The global population is growing older and living longer than ever before.
With this demographic trend is a call for new and innovative approaches to the changing needs of our elders, and those who care for them.
This course speaks directly to this demand by empowering students who are called to help shift the worldview on aging from fear and anxiety to hope and possibility. It is an invitation to grab the reins of wisdom by inspiring each other, our elders, and future generations.
The course is a rigorous and transformative educational experience for advancing consciousness, transformation, and positive aging. It offers evidence-based professional tools, skills, and life experiences for those who serve (or wish to serve) the aging population in living healthy, meaningful, and active lives well into their Third Act.
It invites students to advance the realization of each person’s unique potentials and self-fulfillment through a whole person model that supports self-actualization, self-transcendence, and collective transformation.
The intention is to advance inner capacities for optimal health, personal growth, and a just society that respects elders as wisdom keepers in our changing world. This course provides a collaborative environment in which to explore your own and others’ worldviews on aging. It offers evidence-based skills and resources to help support the social and psychological needs of elders and those who care about them.
The course addresses quality of life as we grow older, helping people of all ages to cultivate growth mindsets, questions assumptions, foster tools for reflection, engage in healthy aging based on self-efficacy, self-actualization, self-transcendence, and human flourishing throughout the life span. The curriculum builds on the developmental models of Maslow, Erikson, and Schlitz, as well as others in the fields of transpersonal, humanistic, and positive psychologies. It will provide you needed educational tools, enriching engagement practices, and rigorous and inspirational content to promote a shared identity that advances elder care to wisdom care.
Course Learning Objectives
- Consider diverse worldviews on aging, what shapes them, and how they impact all aspects of human experience
- Discover the ways in which worldviews on aging are both conscious and unconscious
- Investigate various evidence-based practices for Grateful Aging
- Examine the ways in which states and structures of consciousness apply to our understanding of human experience throughout the lifespan
- Deepen our understanding of cross-cultural and epistemological views and in turn, our own worldviews, beliefs and perspectives and how they inform an integral approach to aging as a transformative practice
- Explore ways in which people view aging through a research perspective
- Develop competencies for supporting your own and others’ psychological and spiritual development and transformation at all ages
- Examine the transformative practices that can improve relationships and enhance people’s lived experience throughout the lifespan
- Learn skills of self-care and how it applies to yourself and your clients
- Adopt skills of grateful aging to professional work and personal development
Your Course Instructor's Philosophy of Teaching
- Shared learning community
- Multiple ways of knowing
- Cultural appreciation and competence
- An integral philosophy that includes inner and outer, private and public dimensions
- Appreciation for rigor and discernment, combined with creativity and curiosity
- A transpersonal perspective that embraces transformation and growth
- Radical empiricism that accepts any aspect of human experience as a valid domain for serious inquiry
- Social, emotional, and spiritual intelligence
- Personal reflection
- Cognitive flexibility
- Comfort with unfamiliarity
- Appreciation for diverse perspectives
- Agility in the face of rapidly changing circumstances
- Self-awareness in the context of responses to others
- Capacities for inter-cultural/worldview communication
- Ability to hold multiple points of view simultaneously
- Discernment that relies equally on intellect and intuition
- Pluralism that values open-minded inquiry with a spirit of mutual collaboration and respect
Example Curriculum
Your Teacher, Dr. Marilyn Schlitz
Dr. Marilyn Schlitz is an internationally recognized medical anthropologist and social scientist, award-winning writer and inspirational teacher, Marilyn has decades of hands-on experience working with healers from diverse world traditions, conducting leading edge research in clinical, laboratory and field-based settings, and translating this work into user-friendly formats. You may know Dr. Schlitz’s work through her more than 300 articles and seven books, including Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind Body Medicine; Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life; and Death Makes Life Possible — or from her award-winning film, Death Makes Life Possible (co-produced with Deepak Chopra), which appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Network.