Facing Aging: A Live Podcast Recording

A live recording of our Insight Timer Live Stream Podcast on Aging. A 30-min episode on facing, and even embracing, aging with spiritual tools. From Botox to prayer we bare it all. Apologies for the low volume in one section due to being a live recording. We love you and you're perfect exactly the age and way you are TODAY. Listen and let us know how you're facing aging these days. xo

Transcript

You've arrived at Pretty Spiritual Podcast where we share our spiritual journeys to empower yours.

Come on in!

Yeah,

Okay!

No seriously,

Come in.

I'm Annie.

This is Lindsey.

Hey-o!

This is a Pretty Spiritual Podcast.

We're doing a live stream today.

We're so excited.

We see some of our friends already.

Thank you for joining us.

We're so excited.

We're so excited.

We're so excited.

We're so excited.

We're so excited.

We're so excited.

We're so excited.

We're so excited.

We're so excited.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you so much.

Our topic today is going to be on aging,

Which is very exciting as we stare at ourselves on this screen.

Oh,

Help my heart.

Help my heart.

We're excited.

We're excited and I just want to let us all know right here,

Right now,

We are all aging.

What?

I just want to bring that into the consciousness and the realm as much delusion as I always am in about time passing and us aging and wrinkles happening.

It's more than that to everyone.

We're not just going to come here and talk about.

We've got a ton of tools.

Yes.

That is actually the point and going through it.

We're just here for it.

How do we be here for it?

This is our podcast today on aging.

We have so many thoughts on it,

But for today it's just going to be a 30 minute episode.

Yeah.

We don't have all the time in the world as we are dying right now.

We have been talking about doing this topic for a while and I was really in my head about it because it is very tender,

Right?

This whole process of who am I?

How do I look?

How does the world see me?

I was super in my head.

Then just all the things that are happening in the world and in my personal life,

I felt so vulnerable sitting.

I was like,

I can't expose myself and dig into all this stuff.

Then I had this aha moment.

I have those all the time and they come and they go and then I forget them and then I get to have them again.

Essentially it was,

Oh yeah,

This isn't about me.

I don't need to stew in my self-centered fear around talking about what the topic of aging means to me and my vanity and all the things that I get stuck in.

What if this is just another opportunity for spiritual growth,

Another opportunity to use tools,

Another opportunity to connect with other people?

That's what we're going to talk about today.

Pony,

Why don't you share with us what your experiences are right now with aging and your thoughts?

My experiences with aging and my thoughts?

Well,

Truth be told that secretly a long time ago,

Way before we were ever ready,

We did do an aging podcast.

I would like to think that we were much more vain then and couldn't even see through the spiritual lens of what we were actually trying to talk about.

For me,

Talking about aging today and working on the spiritual path and seeing more clearly with aging,

Being in denial and delusion is really a goal here for me.

The lens that I want to look at aging through has to do with the framework of acceptance and impermanence.

Last time I said that I needed some Botox for my spiritual life.

Shout out to Botox.

Shout out.

I think it's important.

I always would look at people and they'd be like,

Oh yeah,

I drink so much water and I get plenty of sleep and I'm like,

You have Botox just like I do.

Look,

I'm actually making faces right now.

And I wish it were different and I'm not ready yet and that's honestly my truth and I want to bring in the idea of how culture,

My biggest fears about aging is that I am going to be locked away and that women,

Or men for that matter too,

They're invited now too.

I'm going to be locked away and not cared about.

And when I look at American culture and what we do to women and people who age is how we lock them away and they don't matter anymore and they become invisible.

And so when I take the time to really look at and get close with what the issues of aging are for around me,

It's I want to matter,

You know,

And that's a lot of my core,

Like when I get down to the capital T truth of things is that to matter is so important and the other issues,

My spiritual path,

Like the groundhog spirituality,

It's like Annie was talking about,

I'll remember and then I'll forget and then I'll remember and I'll forget,

That's like my groundhog day spirituality where I learn that all the ways that I am externally trying to soothe myself and become okay and let's say that like the main core wounding that I've got too recently is to matter.

I keep trying to externally soothe these big internal matters that need my attention and my soothing and so there aren't outside things that are going to fix,

Solve or help my issues around aging and what I think it means.

It's a much more deep personal spiritual work that I have to do.

The Botox is fleeting,

Having other people tell me I'm pretty when I'm cranky actually really worries me a lot more because I know that every day is another day that my face is just starting to melt.

I just turned 40 and I'm so grateful that I know like these are smile lines.

I've smiled in my life and I'm so mad at them.

So if you have not listened to our podcast before,

What we do is we each share our experience of what we're going through on a specific topic and then we each share the tools that we're using.

So we're sharing right now just about our experiences with this topic.

And there's so many great comments happening.

So at the end we'll address some of them because we love that you guys are here.

Thank God Katie is letting us know that Botox is spiritual but I also appreciate that someone was saying that Americans are too focused on aging and that we need to live life and I fully agree and I thank you for the perspective and please keep coming and telling me because I just forget every single moment.

I love this topic.

I really,

Yeah,

We're like these constantly evolving versions of ourselves externally but also internally.

And so this,

When I first started thinking about this topic I was really stuck because it was like wrapped up in vanity and self-centered fear and then I was like well I'm bad because I'm da da da and I'm vain and if I don't want to change then there's something wrong with me.

And then I get stuck in that part of you know how society values people based on youth,

Not always but often.

And then I started getting a little bit of ease around this and I was like oh there is that part of it.

And this is,

I'm actually in a life transition period.

I'm 43.

It is very real that the thing,

The body I have been in for decades is going through changes and so to like feel this sense of change and maybe even grief or discomfort or joy,

Whatever might come up,

Like all that is really normal and reasonable and I was kind of stuck in this punitive thing where I'm like I'm bad if I don't,

If I'm upset about aging.

And so I've just been thinking about it in that sense of like this is a huge life change.

Like if someone moves or if they have a baby or if they get a new job everyone's like oh change is stressful and this is a change you know and it's like a really big change.

So another part of it is a lot of,

If you all have listened to our podcast for a while,

A lot of my life was spent in like fragmented pieces of myself so like my heart was separate from my head,

Was separate from my body,

Like I just had these little compartments for everything and they feel as though there's this cohesion that's been happening in the last,

It's been going on for about a decade but it just continues to grow the more love and energy I put into like the spiritual path and as that happens I have more confidence in living inside my body and embodying myself and like having people see me on the street.

Like I used to feel so,

Like being seen on the street I'd feel like naked kind of,

I mean emotionally and I don't,

I have this sense of like self and the same with like my sense of my sexuality of like embodying who I am as a sexual person and then I'm like but it's all changing and going away now that I like finally got the ship on this course and I know how to steer it and like I got my little captain hat,

All of a sudden they're like you're going to drive a totally new boat.

So get ready.

So this is just kind of how I've been thinking about it is there's a lot of thoughts going on.

I also,

It's humbling,

I had hip surgery this year which took a lot of my juice.

I didn't think it would,

I just assumed I'm going to be fine and it took a lot of energy out of me and I just,

All of these things I guess are humbling of like oh this too is me,

This too is my journey.

So I have some tools that I've been thinking about that I am both using and also that I'm sharing with you all as an accountability of I will use and I just want to give a shout out that I love Botox and I also love like cosmetic procedures and whatnot and I am the hugest fan of people doing whatever they want to their bodies in whatever way that they want as long as it makes them feel happy and good.

And I've definitely used all those things before and I have zero qualms except for the amount that it costs.

But for me personally,

I don't feel any conflict in my heart between a meditation practice and getting Botox.

So that's just my personal thoughts on it.

I feel like it's kind of a celebration.

One of my friends calls it aging gracefully however you want and I was like yeah like that.

We do whatever we want.

And I find that as I get older I get more confident and more graceful.

So now we have some tools.

Ms.

Lindsey Poney,

What are your tools that you are working on right now as you navigate the process of aging?

The main things for me is to remember that I am aging and that it is my natural right to age and that my truest intention is that I want to age alongside myself.

And again my groundhog spirituality so what I've learned and forgotten and need to relearn again is that my old beliefs and desire and wanting and wishing and really believing that anything outside of me whether it be filler or whatever Botox whatever it is is going to fix and solve and soothe my internal everything.

And I have been applying this to everything in my life.

It's this constant theme.

Again I keep forgetting it and that's why I remind myself that it's my groundhog spirituality that I need to remember and I forget so I like have to sprinkle breadcrumbs and by breadcrumbs I basically mean that I have to write about this every day in my journal and repeat it over and over again.

All anything is not going to soothe me internally like I need.

I'll get a quick hit.

I'll be pretty happy when I look in the mirror and the wrinkles are gone for the three months or whatever but that deep soul searching and need for soothing comes within me and it has to be from me and I have to show up on a daily basis and really get intimate and learn about myself and so how to show up truly to the discontentment of aging which I put acceptance.

How do I find acceptance within this life the life that we are born we have a life we grow old if we're lucky and then we die and then to build a culture so so much of why I'm terrified and petrified of aging is because it's like she can't get a wrinkle you know all of the things that are put on top of us that as soon as we age you know we're worthless and I like to look at other countries and how they take care of their elderly and how their elderly are respected and I'm going to build that culture within myself and for myself and so I'm going to let myself know along the way that I am here to age alongside myself that's what I tell myself all the time so instead of me being oh no you can't you know I'm all rigid and I'm just like so stressed out and I can just feel my whole face and ever my whole body tensing up then I remember that there is peace and ease and relaxation for myself available for me to go if I sit here and get intimate and quiet and breathe with myself and think about what my intentions are and what I want for myself moving forward so building this my own personal culture of what it means for me to age and what that looks like you know I want to be mobile so am I going to do my stretching I want to be able to move and do activities am I going to keep up a daily or weekly whatever it is for me working out doing something healthfully for my body how do I eat what am I putting inside of me what are my beliefs what type of media am I consuming because if it's people on Instagram I'm sorry but I can't I left there a while ago I miss you all very much I really hope that you I hope that something's going on good over there the clarity and peace for me is to catch myself before I've gone on for another 20 years attempting to fix solve and soothe my banjal spiritual life with Botox it's going to take more than that this takes way more now for the practical tools because that's just me I have to do a lot of talking to myself about why when and how for me to get into action about like taking care of myself figuring out the tools that I can use and apply so it's very personal but here are some that I think can work one of the things that I love is I love Buddhism and they have what is called the five remembrances five remembrances are the truth of the world and of being alive which of course causes suffering and once you practice with Buddhism you realize there's an end to suffering so I highly recommend looking into Buddhism if that sounds like something it really helps me there's so much on insight timer for that and the five remembrances just a few of them is I am of the nature to grow old there is no way to escape growing old I am of the nature to have ill health there is no way to escape ill health I am of the nature to die there is no way to escape death all that is dear to me and everyone I love are the nature to change and it goes on and it's actually even though it's like boom boom boom it is and once you repeat them and say it over more after I got my vaccination and I was so sick and I like did not know what was going to happen it came into my head oh I am of the nature to have ill health these things that come in and the answers are there for you while you practice which is why we practice these type of things another thing I love so much is it was really hard for me to start and I know how much is there for me when I do it is mirror work and my first mirror work started with looking into my eyes and learning how to tell myself that I love myself and so along the same lines of that mirror work for aging is looking deep into your eyes and having that moment where you sit there and seeing what happens and then bringing in whether it's like the five remembrances but what I say all the time is I have to touch myself because I feel like I just might freaking fall over I really need the support when I sit there with myself and really deep intimate moments and gaze into my eyes and I say I love you and I'm going to love you no matter what you look like what happens all the way through this is unconditional love I am here for you I will be with you and then I sit there and I let that happen and I look into my eyes and every time so much happens that is in a space that is not of language it's something more so I highly recommend any type of mirror work that you can do even just becoming willing to look at yourself like that really important and then for the final things that they do in other cultures is they have death meditations and corpse meditations and it's really cool in a different country where they go and they're like burning corpses outside and you can go there I get dark and weird with it but some of the simple ones imagining that you were at your funeral and what that would be like because we all no matter how much denial or delusion that we're in so that we can go about a daily life we are going to pass away at some point to really take the time I'm sure on insight meditation someone goes through it perfectly you could do a corpse or death meditation it really helps bring into focus the preciousness of this moment and kind of takes away these very ego self-centered things of how I look like right now which also I just want to bring in a lot of self-compassion because we can easily say this is vanity and ego and what this means but on a much deeper level like I to matter on a core of my being it's bigger than what I look like and these are just some of the ways that I think that if I can present well enough then I can be lovable or matter that's again when I look deep into the mirror and I say no matter who or how you are I love you and I'm going to be here with you I'm not going to let you go I'm going to stay with you and I love you for myself so those are my tools I love that I love what you shared when you were doing an example of your mirror work I could just say feel it inside of me and I like what you said at the end about how there's it's not just about vanity and ego and it is so complicated and originally we were going to do this as a three-part series because it's so big there's so many aspects to it but it's like there is this part of how do I want to present to the world and there's this part of that that's beautiful and fun and it's this creative expression and it's so joyful and then there's also like the parts that are my ego and that are my fear of not being enough and not you know if I do look a certain way then I have value and like getting it from the outside world so I just want to say that we're sharing simple tools and really shortened versions of our experience with this but it's such a complex topic so maybe it would be fun to journal about this afterwards my I have a couple tools that I want to share about what I'm using to give myself some grace and ease around this very humbling process of aging and they are there's some that are really similar to ponies and a lot of this for me is just taking the actions because I think think think think think think but I don't sometimes do the little simple step and then when I do the step it's like I get the freedom so this is the one that I'm sharing that I want accountability with pony and with you all and if you haven't met us before Lindsay's middle name is pony so we call her Lindsay and pony or Lindsay pony so just thanks so much just an aside I do want to confuse people this one is makes me kind of how pony was saying that mirror work can be uncomfortable this makes me feel uncomfortable is writing a letter to my younger self oh and forgiving her for not appreciating the human form she had in those younger years like I was really super critical and harsh about my body my appearance my what that meant as far as my value and looking back I'm like gosh what an unforgiving environment to live in you know so I didn't know how to embody my self as a sexual person or like value myself and so I just used not in a I relied on the people around me to provide those things and as I've started to resource some of those things inside me I'm like wow what an opportunity that I could have had and so if I write this letter to this younger version of myself in her late teens her 20s even into her 30s just acknowledging that not like oh it should have been different or you would things would be better if it had been different but just writing the letter of like like pony was saying I love you and gosh you weren't very nice to yourself but I'll say it nice in the letter and so then that part is then the mirror work comes into it and it's my spiritual one of the spiritual mentors that I work with recently suggested that I do some mirror work and I was like boo no one wants to everyone says no it's so uncomfortable that's how you know it's good for you it makes me want to make fun of myself like all this stuff comes up and so I'm gonna do it I'm gonna write this letter and I'm gonna read it to myself my me self now and also all the versions of me that I've been so that's one tool is my writing a letter to myself and just like being loving and forgiving and also just like kind of an amends to myself like hey this um I'm not gonna treat you like that anymore and seeing that like as I age and as this changes there's actually real value and beauty in that and I get to change how I see it as that those shifts happen and then the my other tool is to like practice loving and accepting and appreciating my a lot of this for me is like tied up with myself as a sexual person too and I don't mean that in a weird or uncomfortable way but just in like a owning the entirety of my self way and so how can I like appreciate all of these things as they are right now like how I look how I behave how I feel and so affirmations which I've also been completely avoiding the hands down and so a way that I can bring that into my life is have a printed out sheet of ones or I can write them out and I can keep them on my bedside so when I roll over that's the first thing I see so I do a spiritual practice in the morning but there's about 30 minutes of me kind of laying in bed so I can look at that first and then practicing acceptance right in my prayer meditation practice when I start going through my thinking oh my gosh this isn't good enough I'm not gonna be I'm not gonna be happy when this is gone I'm not gonna be happy when I don't look like X I'm not even happy when I look like X now and just saying oh accepting that thought oh I have that thought oh yeah I have that thought a lot okay all right and then redirecting okay what's another thought I could have I really love and accept myself for how I am right now and I will like Pony was saying I will unconditionally I love that you said that it's totally I'm gonna use that I will unconditionally love and accept myself as I am right whatever because it's conditional otherwise when you look this good if you never I don't have hip surgery as long as I don't have ill health yeah only ourselves can give ourselves truly unconditional love but we have to practice and learn how to do that and spot all the ways that we have conditions on ourselves yeah so all these little tools I guess are just strategies to let the conditions go right we're just experimenting we're just playing around with different ways to do it we'd love to hear the ways that you play around with it we are so excited that all of you joined us it means so much to us this is a really special to like see your comments I love it so much I've definitely been reading them and there's so much good stuff it is within the comments here should I should I scroll so you can read some of them well when you scroll like that I couldn't read anything it was so fast we need the readers soon enough we do and I will love and accept myself when my eyes start to fade even more as they will because I am of the nature to grow old I really love that someone in the comments was talking about how they have daughters you know and even though they use what do we call this Botox and fillers I wanted to put a nice little bow on to some other names so I could have more delusion around what it is that we're doing coming back to do these things doesn't mean this is how I'm going to get love love from others love for myself it's not how I'm going to matter underneath all of that I I I think it's true how to keep just tugging at the strings or like getting I'm just not willing to give it up yet either you know like when will that happen I don't know but every year I try and pretend like it's the year so one year I know and then he's always like oh my girlfriends like it's fine it's great we're doing it we're doing it forever while we can well luckily I won't be able to one day because I'm via vagabonds I'm gonna ride my bicycle around and I'm gonna drop this whole entire culture another end of the spectrum why not extremism right look our time's almost up I'm hopeful that you all can love yourself so much the way I'm trying to learn about myself beautiful and you're the exact right age every age along the way is exactly right yeah thank you so much for coming it means the world to us it really does we need we need you we need ourselves we need that to be doing this together also it says for us that if you wanted to donate that would be great and we're supposed to talk about that we also want you to know that on insight timer obviously we're here you can come and follow us or comment that helps us on that type of platform we're not allowed to talk about other platforms but you can imagine that we would be there if they existed in any case this is awesome and I we're gonna do it again we like we're gonna do this again once a month for sure yay so we're looking forward to it the last time we recorded together in person we had to wear masks so this is like this is so dangerous what we're doing no it's not it's amazing so thank you all so much we love you bye

Reviews

Delightful wise and o so human! Love what you share. 🙏🥰

You both are always so beautifully open and vulnerable in sharing how you feel about yourselves with each topic and sharing your personal tools so that we can learn and grow. Thank you, I am so grateful for both of you💜🌷💜🌷.