s a legend, after all. Nearly every song during the three-hour show was once a chart-topper. But watching McCartney and listening to his stage stories made me think about more than his amazing musical talents. What resonated was his genuineness and ease on stage, a comfort and command that are hallmarks of aging well — eight years after he turned 64. Here are six lessons I gleaned from McCartney’s show, both for career success and living a vital life: Claim your place. McCartney unabashedly owns his spot in the pantheon of great entertainers, not in an obnoxious, prima donna kind of way, but by conveying authority and confidence. He’s not back to where he once belonged—he’s staying where he clearly belongs, leading the songs, the band, the whole show. He shares his talents — like his roaring guitar on Purple Haze as a transition to Let Me Roll It — and stories, like the one about attending a Jimi Hendrix show in Britain when Hendrix was relatively unknown. McCartney said Hendrix “called out into the crowd for Eric (Clapton),” asking for help tuning his guitar after shredding through a song. Clapton refused, according to McCartney, with a “Do it yourself!” shrug. “He was a great guy,” McCartney said of Hendrix. “So humble.” McCartney wasn’t name-dropping but showing his...

When Your Adult Child Chooses Another Spiritual Path...

What to do if your adult child has a different spiritual path than you Are we in the midst of a great religious recession? A number of recent studies show that younger people are less religious than older people, and religiosity has declined with each successive generation. In the 2012 Pew Research Centerreport on religion and public life, one-fourth of 18- to 29-year-olds are classified as unaffiliated, a far higher proportion than among their parents (15 percent) or grandparents (9 percent). In extensive interviews with parents and their 18- to 29-year-olds for our book, Getting To 30: A Parent’s Guide to the 20-Something Years, we found that religious questioning is part of the identity explorations woven into this life stage. Most emerging adults feel that it would be wrong for them simply to accept what their parents and others have taught them about religious issues. Their inquiry sometimes leads to a confirmation of their childhood beliefs, but more often to modifying them, and sometimes to a wholesale rejection. Rather than holding to traditional beliefs, the majority of twenty-somethings typically have a vague but inclusive belief in a God who watches over the world and wants people to be good to each other. For some parents, their children’s religious choices are a hot button topic; for others, the subject is almost a non-issue. If parents don’t have a strong religious affiliation or commitment to spiritual seeking, then what their twenty-somethings believe is of little interest or concern to them; they may not even know. But when parents’ religious beliefs are central to their worldview and daily lives, their emerging adult’s beliefs may be one of the most important measures of their success or failure as parents: success if their children...