Past Events

Meet the Author of the award-winning book 

The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul

Online on April 13, 7:00-8:30 pm, EST

Click on Image for Video Link of April 13, 2023 event

Connie Zweig, Ph.D., will present educational and spiritual opportunities for UU leaders and congregations.

With extended longevity we have the opportunity for extended personal growth and spiritual development. We have the chance to become an Elder, to leave behind past roles and shift our identities from what we do to who we really are. Connie’s book explores aging from the inside out – how to uncover our inner obstacles to aging consciously and how to enjoy aging as a spiritual practice.

In this 90-minute introduction to her work, Dr. Connie Zweig will describe three online workshops that she would like to offer to our Unitarian Universalist community: 

1. Becoming an Elder: Elder is a stage, not an age. It’s a qualitative transition, like water to ice. This presentation is about becoming an Elder, a noble archetype that’s not acknowledged in our culture due to widespread ageism, a lack of rites of passage, and a failure to value the new longevity and its deeper meanings. But, with the psychological and spiritual practices of the inner work of age presented here, we can create the missing rite of passage and radically reimagine age for ourselves.
2. Life Review of Your Lived and Unlived Life: As the great existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” The effort to understand a life, repair it, and find meaning in it is a natural developmental task of late life. With this practice, we can learn how to digest the life we’ve lived, distill the lessons from it, and turn them into wisdom. I add the dimension of the unlived life in the Shadow to the traditional life review. This enables people to identify and reclaim unexpressed feelings, traits, and talents now, during this precious stage of life. My Power Point will demonstrate how to do this practice and uncover the hidden tapestry of a life journey.
3. Shifting from Role to Soul: This workshop explores the question Who am I? as it arises in midlife and beyond, especially with retirement, illness, and loss.The lifelong habit of identification with doing, productivity, image, gender, race, values, and beliefs may no longer serve us, as we called to a deeper identity. This shift in awareness requires contemplative or spiritual practice until we can identify with who we really are—God within, Spirit, Christ Nature, Buddha Nature, pure awareness, or soul, whatever name we prefer. The result is a newfound freedom from the constraints of out-worn roles and identities, an emerging sense of becoming who we were always meant to be, and a profound gratitude for the way our lives unfolded. This is the deeper dimension of age, the universal inner journey of human development, the unfolding of our psychological and spiritual authenticity and authority, and even the unfolding of advanced stages of human development, which are described in every religious and spiritual tradition as the purpose of late life.

Each of these opportunities will be described with a Power Point teaser, so that you can clearly see the future webinar. There will be time for discussion. In addition, Connie will describe free online “wisdom circles,” congregants who are reading the book together, doing the practices, and aging in community, which she would like to offer to UU churches everywhere.

BIO: Connie Zweig, Ph.D. is a retired therapist and coauthor of Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow.Her award-winning book, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, extends her work on the Shadow into midlife and beyond and explores aging as a spiritual practice. It won the 2022 Gold COVR Award, the 2022 Gold Nautilus Award, the 2021 American Book Fest Award, and the 2021 Best Indie Book Award for best inspirational non-fiction. Her book Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening will be released May 23, 2023. Connie has been doing contemplative practices for more than 50 years. She is a wife, stepmother, and grandmother. After all these roles, she’s practicing the shift from role to soul.