As adults in the stage of generativity seek to pass on life to the next generation, they may find themselves asking, “What do I really have to pass on?” As they try to answer this question, they may discover in themselves not generativity but what Erickson describes as its alternative: stagnation. Stagnation is the feeling of having forfeited my contribution to life in my age, a contribution that would have been handed down to future generations. A crisis of meaning may occur as adults like the heartbroken Gandhi discover stagnation in their lives and begin to think, “I had these dreams and they never got fulfilled. I’m not doing the things I really wanted to do. I am just on a treadmill, keeping in motion but not receiving life or giving it. I haven’t put my stamp on anything. Time and energy are running out. I have to take a different direction or my life will continue hollow and empty.” This search for a deeper and more meaningful way of living often involves a confrontation with inner darkness….  –‘Healing the Eight Stages of Life’

Knowing that I always feel better when I was in the presence of couples who loved each other in a healthy way, I decided when praying alone to ask for the presence of Joseph and Mary, who were the healthiest couple that ever lived. So, I began asking Jesus to take me home with him and share with me his experience of growing up in the atmosphere of healthy love between a man and a woman. I would see myself entering Jesus’ birthplace in Bethlehem or his home in Nazareth and hear his family greet me. Then I would breathe In the atmosphere of their love for one another, and breathe out any feelings of fear or darkness. Gradually, I began to take in Mary’s healthy feminine identity and feel that I deserved to be treated as lovingly and trustworthily as Joseph treated her. I began to breathe in Joseph’s trustworthy love and know that other men would be equally trustworthy.

After several months of prayer and of being in the presence of healthy relationships, all my symptoms of sexual abuse disappeared. I no longer felt frightened, frozen, guilty or full of grief. During one prayer time, the ‘iron knot’ in my abdomen seemed to dissolve, and I never felt it again. I began to dress attractively and stand up straighter. People who had not seen me for several months told me I seemed like a different person. And that is how I felt. —Healing the Eight Stages of Life

A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in the nest of a backyard hen. The eagle hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what the backyard chickens did, thinking he was a backyard chicken. He scratched the Earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the Eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird far above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old Eagle looked up in the awe. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds, ” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth–we are chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

–Healing the Eight Stages of Life quoting Anthony DeMello ‘The Song of the Bird’

A powerful meditation on expectations from ‘Healing the Eight Stages of Life.

In one experiment called the ‘Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’, researchers told elementary teachers: “We are going to test your students to find spurters, the students who will blossom this year. ” After the testing they gave each teacher a list of the students who would be spurters. At the end of the year they retested the students and found that in each classroom the five students designated as spurters had advanced as much as three years in one year’s time, and their IQ scores had risen 12 – 36 points. The teachers were ecstatic and asked the researchers to return each year to identify the spurters. The researchers replied something like this: “You really don’t need us. We just took five names at random. You thought these five would be spurters so you paid extra attention to them. You had more positive expectations each time you ask them a question and so they answered in a way that would meet your expectations. Every student is shaped by your expectations”.