You spent 40 plus years paying attention and planning your Big money career. Work related issues and problems filled your mind on the job and when at home. Now that is gone, but your mind has not moved on. Just like your planning for retirement where you were given financial advice on saving for retirement. You maintain a 401K, set aside money from your family for your own future use. You may even get help by engaging a financial planner to guide your investing. You are told that hobbies and vacations will fill your days with happiness and purpose. It may, but not likely.
Meditation in retirement is not meant to solve problems but to accept them as they exist so you can have time to discover yourself. Each of us have our individual views on what makes a good life. Some we adopted from our tribe, others we made up as we moved through our lives. You need to free yourself from the things that stop you from finding yourself, that person who has pleasure and purpose in during your retirement. You need to learn to manage your thoughts and judgments you developed over the last 60+ years so you can find yourself and what makes you feel right about you.
If you spend your time commenting on things that you cannot control, not part of your life and you view are wrong. Like:
Your brother in laws lifestyle is a waste of time.
Younger kids have no social skills because of their phones.
Reasons why you will not use a smartphone.
Why Amazon is bad for the world
You need to manage your thought list so they are items about you not other people?
A ted talk on feeling good about ourselves:
Ted talk about how we think empty, rather then half full. Hope this makes you aware so to better manage your lists and remember the good stuff!:
You spent 40 plus years paying attention and planning your Big money career. Now that is gone, but your mind has not moved on. Just like your planning for retirement where you were given financial advice on saving for retirement. You maintain a 401K, set aside money from your family for your own future use. You may even get help by engaging a financial planner to guide your investing. You are told that hobbies and vacations will fill your days with happiness and purpose. It may, but not likely.
Every few days you should review your list of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) issues in your life. These are items that you think about and creates anxiety. They hang around in your mind and fill your head whenever you get some free-thinking time. You try to push them away and distract yourself. But these are tough and keep coming back at you.
You need to accept them without judgement. Make them friends and “agree to disagree” with these thoughts. Bring them closer to your heart.
You have a son who is not employed and spends his days couch surfing with friends from college. He is 25 and not going anywhere fast. You are frustrated that he is not earning money and not growing up and becoming an adult. You know, job, relationship, home and children. You want to tell him how he is missing the boat, not being a contributor. Let me remind you that there are nine billion people on this planet who will tell him about which path to take, but he has only one father.
Look at him and see his goodness, strengths and his love and caring for you and you for him. Accept him and trust his choices as his, not yours. Can you feel that by not judging, by being a friend accepting him with love and caring. He can live his life and still be part of yours.
Do not judge, just agree to disagree.
Do you spend time living other people’s lives and not living your own?
Eckharte Tolle – Addicted to Thinking:
Tara Black on how we drive ourselves into anxiety loops:
During your career, you are given financial advice on saving for retirement. You maintain a 401K, set aside money from your family for your own future use. You may even get help by engaging a financial planner to guide your investing. You are told that hobbies and vacations will fill your days with happiness and purpose. It may, but not likely.. Meditation can help you see yourself, rather than your looking good and being right views.
Meditation comes in many flavors. You can go all the way from silence, isolation and deprivation of sensory to just learning how to prioritize your thoughts.
This is the first in a series on helping yourself to see what gives you pleasure and purpose in retirement. We start with the “list”.
The list works as follows:
Write down any subject that comes into your mind as you think about yourself and number them. A short example could be
1. I am overweight
2. My son does not have a regular job
3. I Wish I had more sex time with my wife
4. Garage door makes too much noise
Each item on the list is something you can wrap your mind around, world peace is too big, got it?
The next day or a day latter sit down and write the list again with the old list next to you. As you write the lists you will be able to feel each item. Your worries and woes are open for you to embrace and make friends with, not run from. Do this for 3-5 lists and you will feel that you are beginning to start to see yourself without the items on the list getting in the way. Latter we talk about list items that give you pleasure and purpose.
How do you manage your fears and frustrations?
This approach of embracing and making friends with your fear and troubles come from Tara Brack, PHD. She has many YouTube videos. Here is one you will enjoy. She is pointing out that inside you is a good person and the lists items are just stories that distract you from yourself.
During your career, you are given financial advice on saving for retirement. You maintain a 401K, set aside money from your family for your own future use. You may even get help by engaging a financial planner to guide your investing. You are told that hobbies and vacations will fill your days with happiness and purpose. It may, but not likely.. Meditation can help you see yourself, rather than your looking good and being right views.
Loneliness is a major challenge when you retire. Once you leave work, you leave behind the majority of your social contacts.
The recommendation of hobbies and arts are typically single person activities.
A lonely retirement is like be in a minimum security prison with kitchen privileges
Research has found that loneliness has the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, making it even more dangerous than obesity.
How do you deal with being lonely?
Can you die of loneliness?
In my book “Retirement How NOT to end up Lonely, Tires and Bored” . I go over the steps to become aware of what give you pleasure and purpose and building a tribe.
A video on alternatives from accepting to being alone to stepping out of your comfort zone “How to deal with loneliness.”
During your career, you are given financial advice on saving for retirement. You maintain a 401K, set aside money from your family for your own future use. You may even get help by engaging a financial planner to guide your investing. You are told that hobbies and vacations will fill your days with happiness and purpose. It may, but not likely.
Friends are not acquaintances. A friend is someone who you can
-Trust to tell you the truth, even if they disagree with you
-Will come when called
-Shared a meal and
-Shared your feeling and thoughts without judgement
What is a real friend?
Do you have a friend?
Doing the financial planning, savings in a 401K, getting the best financial advice is only part of a successful retirement.
In retirement you have left behind your role of provider and head of household. You are now a 60+ year old adultescent looking for friends and purpose that is centered around your pleasures and purposes. Just like you were as a teenager. The challenge is to find those pleasures and activities that give you pleasure, happiness and purpose.
As a teenager you sought friends and activities to share with them.
A video by Tony Robbins on finding yourself (your needs) and creating a blueprint for retirement so that your second life is as rewarding as your first.
A friend or an acquaintance can make the difference between during retirement.
A friend is someone who you have:
–Shared a meal with you recently
–When called will come
–May not agree with you, but always tells the truth
Ask yourself, how many friends do I have?
The only thing keeping you from being happy is the belief that you are alone.- Anne Drapper (Mad men)
All the people wo you pay for service, work with gym junkies that fill your day are most likely acquaintances. A short story to bring the point home.
I locked myself out of my car at YMCA. I asked a gym buddy, someone I have had conversations with to give me a ride home for the spare key. His response, you can go inside, and the people can help you. The financial advisors who help you save money and help plan for your happy life, most likely won’t give you a ride home
We save, work with planners and invest in 401K’s for our retirement. All good advice, but is it enough? Let’s look at what happened to these lottery winners who could instantly retire with seemly unlimited moneys to fund their retirement activities. Here are some Youtube videos about people who retire with a bunch of money.
How do your family, acquaintances and friends view you as a none working person with money. Like a lottery winner?
Here more how your acquaintances and even family see you as retired with money!
Many of us entering retirement immediately recognize our inability to do simple life activities, getting out of a chair or walking up a set of stairs. Our body has given us great service all these years, and now needs to be found. We have used high sugar and carbohydrate foods to maintain our energy and mental awareness to do our “Big Money Career”. This use of food drugs kept us energized but has taken its toll on our body.
This TED talk YouTube video talks about the TOXICITY in carbohydrate toxicity. This is the scientific and medical foundation to the low carbohydrate recommendations in the eating regime covered in the book “Retirement: How Not to be Lonely, Tired and Bored.”
You have had a successful life, saved in a 401K for retirement, and even worked with professionals for financial planning advice. Just like you spent time and money fixing up your home, your body can use some help as well.
