COURSE

Mindful Aging

In this 14 day course we will explore our beliefs about aging, impermanence, loss and aliveness through the lens of mindfulness, body awareness and poetry. We will practice tools to be more present in the midst of change, understand how our identities shift over our life, discover how aging can be a radical and creative time and harvest the gifts of both challenging and positive life experiences. Each session focuses on a particular topic with inquiry questions for you to reflect upon as well as a guided meditation and a poetry reading. You will gain skills in working with pain, grief, loss; reflect on your personal values of a 'life well lived' and practice tools to communicate with your body with greater kindness and understanding. We will also explore the liminal space of being with someone who is dying, honoring our ancestors and learning to embrace our life with curiosity and deep respect.

Acceptance Resilience Wisdom Secular Mindfulness Mindfulness Meditation Happiness Health & Happiness Health & Happiness Health & Happiness Secular Mindfulness

Meet your Teacher

Bhanu Joy Harrison

Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

Bhanu Joy Harrison, LCSW, SEP is a long-time meditator, clinical social worker, trauma therapist and UCLA Trained Mindfulness Facilitator. She has accompanied clients on their healing journeys for over 20 years using somatic and mindfulness interventions such as Somatic Experiencing and EMDR. Her own spiritual journey began in her youth learning TM meditation when she was 16. She also lived in a yoga ashram for 8 years, was a bodyworker for over a decade, and has been an educator since 1985. She is absolutely fascinated by our exquisite nervous system and weaves neuroscience and trauma-informed information into her meditations and courses in a simple and user-friendly manner. She is the founder of Choosing Mindfulness which offers classes, mentoring, and workshops to clinicians and the general public. Her deep intention is to offer simple, practical mindfulness tools to become more embodied, resilient, and joyful.

14 Days

3.6k students

4.8 stars

15 min / day

Acceptance

English

Lesson 1

Turning Towards 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.

Lesson 2

Aging As A Creative Act

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.

Lesson 3

Recognizing Impermanence

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.

Lesson 4

Past, Present And Future Alchemy

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.

Lesson 5

Shifting Identities

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.

Lesson 6

Turning Towards Grief

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.

Lesson 7

Moving Into Acceptance

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.

Lesson 8

Letting Go

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.

Lesson 9

Forgiveness And Kindness

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.

Lesson 10

Gratitude

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.

Lesson 11

Honoring Our Ancestors

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.

Lesson 12

Facing Death

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.

Lesson 13

In The Liminal Space

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.

Lesson 14

Belonging To Life

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.

Ask your teacher

This course includes 103 community questions and 33 audio replies from Bhanu Joy Harrison. The community classroom and teacher audio replies are only available via the app.

103

4.8 (153)

Recent Reviews

Joanna

January 22, 2026

Wonderful thank you I will definitely listen to this course again So worthwhile ❤️

Christine

December 16, 2025

Beyond Excellent! I find it hard to leave this course - it has answered, illuminated, clarified and affirmed so many of my queries and questions - as well as acknowledging the "unknowns"...I feel deeply grateful....Namaste 🙏🙏🙏

Anne

December 14, 2025

Great exercises to connect with a more mature body

Drew

December 5, 2025

Beautiful course filled with wondrous concepts and practice. Young or old should listen. Bahnu Joy delivers with a voice and presence that comforts and floats you through it all 🙏🏻💕✨🌴

Donna

October 25, 2025

A thoughtful, beautiful, gentle reflective meditation on living and dying. Do powerful, enlightening and calming. What a great teacher!

Olivia

October 21, 2025

This was a beautiful, healing course. Thank you 🙏

Sandy

October 1, 2025

This course gave me many chances to get in touch with all aspects of the beauty in my life 🥰

Krysia

September 7, 2025

I have relished this course and loved the questions and readings. It is helping me in my aging journey. Thank you.

LYNETTE

September 4, 2025

Thankyou 🩵🥀🐦👌

Karenmk

August 21, 2025

Thank you for this most thoughtful and inspiring course on aging mindfully. I will turn 71 in the fall and am blessed with good health. I appreciate each lesson, where you shared personal stories and offered meaningful quotes. A course to reflect upon, and journal feelings, You presented hard situations in a gentle and caring manner. Blessings to you, take care, and be well. 💓🙏💐🧘‍♀️

Claire

August 13, 2025

Many many thanks dear Bhanu for this beautiful course on mindful aging. So much to reflect on, I will be revisiting these meditations in the future. I loved the poetry and quotations. Very grateful for your guidance on this difficult time of life, feels like I have a hand to hold and wise counsel by my side. Blessings to you. 🙏

Maureen

July 29, 2025

Such a meaningful journey.

Robin

July 16, 2025

One of the best courses I have taken on Insight Timer. Very well thought out and structured with deeply meaningful content enhanced by lovely poetry. Bhanu addresses many challenging aging topics in a kind, compassionate and gentle way. This is a course one can go through a second time as there is much depth and richness to explore. Bhanu has a very special gift and I most appreciate her responsiveness to my questions and comments in the classroom. I will certainly be checking out her other courses here on Insight Timer.

Chrissie

July 12, 2025

Excellent course. Thank you 🙏🏼

Mary

July 4, 2025

This was a beautiful, deeply meaningful course filled with great discovery and intimate exploration. Thank you!!

Brian

July 1, 2025

This course seems focused on people who are at the very end of life with little physical capabilities left. I am not there yet, so some of the encouragement felt like it was taping down my energy.

Darrell

June 26, 2025

Namaste and thanks for creating this program 🙏it has reopened old doors, and also helped me in dealing with many current challenges in my life.💞

David

June 20, 2025

I found the various subjects covered to be helpful as I glide through the last chapters of my life. Namaste.

Michelle

June 12, 2025

This is a beautiful course. Thank you for your loving time and energy it took to share this with us 💕🙏

Cindy

May 29, 2025

This course truly helped me to better understand the aging process. I'm 68 years old, and already I've had a few very close friends die. And, you SO very gently pointed out that death is a part of life...thank you. I totally appreciated each and every lesson!

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