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Unlived LifeAre you leading the life you were meant to lead? Is it too late to change course? The simple truth is, it is not too late – for any of us. Even if outer circumstances cannot be altered.
Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life explores the essential developmental task for achieving true maturity—rectifying the loss of abandoned dreams and unrealized potentials to achieve our full potential.
Available now from Tarcher/ Penguin, this new book by renowned therapist Robert A. Johnson and his long-time collaborator and fellow Jungian psychologist Jerry M. Ruhl, Ph.D., is aimed at helping people find validation and satisfaction as they age. It is a profound and important guide to the psychological tasks of our mature years when we are beckoned to grow beyond the requirements of family and society, to navigate transitions, and to secure our own relationship to wholeness. Writing with elegant simplicity, Johnson and Ruhl help us understand our own heritage of unrealized hopes—and how they must be examined and transformed if we are to be at peace with ourselves and others in middle-age and beyond. Living Your Unlived Life explains that, when brought to awareness, our unlived dreams can propel us beyond our disappointments — even if outer circumstances cannot always be visibly altered. The book is a deeply realistic blueprint for transforming regret into greater consciousness and integrating the hidden parts of our psyches into our outer lives. Using very specific examples, exercises, and case studies grounded in Jungian theory and practice, and drawing upon a wide range of spiritual and ethical traditions, Johnson and Ruhl explain how to:
What is unlived life? It includes all those essential aspects of you that have not adequately integrated into your life – conscious or unconscious. You can hear the distant drumbeat of unlived life in the mutterings that go on in the back of your head. “Woulda-coulda-shoulda.” Or in second-guessing life choices. Or those late night longings. The unexpected grief that arises seemingly out of nowhere. A sense that you have somehow missed the mark, or failed to do something you were so sure you were supposed to do. Instead they go underground and become troublesome—sometimes tormenting—as we age. When we find ourselves in a midlife depression, suddenly hate our spouse, our jobs, our lives – we can be sure that the unlived life is seeking our attention. When we feel restless, bored, or empty despite an outer life filled with riches, the unlived life is asking for us to engage. To not do this work will leave us depleted and despondent, with a nagging sense of failure or ennui. If you have ever yearned for a fate different from the one you have, Living Your Unlived Life is a revealing account of how to turn regret and disappointment into greater consciousness. An instructive roadmap, it penetrates the surface of modern life, providing simple tools that produce profound results, moving our understanding of the inner realm to new depths. The book includes wisdom that spans many cultures, continents and traditions – from ancient Greek myths to Hindu and Zen sages to Christian mystics to contemporary poets, artists, and scientists. The authors’ many years of teaching workshops, lecturing on this subject, and guiding individuals through their inner work are evident in the rich diversity of relevant personal stories used to illustrate key concepts. Advance Praise for Living Your Unlived Life Living Your Unlived Life is one of five featured "Books for Grownups" in AARP: The Magazine, September/October, page 14. “Robert Johnson's work always has that naked intensity that tells you you're in the psychic house of an honest man. In this book, he says, ‘Life is unendurable without an occasional taste of Paradise.’ He reminds us where to look for that.” “With twinkling eyes and the smile of a wise old man, Robert Johnson
brings us the wisdom of a life fully lived. Sharing these insights, Johnson and Ruhl show us how to live timelessly in the moment.” “Why is it, even when we have done what we were supposed to, something still nags from within? What is this unlived life that summons us, demands accountability from us? Johnson and Ruhl, two wise souls, effectively define this unlived life for us, provide questions and examples to lift it into greater clarity, and provide methods of dialoguing with our separated energies in service to an enlarged, more authentic personhood.” “Gratitude is due to Robert A. Johnson and Jerry M. Ruhl. Living Your Unlived Life is a wonderful guide to heal the split between the ego and the higher self, between the life we have and the one we yearn for.” The Compelling Personal Story Behind the Book:
In spring 2006, Dr. Jerry M. Ruhl was busy writing his new book, Living Your Unlived Life, and seeing patients in his private psychotherapy practice. His 49-year-old wife, Jordis, was running a successful business from home and caring for Oliver, their nine-year-old son. Then, one especially fine Sunday afternoon, the ever-healthy Jordis fell hard to the floor, the result of a totally unexpected and unexplained grand mal seizure. Hospitalized, three days of medical procedures and anxious waiting followed. When the diagnosis came it was bone chilling. It was a brain tumor, and it had to be removed immediately. In the post-surgery waiting area a grim-faced neurosurgeon bluntly told Jerry that, while his cutting would leave Jordis with no functional deficits, some of the cancerous tissue could not safely be removed by scalpel. Six weeks of scalding radiation and chemotherapy followed to kill what was left of the tumor. Despite all this, the most aggressive treatment available, the tumor returned — this time larger than before and reaching further into inoperable territory. The doctors gave Jordis six months to live, “twelve at tops.” Haste was plainly called for — but to do what? If you had only a few months to live, what would you do? Travel? Pray ceaselessly? See far-flung family? Consider every strange and alternative treatment option? Reach out to others in even greater distress? Jordis did these things, but her ordeal produced something more. The Ruhls came face to face with their unlived life, individually, as a couple, and as a family. With an intense immediacy they apologized for failures and shortcomings and became more unified and consistent in their spiritual practice. They wept over missed opportunities and contemplated long deferred pleasures such as a trip to Paris. But as the ordeal lengthened, it became clear that acquiring more or even doing more was not the true agenda. What became illuminated were small miracles that exist between the cracks of weekly routines in busy modern lives: a slant of sunshine, your child’s spontaneous joy, your partner’s light caress as you pass in the hall. These are the moments — never lasting for more than seconds but seeming, in retrospect, hours long — that produce sudden and entirely unsought consciousness of the sacred. “The neurotic structure of our lives keeps us separate and disconnected,” says Dr. Ruhl. “It’s never a matter of what you are doing in life that is most important; rather, it’s a question of what consciousness you bring to the activity. Whether you are pushing a wheelbarrow or heading a corporation is really not the point. Who is doing it and what consciousness is brought forth?” With the help of a new experimental drug protocol, Jordis Ruhl has outlasted the direst predictions of her doctors. One year past her expected demise, that irreversible tumor has all but disappeared. The Ruhls still live from MRI to MRI, but with the gratitude and grace that comes from sharing such an ordeal and coming through it with new clarity, honesty, and commitment to what is truly essential to leading a full life – whatever its duration. The story behind Living Your Unlived Life is as intimate and compelling as any work of the imagination. It is a story of the determination to live as fully as possible for as long as you are able. The Ruhls believe you don’t have to wait until illness or tragedy shakes you to the bone to examine your life and heal it. This became a central message and lesson in Dr. Ruhl and Robert A. Johnson’s new book, Living Your Unlived Life, a book grounded in direct experience of transformation and transcendence.
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