by William (Bill) Israel
Following 25 years working professionally as a human resource management consultant in Canada and the United States, I was ready to retire in 2008. My specialized consulting practice consisted primarily of contract work with manufacturing companies at varied locations in both Canada and the United States. I had the benefit of citizenship in each country, and it was the stress of constant travel that finally took its toll on my physical, emotional, and spiritual capacity to work effectively in a meaningful and rewarding way. I was 70 years old and had a speaking acquaintance with the Intensive Journal™ method which I had undertaken in an earlier vocational transition in the 1970’s.
Following a six-month “entry” into my retirement, I realized that gardening, walking my dog, and weekly golf rounds were relaxing but emotionally and spiritually insufficient. I needed something more meaningful to transit the remaining years of my life.
I enrolled in a series of Intensive Journal workshops in Seattle, Washington, Vancouver, British Columbia, and Sacramento, California. Travelling from my home in Victoria, British Columbia, I undertook the entire series of Intensive Journal workshops from three different certified facilitator/consultants. This was over an 18-month period of my retired life. My wife of 35 years was happy that I had taken an active interest in finding a meaningful avocational pursuit. Ten years my junior, she was still actively employed and aware that my so-called leisure activities were not emotionally, physically, or spiritually fulfilling for me.
I had been in the people business for most of my adult life, solving problems with clients, training managers and laborers, and volunteering with arts and cultural organizations. The Intensive Journal process offered an innovative opportunity to explore what possibilities there might be for putting my “life experience" to creative and meaningful use in retirement.
The multiple geographic offerings of the Intensive Journal workshops enabled me to experience the professionally facilitated workshops over time. Each of the three distinctive modules provided preparation for the following event. The cumulative effect of the entire process was surprising and helpful. The venues were always appropriate for the meditative nature of the self-reflective, private writing workshops.
On reflection, I recall the emotional sensation of doubt about the non-didactic process of the Intensive Journal method in the beginning. No teaching? Really? How was this helpful? Gradually the quiet, private/communal writing with no crosstalk began to enable my “inward epiphanies.” The innovative writing components require respectful, meditative privacy in a workshop’s atmosphere of communal, attentive silence.
The meditative privacy for every writing prompt enabled me to privately “write reflectively” in an uncensored, open-hearted process, about who it is that I am. I wrote enthusiastically about the multiple creative projects that I had been engaged with since early childhood. The timed writing periods opened opportunities to engage in a much deeper dialogue exploration with personal relationships, creative activities, and significant personal and transpersonal events of my life. Very private recapitulation of pivotal moments including grief, shame, and fear, as well as the ecstatic and beautiful moments of transition, written in private, were transformational.
As I worked my way through the structured writing sequence for all three Intensive Journal workshop modules, my self-awareness deepened, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. With each of the Intensive Journal workshop modules, my sense of “life mission” from childhood and adolescence re-emerged slowly and on paper. The occasional opportunity to read-aloud (without crosstalk from the workshop listeners) deeply influenced my inward, spiritual awareness of how I “belong in the universe.”
As I moved steadily through the cumulative Intensive Journal process, very old values began re-emerging in my elder adult awareness. My people skills, from which I had long “made a living,” took a more spiritual turn toward the importance of “making a life” in my retirement.
From my earliest memories of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, my social justice leanings re-emerged. For the past eight years, I have been voluntarily engaged in family, community, and “transpersonal” causes in my community and province. I have worked directly with clients of four different criminal justice programs, a province-wide family caregivers support program, and two recovery programs for post-detox addicts and homeless persons. It is a boon that I still have time for my gardening, golf, and walks by the lake in a nearby forested park.
The Intensive Journal process enabled an effective life-transition for me, into a vital, relevant and meaningful retirement with family, my community, and the wider world.
My ongoing transition has been enabled using the “twilight imagery” meditations, so central to the Intensive Journal process. Without judgment, clinical diagnostics or religious dogma, my renewed sense of life-mission emerged as a spiritual awareness. To this day, I recall fondly the meditative workshop moment when I “heard” (in my meditation) the song Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man as the prayer the author intended. A popular song written by Bob Dylan (ca.1960) included the lyrics “...though I know that evening’s empire has returned to sand, vanished from my hand ..., play a song for me. I ain’t sleepy and there is nowhere I am going to, play a song for me in the jingle, angle morning and I’ll come following you.”
"Intensive Journal" is a registered trademark of Jon Progoff and licensed to Dialogue House. © Copyright 2019. Reprinted with permission of the author.