Mindful Aging

In this first session, we begin the process of turning our attention to the topic of aging. We hear about aging, disease, and death all the time. One of Buddha’s teachings is that we are all suffering from loss, illness, and death. Each of us has known someone who has passed away, human or animal. We have parents, siblings, and friends that have become older or are no longer living. Some of these passings touch us deeply, others are lost as our lives move on. How can we hold all the suffering and the joy, make it meaningful and also not so overwhelming? Our practice in this session is turning towards aging with curiosity and safety, learning to titrate, and growing our capacity to be with this topic.

Our beliefs inform our experience. Most of us have unconsciously taken on beliefs about aging and death from our family, our culture, the country we live in, our faith, our personal experiences and traumatic events. What do we really believe about aging? Who do you want to be when you grow up? The session today will incorporate journaling, inquiry and practice as we explore the upside of aging.

Life is nothing but constant change and we notice this more as we become aware of our own aging process. As we grow older, most of the changes we experience are losses – our hearing or eyesight may diminish, we lose friends and even the quality and consistency of our handwriting changes!! Small and big changes, some slowly over time, some shockingly sudden. What is your relationship with change? How can we make friends with impermanence? In session today we will explore the experience of impermanence and how our relationship to it can change depending on the state of our nervous system.

Our past informs our present and future. Today we will be creative and document a timeline of important events that have impacted us. As we age, it can be helpful to have ‘the big picture’ perspective on our lives. Highlighting important positive and challenging events can help us understand the gifts we have received from all our experiences and helps us craft the future we want to grow into. Bring paper and pen to the session today.

All of us get attached to our identities…who we are in a job, a relationship, in the face that the outside world sees. And many of us have identities put on us by the current culture and social conditions we face. Most of us in Western culture are valued for what we do or accomplish and this often begins when we are just children. Aging and illness force us to shed our identities, to let go of our attachments to what we “do” and move into how to “be” in our life. This is not an easy shift, no matter what age we are! In this session we will identify new values and purpose as we shift from doing to being and practice mindful tools to cultivate these qualities.

We all experience pain and loss over the course of our lives… physical pain, emotional heartbreak and challenging mental states. We are grieving so much these days - the loss of people, pets, our memory, our physical functions, political stability, the destruction of our planet, the suffering of so many, the ongoing social inequities and injustices and on and on…We cannot avoid pain and loss, but with attention and mindfulness we can re-configure our relationship with them. In today’s session we will work with growing our capacity to be present with our grief.

If we accept our aging process or our pain, are we giving up? Many people fight against these conditions as they feel acceptance is equal to a failure. On the contrary, studies with the therapy called ACT have shown that when people actually accept what is happening right now, their experience of pain is less, and they are more capable of taking action in fulfilling their life values. Our practice today will focus on being present with the somatic experience of pain, giving you an opportunity to turn towards and be with a challenging experience.

What are you holding on to that no longer serves you? Clutter in your home, a long-held belief that is no longer true or maybe never was true or perhaps a friendship that is no longer mutually supportive? As we age, letting go often means losing capacity, friends, abilities. For some of us, letting go means loss and grief. For others, letting go is ‘letting flow’, as Jack Kornfield says, inviting a sense of lightness and freedom. In today’s lesson we will explore our relationship to letting go and identify what we are ready to loosen our grip on.

Forgiveness is challenging! It is hard to forgive ourselves or another for harm caused. And yet there are many benefits to forgiveness – a reduction of pain, anger, anxiety or depression. While forgiveness cannot ever be forced or coerced, forgiveness and kindness can help us lessen the burden of life events. Our practice today will focus on opening a kind space for forgiveness to begin to blossom.

Gratitude is a positive emotion that we can cultivate with practice. Gratitude offers us many benefits – greater appreciation, a shift out of our negativity bias and reduction in anxious and depressed emotions. Consciously choosing to shift our attention to gratitude can be immensely helpful in our aging process…as we shift from noticing our losses to acknowledging our gifts and strengths. Our practice will focus on gratitude for our body, heart, mind and others.

We all have our family lineage, those that have come before us and that gave us this body and experiences on earth. We all have painful family histories full of loss, grief, fear, regret and trauma as well as legacies of resilience, strength, humor, honesty, creativity and tenacity. Our practice today will be an honoring of both the pain and the gifts with the knowledge that healing ourselves is the path to healing the past.

As humans we have both fascination and aversion towards the death process. It is one of life’s greatest mysteries as we truly encounter the unknown. In today’s session I will speak to the importance of handling the details of the end of our life as well as offer many inquiry questions about our own experiences around death. The way our family and our culture processes death has a profound impact on our beliefs of this experience. We will close with a R-A-I-N practice.

Some of us have the opportunity to be with someone who is very ill or in the dying process. This is a unique experience of being in the liminal space between life and death. In our session today we will explore the qualities of this space and how we can be of greatest service to those we are supporting. Our meditation will focus on envisioning what we would like to create in our own last days.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.” In our last session of this course, we will practice embracing our life, sensing our aliveness, belonging and opening up the gifts of love and our presence on this earth.