Life Review

07/07/2021

The website has been updated to reflect the "back in business" message. Taking reservations for fall and winter!

06/20/2021

I am back to full, in person Life Reviews in the Loft at Wise Acres. Taking reservations for all seasons.

02/08/2021

Up-date! I have scheduled an on-site life review for April. This is a next level hybrid version. The retreat space will be fully available with meals delivered. The face time will negotiated with a combination of out door time (weather permitting), social distanced and masked time and Zoom. Please contact me if this seems like a viable option for you.

10/09/2020

Pandemic precautions have curtailed my ability to offer Life Review in the form described on the uulifereview.org website. Recently, however, I have been encouraged to offer an adapted virtual version. I have engaged in one such review and have a future reservation for another in early 2021.This, like so many Covid adaptations, is lacking all of the amenities of real retreat but does provide an opportunity to reflect on the impact of this life changer in real time. It requires the circumstance to retreat in place. Time frame, schedule and price are more flexible and negotiable. I welcome conversation about this possibility.

A Self Renewal Ministry

11/27/2019

At the center of this Life Review practice, is of the power of story, of truth in the multiple stories of the same event or experience or feeling filled relationship or historical moment. Particular strands of meaning that become embedded in a larger story whose power grabs like snags in the design of an unfolding tapestry or stitches dropped in knitting pattern. What a beautiful tapestry, we hear. Yes, we say but look here. This flaw, this off colored thread, look how it shows up again and again in the pattern. It’s not quite right. The weaver must have thought no one would note the substitution and yet here it is. Look, look at this flaw. And sure enough. There it is. As true as the perfect sky over the intricately woven treetops. As true as as the unicorn standing strong and free at the edge of the pond.

Now that we see the errant thread, we find it drawing our attention while at the very same time, we note the amazing quality of the whole. This is a work we want others to behold. We invite others to see it. And inevitably in the introduction, after the ooh’s and ahh’s have subsided, it is often almost impossible, in spite of the “do not touch” sign, to lift a quavering finger and point out the counterfeit thread. And it time, in spite of the exquisite and enduring beauty of the whole, the tapestry becomes known as the “cloth of the errant thread”.

Often we do this with our own lives.

I have heard it said that humans are hard wired to veer toward the negative. Our true stories around potential fear or harm or loss or offense or negative expressions of all kinds, grounded in some primal fight of flight from the dangers of that threaten our survival, cause us to be wary of the goodness that we and others possess. And that wariness shapes our capacity to open our hearts and minds to other possibilities. Those who manage to veer in the direction of a more satisfying future, develop what we call, “resilience”. Resilience is many things but the two that seem most relevant in the endeavor to claim a new story are a willingness to live out of the bigger story and to see the “errant threads”, not as defining flaws but points for exploring greater depth.

02/25/2019

In the process of hearing peoples’ stories I have gained a greater appreciation for both the larger and the more universal narratives that shape our culture. We are, it seems, all part of “the big story”. Within the stories of our lives are universal themes like love and loss; grief and triumph; success and failure; attachment and abandonment. Around these themes we have, for better and for worse, developed expectations and patterns of reacting, rituals and traditions that provide pathways which we follow, often unconsciously until we find ourselves wanting to claim a more individual or unique path.

There are many steps in this claiming. I received an important lesson from my granddaughter. Her grandpa and I were staying with her and her little brother while her parents were away for a weekend. On the morning of their return, Zoe (nine years old), Grandpa and I were playing monopoly . I left the game to attend to the baby and when I came back, Zoe had left the table and was watching a video with her head phones on. After a time my husband asked her if she was done playing the game and she lifted her head phone long enough to say “Yes”. So we picked up the game and put it away. In time, the video ended and she returned to the table where the game had been.
“Where is the game,” she demanded.
“We put it away. We thought you said you were done.”
Outrage.Tears. “No, I meant not right then.”
“We could play again,” we countered.
“Nooo I wanted to play THAT game.I was winning!”
More tears, a slammed bedroom door. After another while I went to her. “Zoe,” I said, “ I am so sorry there was a misunderstanding about the game. Grandpa and I both heard you say you were done playing. We did not take time to be sure you understood. This sounds like a story with an unhappy ending.”
“Yes.” she said. “And it’s a TRUE story”.
“Yes it is,” I said. “Maybe there is more to the story that can give it a different ending. Why don’t you think about it and if you can figure out a way to make a different ending, Grandpa and I will we out there waiting to help.”
In a few minutes she came out.
“I want to play the game again,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “I have started the dishes. Could you and grandpa just play the game?”
“ No.” she said. “Having you play with us is part of my happy ending.”
So I did!

“And it’s a true story.”
For better and for worse, whatever story we tell, even a lie, carries a truth. It is the truth of the felt, if often unconscious, need of the teller to shape or to preserve some aspect of identity in relation to the big story that connects us all.

10/07/2018

Starting to blog now! Check it out!

“Legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks exposes the remarkable mechanisms by which we fabricate our memories, involuntarily blurring the line between the experienced and the assimilated…One pheno…

07/06/2018

Northern Minnesota sunrise ...

03/21/2018

01/12/2018

Are you, or someone you love, needing self renewal?

A Life Review Retreat may be the answer.

Join a UU Minister to personally explore your past narratives that are shaping your future. Life Review is a way of gathering up the seeds of wisdom embedded in a lifetime of stories of past transitions - seeds that often get lost in the pressure to get past the hard parts and on to the next thing.

A Self Renewal Ministry

03/06/2017