The Cycles of Your Life
The following exercise helps us to perceive the “pattern that connects” by partitioning the continuum of our lives into seven-year cycles. Focusing on specific periods of time brings to awareness the experiences we need to recover our past and harvest our lives. Perceiving the larger pattern of our lives, we can gain insight into how to bring them to completion, cultivating an appreciation for all we have enjoyed, affirming learnings and showing us directions for future growth.
- Down the left side of a large piece of paper, list the 7-year cycles of your life: January – ages 0-7 February – ages 8-14 and so on …
- Across the top, divide the paper into 3 sections in which you write answers to the following questions for each of the 12 periods:
What were the significant moments and events of each phase of life?
Who were the people who guided and influenced you during each period?
What did each phase contribute to the continuum of your life?
- Feel free to devote a separate page or more to various time periods, attach photos, make sketches, collages, etc. Be creative as you harvest the experiences of a lifetime.
- Use this exercise to help recover memories of experiences that remain incomplete, to work on forgiveness, recontextualize difficult outcomes, mining the past for its untold riches, and discovering a future direction for growth.
Affirm your learnings and growth through life’s inevitable joys and sufferings.
(from Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Revolutionary Approach to Growing Older, by Schachter-Shalomi.)
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