A café-style conference was held at the Quaker Meeting House in Oxford on Saturday 15 March 2025, with thirty participants from around the country. I was privileged to be one of seven speakers, all of us experienced psychotherapists of different modalities, cultures and life experience.
Listen here:
Each of us presented for 25 minutes, drawing together our thoughts and reflections on what it means to be a psychotherapist at this stage in our lives. what is different, what is most important and how we have changed in our careers. Participants were invited in their small circles to offer their own thoughts and questions in response.
What was created – thoughts about what age gathers without us even knowing – surprised us in its richness. There is a gathering together of some of the themes in the poem below, while the photo above shows us in the sunshine of the Meeting House spring garden.
Reflections on the Gifts of Ageing
A lonely profession
Yet a privilege to be
Lightning rods for others
We the sensitive ones yet
Do we fear obsolescence
Do we know when to grasp and when to let go?
Does the sheer weight of loneliness increase in our world?
Maybe a quality of being is what we give back
A giving soul a rested soul
Can we age with grace
Staying curious and compassionate
Holding the polarities
Allowing blunderings
Through the looking glass kindly
Drawing together younger selves
Cherishing relationship and connection
Under the shelter of each other?
A salve to sorrow
Creating new narratives reimaginings
Weaving together young and old
In the same wardrobe
Not covering our brokenness
Wearing it with radical acceptance
Not fixed but just ourselves
Blossoming in our own time