I have been listening to many of these Sounds True and similar audiocassettes recently, looking for good meditation material. Fortunately, since the exploration is pretty hit-or-miss for me, the Seattle library has a lot of them (including this one), so I am able to preview them. For my taste, The Second Half of Life is better in its intention than its execution. Overall, for my money, a more successful work (also available both at Amazon and the Seattle library) is A Woman's Spiritual Retreat: Teaching, Meditations, and Rituals to Celebrate Your Authentic Feminine Wisdom, by Joan Borysenko. Although it focuses primarily on women's wisdom and growth, as opposed to second-half-of-life wisdom and growth, it hits a lot of the same notes and also draws on myth and ritual. (Another, much shorter work in a similar vein that I also found more successful is the meditation CD, Celtic Spirit Meditations, by Mara Freeman--also available at Amazon and reviewed by me here.)
Certainly, the intention of The Second Half of Life is to help people do some positive growth in their later years, drawing on wisdom of many cultures, and as the positive reviews attest, it does accomplish this very well for some people. However, for me, Ms. Arrien picks some good myths, tales and themes for her foundation, but then doesn't do enough substantive and rigorous work with them. The basic pattern (except for the Preferential Shapes exercise, see below) is to tell a tale or introduce a character or concept, give her interpretation (which often seems either too simplistic and schematic or too arbitrary, as other reviewers have noted), and then to say, "So where am I with __________ in my life?" [Fill in the blank with the theme or symbol just discussed.] The psychologizing offered, although constructive, seems--well, mostly self-evident. To someone who grew up loving much of the original source material in its pure, story form, some of the interpretations actually diminish the stories' inherent symbolic meaning.
I did find both the description and the interpretation of the Nine Muses pretty good, and was pleased to come across a theme I'd been looking for but hadn't found elsewhere (except in Layne Redmond's wonderful music CD Invoking the Muse, also available on Amazon). The Pandora's Box story has an interesting comparison of this myth in different cultures (including what was left in the bottom of the box, according to the different cultures). The Preferential Shapes section gives you something specific to do, an exercise with your preferences for five universal shapes. I found this exercise to provide some helpful insights, albeit in a fortune-telling kind of way. The 12 Labors of Hercules got a retelling that was somehow both cursory and redundant, and the interpretations here felt especially arbitrary and forced to me. Like another reviewer, I found the Eight Gates rather suspect in how Ms. Arrien drew together elements supposedly from many sources to arrive at this particular interpretation (and I also could have done without the gnomes!), although there is some good material about initiation and transition here. Overall, there seems to be a lot of focus on schematic, numbered, arbitrary hierarchies.
I also found the material overall to be too repetitive and slow-moving, and like another reviewer with the same problem, was irked by the verbal delivery (the uneven rhythm, the tone, and a tendency to do repetitions of phrases that did not feel naturally emphatic and became quite irritating). It would be nice if Amazon would provide not only the Search Inside This Book function for books on tape (sadly missing here), so that people can get an idea of the specific content and tone, but also audioclips for books on tape, as they do for music CDs. These audiocassettes are often quite pricey, and long, and one's personal reaction to the voice of the narrator is pretty important. The Sounds True website does have audio samples for many of their authors' items, including this one.
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