Certificate: The Grateful Ageing Program: Awakening to Our Third Act (GAP)
A new and innovative approach to the changing needs of our elders, and those who care for them
Programme Leader: Marilyn Schlitz, PhD, MA
The global population is growing older and living longer than ever before. With this demographic trend is a need for new and innovative approaches to the changing needs of our elders, and those who care for them.
The Grateful Aging Programme (GAP) speaks directly to this need by empowering caregivers, health professionals, gerontologists, policy makers, organisations, community leaders, and lifelong learners who are called to help shift the worldview on aging from fear and anxiety to hope and possibility. It is an invitation to grab the reins of wisdom to inspire each other, our elders, and future generations.
GAP is a rigorous and transformative educational experience for advancing conscious, transformative, and grateful aging. It offers evidence-based professional tools, skills, and life experiences for those who serve (or wish to serve) the aging population in living healthy, meaningful, and active lives well into their Third Act.
Principles of the Grateful Ageing Programme (GAP)
GAP invites participants to advance the realization of each person’s unique potentials and self–fulfilment through a whole person model that supports self-actualization, self-transcendence, and collective transformation. The intention is to advance inner capacities for optimal health, personal growth, and a just society that respects elders as wisdom keepers in our changing world.
Programme Overview
Our Grateful Ageing Programme (GAP) Certificate at Alef Trust (one-year) provides a collaborative environment to explore your own and others’ worldviews on aging while gaining evidence-based skills and resources to help support the social and psychological needs of elders and those who care about them.
- Consider diverse worldviews on ageing, what shapes them, and how they impact all aspects of human experience
- Apply insights from transpersonal studies to grateful ageing
- Discover the ways in which worldviews on ageing are both conscious and unconscious
- Investigate various evidence-based practices for Grateful Ageing
- Explore tools for collaborative dialogues about diverse worldviews and beliefs about ageing
- Engage in skillful forms of communication in challenging conversations about ageing
- Develop competencies for supporting your own and others’ psychological and spiritual development and transformation
- Examine the transformative practices that can improve relationships and enhance people’s lived experience throughout the lifespan
- Learn skills of self-care and how it applies to yourself and your clients
- Adopt skills of grateful ageing to professional work and personal development
Discover more about the value of earning your certificate in the Grateful Ageing Program: Awakening to Our Third Act (GAP) in this short video from Programme Leader, Marilyn Schlitz, PhD, MA:
How can I benefit from attending the Grateful Ageing Program (GAP)?
Whether you are starting out, approaching mid-career, switching careers, seeking to engage your retirement communities, or looking to advance your own personal growth and development, this program is for you. It will provide you needed educational tools, enriching engagement practices, rigorous and inspirational content, and networks to promote a shared identity that advances elder care to wisdom care.
What are the unique skills gained from the Grateful Ageing Programme (GAP)?
This Grateful Ageing Programme Certificate at Alef Trust provides you with a collaborative environment in which to explore your own and others’ worldviews on ageing while gaining evidence-based skills and resources to help support the social and psychological needs of elders and those who care about them. The programme addresses the quality of life as we grow older, helping elders (and their caregivers) to cultivate growth mindsets, question assumptions, foster tools for reflection, and to engage in healthy ageing based on self-efficacy, self-actualization and self-transcendence. The programme encourages human flourishing throughout the life span. The Certificate Program builds on the developmental models of Maslow, Erikson, and Schlitz.
A truly client centred approach
GAP uniquely offers an integral philosophy that includes the fullness of lived experiences, including expanded states of consciousness that reveal our unique qualities and fundamental points of interconnection. It guides us to develop resilience and agility in the face of rapidly changing circumstances and helps move us from surviving to thriving in our complex world.
How will my clients benefit from the Grateful Ageing Programme (GAP)?
GAP facilitates the concept that living with meaning and purpose is a basic need and motivation, throughout the lifespan, and takes a transpersonal perspective which can enhance self-actualization and transcendence through self-awareness, engaged practice, and real-world applications. In addition, GAP focuses on the social and emotional competencies that offer useful skillsets for addressing complex issues and represent literacies that can be learned and shared.
Programme Tutor:
Marilyn Schlitz
(PhD, MA)
Social anthropologist, master teacher, and accomplished author.
Testimonials
“The gift of Dr Schlitz’s expertise, teachings and research is to bring to the fore the essential inquiry and the essence of the topic at hand. In this case a journey through the worldviews on aging. Through meticulous, scientifically based and intuitively led examination she observes and shares her research in personally applicable and relevant ways for improving quality of life and supporting transformation. From DMLP to Dr Schlitz’s research on grief and aging she has provided a journey rich with tools and transformative applications for my work as a practitioner, teacher and researcher.”
“I’ve worked with Marilyn for nearly 10 years across numerous research projects and in the development of transformative education programs. As an educator in the field of personal transformation, and as a researcher in psychology, the mind-body connection, and human potential, she has contributed to a deeper evidence-based understanding of what it means to be human and how to successfully navigate that journey from beginning to end. I am certain the Grateful Aging Program will be just as transformative for her students as it will be for the elders for whom those students will serve.”
“I am grateful for the many gifts that Dr Schlitz brings to our world. Her love of teaching, her deep insights, her groundbreaking research, and her amazing communication skills are truely inspirational. She is a trusted guide on the path to personal and collective transformation. What she offers us is a rare and highly polished jewel.”
“In crafting this important program, Dr. Schlitz has drawn upon decades of rigorous academic research and a thoughtful, personal connection to the people this program is meant to ultimately benefit. Like all of her other work, it will surely result in life-changing impact on both its participants and the people they serve.”
“The fear of aging causes as much suffering as all the diseases combined. Thus Marilyn Schlitz is performing an immensely valuable service with the Grateful Aging program, which is helping remind of the joys that come through the wisdom that lies in our third act.”
“Dr. Schlitz brings so many interpersonal and professional transformative tools of growth to her workshops and classes. From her connections in this field, her ability to apply the materials and present it in ways that resonate with the changing times of culture and society, all make for intriguing courses. Her ability to invite us to engage, process and integrate these materials both personally and professionally is deeply transformative for months and years to come.”
