E139 Aging Beyond Midlife with Susan Stewart, PhD

Experience 50 Podcast for Midlife

Heads up! Susan Stewart, PhD gives us a sneak peek into our future state of mind as we discuss her new book Winter's Graces: The Surprising Gifts of Later Life.

Nature and neuroscience come together in our 70s, 80s, and 90s bearing gifts for creating a state of reflective contentment as we complete our turn on this earth.

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A Professor of Psychology for over thirty years (now emerita), a retired therapist, and four times a grandmother, Susan Avery Stewart, Ph.D., is passionate about sharing the gifts of late life in a culture that mistakenly equates old age with debilitating decline. Her own journey into the apparent abyss of old age began quite by accident, but it has enhanced her view of aging, and her life, immensely. At age 54, a series of encounters with the word crone left her unsettled yet curious, and she went looking for good news about growing older, not at all sure she would find any.

Fifteen years later she completed Winter’s Graces: The Surprising Gifts of Later Life. In its pages, she weaves together folktales, current research in gerontology and other fields, themes from the world’s wisdom traditions, stories of her own and other older women’s experience, and characters from film that reflect qualities that ripen in later life, such as contentment, agelessness, simplicity, and necessary fierceness. Susan is also a singer and a cellist and loves to dance.