‘We are the ones that we were waiting for’. The potential to become one’s own leader, teacher and healer lives in everyone today, waiting to be born into reality. We are all pregnant with this capacity, at least for the past 60 years. As with any birth - conscious effort is required and a skilled help is essential: a doula, a midwife.

A few days ago I gave a lecture on the topic of how to age well to the group of holocaust survivors in Bratislava, to whom I present various topics from time to time upon request, as I admire their heroism and spiritual resilience. The group includes people in their 80’s and 90’s, and a few years ago I would not accept such a topic of presentation to my elders. But now, in my mid-60’s I felt that I started to be qualified for it. After 30 years of counselling people from age 3 to 83 in more than 10 countries and recently becoming more aware of my own ageing process – I took up this challenge.

No one likes crisis. It is painful, it is damaging, it creates loss, it creates loneliness, it destroys life as we know it before we know what the next step is, it ends dreams, it shatters self image, it is the very opposite, of safety, safety-zone, security, comfort. We devote a lot of our time and energy to prevent the possibility of crisis and maximise comfort and security - the whole of western-oriented economy and social structure is devoted to it.

It does not take a very sharp eye to realise that we live continuously on many dimensions at the same time. Against the background of the dominant materialistic worldview in our academic and public life - for many people one human lifetime is only a chapter of a much bigger cycle of time, story and biography. Some believe in the possibility of reincarnation, some scoff at it as an old eastern religion and western hippies fairy tale. But there is another category of people regarding the possibility of repeated earthly lives: those who experience their previous lives with the same clarity and strength of reality with which they experience any other memory. For them past life is not a matter of belief but of direct personal experience.

Personal intimate relationships are in urgent need of upgrading everywhere. We cannot manage it the old ways any more. We have grown into complex sophisticated individuals in an ever more complex civilization. Traditions, old habits and following previous generations don’t work for us any more. We are upgrading everything around us all the time from the simplest gadgets to IT to international trade, but the way we interact in personal relationships remains primitive, from the simplest of people to the most cultured and educated ones.

What is the mission of men in the 21st century? Men used to have their unique mission. They ruled the world indisputably for thousands of years, regarding women as secondary class citizens, inferior human beings born to serve them, love them, bear their children, care for them, entertain them, obey them and have no say in the running of the world. Only 126 years ago women were given equal vote for the first time: New Zealand 1893, South Australia 1894. Switzerland gave women this right only in 1971.

Empathy is a growing field of research, development and training. The term has been used since 1951, but the appreciation for its importance keeps growing as the cutting edge of conscious human evolution. Methodical Empathy, the process by which an individual's capacity for empathy can grow methodically – is Psychophonetics most important cultural contribution in its 35 years of existence. Empathy is so new in human cultural evolution – we can teach it and learn it like any other skill, as demonstrated through Psychophonetics practice and professional training.