Books : Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the...Second Half of Life
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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 155.66
EAN num: 9781585425860
ISBN number: 1585425869
Label: Tarcher
Manufacturer: Tarcher
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 272
Printing Date: October 04, 2007
Publishing house: Tarcher
Sale Popularity Level: 63212
Studio: Tarcher
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The esteemed Jungian psychologist counsels how to cope with feelings of failure or regret in the latter half of life and how to open to a more meaningful existence, even if outer circumstances cannot be changed.
We all carry a vast inventory of abandoned, unrealized, or underdeveloped talents. These do not just 'go away' through underuse or by tossing them off. Instead they go underground and become troublesome-sometimes tormenting-as we grow older.
In Living Your Unlived Life, using warmth, humor, and elegant simplicity, the renowned therapist Robert A. Johnson, writing with longtime collaborator and fellow Jungian psychologist Jerry M. Ruhl, helps us understand our own heritage of unlived life-and how it must be examined and transformed if we are to make peace with ourselves and others in middle age and beyond.
The authors provide intelligent ways to explore paths not taken, without causing damage to ourselves and to others. They show how to:
- identify those unfulfilled hopes, yearnings, or needs that have gone 'underground'; discover how we unconsciously burden others- - friends, spouses, coworkers-with our unlived hopes; create new life options and unlock hidden talents; - transform fruitless fantasies or 'silly' dreams into tools for inner growth; - start truly living in the present moment; and - revitalize a connection with God and spirit and attain peace in purpose in our mature years.
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Rated by buyers 
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In the blurrrr of early-life demands people fail to realize how much of their potential they are suppressing. Now at age 87, Robert Johnson offers wisdom for the aging.
Rated by buyers -
This is not a book to just read in the ordinary sense of the term. This is a book that is best judged by the results it produces for the reader, and the reader will need to work, not just read, to attain them. I read the book. I did the work. I gained some splendid benefits. For that reason, the following essay is as much a testimonial as a review.
We all have unlived lives. In the process of making the decisions that defined our destinies, we decided not to do other things, which often were things we very much wanted to do, but for circumstantial reasons we could not. These desires may not just go away. They might, and often do go underground, into our subconscious minds, which silently remind us of unfinished business, of things we are "incomplete" with, or of things--sometimes we don't even know what they are--that need to be "fixed" before we are worthy of enjoying an ocean view. They find ways to seep out of us, in little acts of self-sabotage, in disruptions to our concentration when we're trying to work, in sudden uncontrollable obsessions, or in strange dreams. Or they exist as a set of values and beliefs about ourselves and the world that limit our options as we see them and lock us into a state of bland resignation to a life that seems destined to fall short, maybe by a long way, of the hopes and expectations we had when we were young.
The authors take this universal aspect of human experience as their point of departure. In the early chapters of the book, they help you to become aware of this and to apply it to yourself. You begin to see that there is a shadow within you, a repository of your unlived lives. . .other people's unlived lives, too. You begin to see how these have impelled the trajectory that your life has followed. You might even see how these unlived lives affected how you got to where you are, and where you think you want to go from there. Or not go. That is the question, isn't it?
In the middle of the book you are invited to create a dialogue with yourself, or rather, between two of your "selves." It is helpful in this connection to let go of the idea that we are "one," that we are unitary, integrated beings with a single persona that is always in control and always consistent, whether we are asleep or awake, aware or on automatic pilot. The truth is that most of us are just psycho-physical apparatuses playing the role of the rope in a tug-of-war between the gang of selves that live within us. It would be good, even empowering to know more about the members of this gang, and that is where we are led by the authors and the exercises they invite us to do.
In response to the authors' invitation, I found a couple of these entities and had conversations (on paper) with them. It was one of the more productive exercises in self-awareness I have ever done: I was liberated immediately from a complex I had carried for most of my life concerning money. I reviewed a couple of long-standing relationships in my life that had masqueraded as friendships for years and decided what to do about them. That was liberating, too. Not least, I made an important career decision. These were all good things.
There are a number of other exercises, some more effective than others (for me). One involved creating drawings, one on each side of a piece of paper, of the opposite ends of a polarity in your life. I resisted doing this at very first since I am not much of an artist. I did it anyway. To my surprise, the effort produced an attractive set of drawings that became the basis of a powerful moment of awareness concerning the way I approached my work. I attained additional clarity on that career decision I mentioned earlier. This was a very good thing, too. And by the way, it was fun to do.
Living Your Unlived Life isn't for beginners on the path. Readers who are already familiar with Jungian concepts, or who have invested serious time in one or another technique of meditation, or who have already done fairly considerable "work on themselves" will have a much easier time with this book than newcomers. Having said that, I believe anyone can benefit from this book, as long as it is treated more as a study than as a read. Just be sure to do the exercises and take them seriously.
Rated by buyers -
Every night as I read this book I wondered what my unconscious would have in store for me as I sleep. It seemed that by just reading this book my unconscious was stirred and I'd wake up having had a dream that revealed important messages for me in my life. The author through personal stories and professional examples states that our unconscious strives to reveal itself in our dreams providing us answers to what needs to be made conscious to further us on our own life's journey. If we take time to write down and explore these dreams, especially as we reach the 'middle years', we will uncover answers to how to make the most of our lives.
Rated by buyers 
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I gave this book a chance but I could not stand to finish it. It is full of platitudes and unsubstantiated statements. Anyone could write a book like this consisting of just lot of statements which are not supported by reason or argument. The central theme seems to be: if you do not deal with your unlived potential, it will affect you negatively whether you know it or not. So far so good. But there really isn't much more to the book for me after that. What makes it unreadable to me are the generalizations and statements of fact that are not in fact fact. For example, the authors state that seeking romantic love is really seeking God in the object of love, as this is God's last chance to reach a person.
However, since this book has gotten many positive reviews, I can only assume that it has helped many people. For that I am glad. It hasn't helped me. I feel like I wasted my fifty cents putting a hold on this book.
Rated by buyers -
I've been a fan of Robert A. Johnson's work for many years. He was a student of Carl Jung at the Jung Institute in Switzerland. He uses mythological themes to illuminate human situations. In this book, he uses the story of Castor and Pollux to talk about the dimensions of human consciousness(one foot in conscious awareness, another foot in the underworld of the unconscious). As with many of his books, he advocates paying attention to our night dreams and trying to discover the themes that are happening in the unconscious. He wants us to engage the figures of the unconscious in active dialog, a technique called "active imagination".
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