by Jean Haner
In each decade, it’s almost as if you’re compelled to turn your attention in a new direction and to deal with issues associated with that particular stage of development. You think life is just happening to you, but in fact there is a recognizable pattern. If you’re aware of it, you can make the most progress with the lessons being sent your way.
Please note that childhood is the only time period that’s not split exactly into decades. Instead, the first stage is considered to last until approximately the age of 10, and the second ends at age 18.
Your Childhood: Birth to Age 10
Each child is a link in the chain of existence from the family’s past to its future. When you’re born, and for some time after, you maintain a connection to that mysterious land of the ancestors where you lived before you emerged into your parents’ arms. In your first ten years of life, you process this enormous transition. While it’s a period infused with many feelings including joy and wonder, there is also always a return to fear as you learn to trust this new body you’re in, this foreign environment, and these strangers around you.
And that’s the homework for this stage: with the help of your family, to work through layers of fear over the years till you reach a plateau beginning at around age ten. At this point you feel you have things pretty well figured out; it’s a phase of time when you believe that you objectively understand the world and have a handle on things … and then the hormones kick in.
Your Childhood: Ages 11 to 18
In this era, you’re soon swept away by a riptide of hormones that thrust you back deep into your emotional nature, and any sense of the logic of life disappears. No longer grounded, you’re at the mercy of your feelings. The journey here is not to resist but to swim deeper into yourself while still being able to come up for air.
Your second stage is touched by fear, but it’s also built upon the foundation of the first decade. If you successfully developed trust in life in the first part of childhood, then you’ll be able to navigate this period relatively well. But if your early years were traumatic, this age can bring some chaos, and it can be a struggle to stay afloat. If that’s the case, this phase is fraught with opportunities for difficult experiences instead of positive adventures; and it’s an important time for parents, family members, and the community to step up to lend support.
Your 20s
This period actually begins around age 18 and lasts through the decade of your 20s. It’s a time of adventure, when you leave home and enter life without the buffer of family to protect you. This is a time when you know one thing for sure: Your parents are idiots, and you know everything.
Watch out, world, here you come! This is often the time you’ll first live on your own, have significant relationships, and obtain your first grown-up job. It’s a stage of risk-taking, discovery, and surprises; and the powerful lessons you learn now can benefit you for the rest of your life.
The focus for this period is external and not so much to do with your inner emotional growth, as you venture out to learn how to function in the world. As you do, you’ll be challenged repeatedly—often in positive ways—until you reach a point in the last two to three years of your 20s when you finally begin to develop a new vision for your life, a point of individuation as a maturing adult rooted in the knowledge you’ve gained so far. Each step of life builds on skills learned in the previous time period, and the quality of the transition here is based on how strong a sense of personal identity you’ve been able to develop. By your late 20s, you feel in some way that you’ve become truly involved with the world … and then the tide turns.
Your 30s
The Chinese call this a yin time, when you go within, as opposed to the 20s, which was a yang period and more focused on the outer world. When you’re in your 30s, you work on emotionally integrating everything that’s happened to you up till now. A lot will be churning inside and sometimes you can feel all alone with that invisible struggle. After all, this is the first time in your life that you’ve had to swim in your inner emotional realm without your parents by your side, so there can be difficult stretches during this decade. It’s not so much about what happens to you at this point but about what’s going on within you.
This decade is really the next stage of your independence, a journey of soul-searching as you grow into a deeper and wiser version of yourself. During this stage it’s best not to bottle this up inside but instead to find safe places and people to express what’s going on for you as a way of gaining further understanding and development. (When they’re in their 30s, people often work with therapists or coaches for the first time as they try to process their experience, and it can be very helpful to do so.) Then in the last few years of this decade, a new siren song begins to be heard, and your attention is irresistibly drawn in a new direction: authenticity.
Your 40s
The 40s are another yang time, when your attention is again focused outward. Because of this, it’s common to have career success, either for the first time or else at a higher level of achievement than before. You’ll feel clearer, have a better sense of the big picture, and begin to develop a new idea of where to go from here.
But as you turn 40, you pass through the first of the Four Gates, those significant turning points, and often major life changes happen here—such as divorce, a career change, or a big move. This isn’t coincidental. As you enter this decade, you naturally feel compelled to live more authentically. You can no longer deprive yourself of being who you are just to keep your marriage intact, earn that salary, or (you fill in the blank).
You have to stop pretending to be the person you have been. It’s time to finally stand more in your power. You may feel driven to find work that’s more meaningful and relationships that resonate better with who you really are. As you approach your 40s, if you’ve been living in a way that’s not true to your inner spirit, life will conspire to make you feel so uncomfortable that you just have to make a change. It can feel as though you’re being forced through a keyhole, so it’s helpful to understand that this is a genuine turning point and worth all the effort!
In the Chinese view, you can live off the life force you were born with until you turn 40, but at that point you have to get real and start taking your life seriously. As you turn 40, every cell in your body calls out for change. You almost have no choice but to do what’s necessary to make that transition, to create a life that’s more true to who you really are. And as you end this stage, you look around to evaluate things yet again, but through a different lens: fulfillment.
Your 50s
As you approach your 50s, there can be a growing sense of This is not what I asked for! To one degree or another, you look around with dissatisfaction, remembering all the things you’d hoped you would have received by this stage but haven’t. Or you might notice how hard you’ve been working but with little time to really enjoy your life.
This is another yin phase, where your focus turns inward again for the next stage of emotional maturation, and life will rub your face in all the ways that you’re not happy. One pressing question that comes up in this stage stems from not feeling nourished—by your partner, by your job, and most of all by yourself. By the time you reach your 50s, you may have gotten so caught up in the demands of life—in taking care of family, career, and everyday, nose-to-the-grindstone activities—that you’re taking little time for good self-care. It may even be that by the time you move into your 50s, you’ve developed more and more of an unhappy mind-set, getting stuck in disappointment about how things have turned out and having negative expectations of what life will bring you from here.
You’ve just passed through the second Gate, of course, and 50 can bring what feels like an emotional downturn. This period could very well bring up feelings of anguish about how you wanted more in life, and anger about your current circumstances may arise as well. By this stage, many women have fallen into a pattern of over-giving and under-receiving in some way. Perhaps this stems from years of taking
care of a spouse or family; supporting a boss, staff, and clients; or (for most women) all of the above. Now you know in your bones that this situation of having to take care of everyone else but you has got to stop.
The same thing happens for men but in a slightly different way. They can wake up as they enter their 50s and feel like they’ve just spent the last 30 years at the office. Perhaps it seems as though they missed seeing their children grow up, they no longer enjoy their job, their relationship with their partner may now be more like roommates, or they have few real friends. Again, it often feels like all of the above, with so many responsibilities that they’re prevented from enjoying life.
The cure for this dilemma for both men and women is to develop a healthy selfishness, where they begin to give themselves what they need. For some people, that means quitting their job and starting the business they’ve always dreamed of, while for others it’s about healing their relationship. It can also just mean more time off to enjoy the life they’ve created so far.
The more you can bring the ratio of giving and receiving back into balance, the more you’ll enjoy what’s coming in your 60s: revitalization.
Your 60s
In Chinese culture, turning 60 is the single most important birthday of your life, considered to be the completion of one full life cycle, when you are now freed of old responsibilities. It’s believed that this age is the beginning of an entirely new phase where you feel revitalized and can move forward with a new purpose. It’s another yang stage when your energy goes outward again to take new action in the world. There’s a sense of renewed vigor and delight in life that in previous generations in Western culture was often the result of moving into retirement and freedom from the daily grind.
In current times, of course, fewer of us are leaving our careers in this decade—but the theme of new energy and freedom is still at the forefront of the experience in the 60s. There will be an irresistible desire to have more independence, to not be so burdened by the restrictions of normal life.
The level of vitality you feel at this stage will directly correlate to the amount of willpower you’ve had to use up until this point in your life. We all are born with a deep reservoir of pure will, which is available for us to tap into during challenging times, using it to push through when life gets hard and there’s no choice but to keep going.
However, most of us use this will too often and incorrectly, draining it as we charge through everyday life, trying to make things happen—to force, rather than to allow—and that depletes the supply we were meant to draw from in our 60s. But we always have the chance to replenish, to refill the reservoir of will.
One way you can do this is to allow yourself what you might call downtime, which is really about rejuvenation and deep rest—for example, a long soak in the tub or time spent in meditation or daydreaming. But on a deeper level, this is about remembering to trust the process, to understand that attempting to force your will on life only drains your energy and can block wonderful things that are trying to come to you, if you’ll just stop and allow.
The age of 60 is the third Gate, where because of all the personal work you did in your 50s, you’re now really moving into a new way of being in the world. One theme here has to do with creativity/fertility. As you reach 60, it’s the end of an era, a turning point where your creative juices need to flow in new and different ways than before.
Usually until your early 50s, a portion of your system’s attention is on your physical fertility, creating offspring to continue the family line. Whether or not you actually had children, some part of your essence was attending to this possibility. The rest of the decade phases that out, though; now as you turn 60, you’re freed to express your creative urges with new adventures and ideas, exploring and making new discoveries about yourself and the world. You may travel or develop your artistic abilities or simply enjoy a more creative lifestyle overall. Interestingly, studies of creativity show that more new ideas are produced during an artist’s 60s and 70s than in their 20s.
And with this renewed vitality comes a need to more deeply integrate spirituality into your identity, whether that’s being part of a church community or living a more spiritual life overall. This focus prepares you for the work of the next decade: a new vision.
Your 70s
As you enter your 70s, your attention turns to refining the vision for your life, including working through any unresolved issues or old conflicts and examining what you can let go of in order to move into the future unencumbered.
As you pass through the last of your Four Gates, it’s time to gain more clarity about the past and get new insights on how to release any lingering pain that still needs your attention. Sometimes this concerns relationships from years gone by. Even if the person is no longer living, it will be important for you to come to some resolution about the relationship and what went wrong, to work through a process to heal what you can for yourself. In this period of life, it’s easier for you to have a wise view of what happened and why.
In Chinese culture, it’s believed that your work at the age of 70 is to purify your mind, to free yourself of negative thoughts and any regrets about the past. It’s a time to reflect back on your life, to let go of any remorse or sadness and instead feel a growing sense of the integrity and harmony of your journey.
As part of this process, you’ll begin to detach from the everyday world, not with feelings of loss but with pride and satisfaction in who you’ve become. This new way of being opens you to a new life in your 80s: joy.
Your 80s
There are no more Gates to fuss with—you’re free to just enjoy! Building on the work you did in your 70s, the momentum of life is directing your energy inward to cultivate the “sage heart,” a state of pure wisdom, peace, and joy.
In this decade, you could be brought to a second stage of letting go, where at some point you might need to release your attachment to some of your material possessions and move from what you called home to a smaller space. You may need to accept that your physical vitality is diminished and that there are limitations on what you can do. If you resist and hold tightly to what you think your life has to look like, you won’t be able to find the joy that’s waiting for you in this phase.
There’s a term in Chinese culture for an elderly person who’s staying overly attached to the past: a ghost. Just like a ghost is trapped in a space they don’t realize is no longer theirs, if you’re locked into thinking that you have to retain every aspect of your old life, you can never relax into the beauty of this stage of conscious aging and experience your joy. If you stay in harmony as your physical energy fades, you can effortlessly move into the next decade with appreciation.
Your 90s
At this stage there will be a growing ethereal awareness as your physical energy continues to become delicate, and you balance between Earth and heaven. The work in this decade will be to become more and more present, with a developing appreciation of the preciousness of each moment. Watch in awe as the beams of morning sunlight glow in the leaves outside your window, relish the feel of the breeze on your skin, and soak in every second of the pure delight of watching your great-grandchild at play.
You don’t feel afraid when you see the trees lose their leaves in autumn, or as the cold slows things down in winter. You know these are natural events, and just as you can find pleasure and beauty in those seasons, you can find the same in this phase of life. Use your understanding of nature as your guiding principle, and this can be a time of ease and delight.
Age 100+
If you reach the century mark and beyond, the Chinese believe you emerge into what’s like a second childhood. However, this time it’s not immersed in fear but in wisdom. Every moment of fear that you’ve transcended through courage, every lesson you’ve learned, every moment of love you’ve felt brings you to this point of wisdom, nonattachment, and total flow. Good job!
Now that we’ve seen the meanings and messages of the decades in life, in the ne
xt chapter we turn to focus on shorter time periods. Each individual year also has an energetic signature that affects both your inner and outer worlds.
CHAPTER 11
YOUR PERSONAL
SEASONS
Each year has a theme that’s represented by one of the nine numbers, and it will bring you certain experiences from the outside world as well as stimulate thoughts and feelings in your inner world that are in alignment with that pattern. If you’re aware of the year’s design and direction, you won’t feel bewildered or blame yourself for what’s occurring—it can be such an incredible relief to know why things are going the way they are. This lets you have realistic expectations for your experience and helps you make the most progress during the year, rather than groping in the dark.
The annual change in energy doesn’t happen on your birthday; instead, the timing has more to do with the calendar year. But it’s also not the case that on January 1, the theme of the new year abruptly drops into place in your life. It’s more gradual than that, and I often notice a two- to three-month threshold that people cross from year to year.
In Nine Star Ki, the “official” New Year’s Day is actually February 4, but I usually don’t pay much attention to that specific date. Instead, what I observe is that toward the end of any particular year, usually around November or December, the influence of the current phase starts to wear off and the energy of the coming year begins to flood in. In fact, in late fall or early winter, it’s common to notice new developments or changes, or even just shifts in how you’re thinking or feeling. If you don’t notice anything in that time frame, then by January or early February, it will be obvious that things are definitely different! Pay attention this year to what happens from November to January and see if you notice the shift.