Victorian Housegrass houseMobile HomeRow HouseShoe HouseBungalowTeepeesplit level

 

Positive vs Negative Energy

Gretchen Heuring

ElderThink | 02.14.10

 

According to Judith Orloff, MD, a physician, author and mystic, people can transmit both positive and negative energy. To help us understand us, Dr. Orloff says that people transmitting positive energy "exude an inviting sense of heart, compassion, and support." We intuitively feel safe, relaxed, wanting to get closer to that person. Often we feel more peaceful around them and they make us feel better, more energetic and more optimistic.

 

Dr. Orloff says that people who transmit negative energy can make us feel "demeaned, constricted, or attacked." She says we feel unsafe, tense, or on guard when we are around them and want to get away from them. We feel less energetic and optimistic when we are near them.

 

You can find more information about this at Dr. Orloff's website: www.drjudithorloff.com

Do you follow the ElderThinker?
     

Add to Google Reader or Homepage

 

 

 

Moving Mom: Helping Older Parents Move

Gretchen Heuring | ElderThink | 03.24.09

 

Life brings us major moments; the birth of a child, the marriage of a sister, and helping older parents downsize and move. Moving our older folks is hard for everyone and the experience can be filled with many difficult events.

 

There is help at hand from professionals that specialize in moving seniors. According to Mary Kay Buysse, Executive Director of the National Association of Senior Move Managers (NASMM), "Senior move professionals guide clients through a journey that's often as much about sorting through a lifetime's worth of memories as it is about possessions."

>> More

 

Moving Mom

 

How We Live

centerBar

Happiness Is What We Really Want

Gretchen Heuring | 02.24.09

 

Doesn't matter how old or young we are, we all want to be happy. Can we be happy every day? Shirley MacLaine, in Life Can Begin at 60, says,

 

"Experiencing and living life should become limitless when we age. Aging should be liberating. We no longer have the same concerns we had in our youth. After middle age, the pursuit of happiness should be our goal."

 

We have tremendous freedom to choose our lifestyles. We can travel, or paint, or write. We can move to a place where it's nice to retire, a whole new community to explore. We can move nearer to our children or other loved ones. We can stay in our home longer than ever before, with new technologies and skilled people to help us. Children can move in with us (or we with them) building new multigenerational lifestyles. There are senior villages and alternative lifestyles that would have raised our parent's eyebrows, for sure.

 

Nice Places to Retire

 

Every few months, I come upon a new list of nice places to retire. Some locations show up again and again because of the weather, golf courses, scenery, and great sense of community for older persons. Recently there has been more interest in locations outside the US where life is slow, easy, friendly, and low cost. We highlight new "finds" every month or so and, as always, give you a chance to comment and say what you think. >> More

 

Staying In Your Home

 

There was a time when most of us thought that we would have to leave home one day. We love the spot where we always put our Christmas tree. We enjoy, through the window, the seasonal changes to the now fully grown pear tree we planted so many years ago. And we take pleasure in the look of our comfortable couch against the wallpaper we hung ourselves. This is home. We know where everything is (well, almost everything). It is our place.

 

There is a great movement afoot that allows us to stay in our homes as long as possible. Researchers and economists agree that keeping us in our own homes costs less money, and we live better and longer. >> More

 

Moving Near Children

 

We are living longer and healthier. Breakthroughs is medicine and understanding the benefits of good nutrition and exercise have lengthened our healthy and productive time. We are living at least ten and possible as many as forty more years than our parents did. So many of us are moving closer to our children. It's a big decision to leave home and move to a new place, but we are called to do this by our quest for happiness. It makes us happy to be with our children and grandchildren. So we uproot ourselves and move nearer to them. >> More

 

In Our Later Years We Help Our Parents Move

 

We help our parents move. They move to assisted living, or to a smaller home, or nearer to us, or in with us. They resist and we become our parent's parents. Not understood by anyone until we are in the process. This is a difficult and challenging time. >> More

 

We Move Our Parents In With Us Or We Move In With Them

 

It has been somewhere between twenty-five and fifty years since we lived with our parents but now we must move in together again. Perhaps is is for financial reasons and we are combining our resources. More likely, they need us to take care of them. We create space in our homes and our lives. In time, we become caretakers.