The cultural context for our Western way of dealing (or not dealing) with aging parents was expressed in a nutshell by the comment “The difficult part was moving a person to a care facility when all they want to do is go home.” I remember when I myself was in a rehab hospital for three months, and from beginning to end that is all I wanted, to go home (never mind that for most of my time there I was in absolutely no condition to be at home, nor could anyone have taken care of me there).

We all want to go home and be home, wherever that is, and historically it is our parents who first bring us into the world and make a home for us there.  We as adult children of our aging or dying parents want to be home too as much as they do, and maybe the difficult lesson from the Buddhist tradition to be had from this deep desire to be home is that in the end the only true home is this present moment, wherever we happen to be.  Any other home is one that we  will eventually lose.

Last post I suggested a modification of the Metta prayer (“In caring for my parents, may I be filled with loving kindness.”).  Here I would like to begin speaking about a different kind of practice, one inspired by the tonglun or “sending and receiving” compassion practice of Tibetan Buddhism.

If we are caring for aging parents, this practice begins by looking in the mirror.  We see the adult that we are, but if we look more closely we can also see the child we once were, in all the stages of our life.  That is what our parent sees; they see the child in us, even though we are now the adult that has to now take care of the aging parent as though they were the child—a difficult and complex role reversal.

Keep looking in the mirror; the child we once were is still there, and that child is now grieving for the strong parent that once protected us and now needs our protection.  Where is Mom or Dad now, that child is asking? And how is that child feeling?

Next post I will talk about how to practice “sending and receiving” meditation as an offering of compassion to the child who is still within us, and who needs our care inwardly as much as our aging parent needs our care outwardly.

I look forward as always to your comments!

I have a thumbnail summary of Buddhism that I have mentioned here before and that goes like this: “Everything is connected, nothing lasts, and we are not alone.”  So the losses of our friends and loved ones tells us, like nothing else can, that “nothing lasts”—especially those things that we most care about.  This is the first big lesson of Buddhism and whether you are a Buddhist or not, the lesson comes home as we age.

So what do I mean when I say, especially to those grieving or lonely, “We are not alone?”

I certainly do not mean that Buddhism teaches we can escape loneliness.  Loneliness is part of the human condition, and even adepts and realized teachers of Buddhism can suffer from it—though they may understand and accept it better.  Even the Buddha grieved for lost family and companions, I’m sure.  My own teacher certainly did.  No, I am distinguishing between “loneliness” and “aloneness.”

We may feel grief and loneliness, but we are actually never alone.  Yes, I am Lew, and I am the only one who is this Lew.  My life story and memories and losses are unique.  Nobody else feels them as I do.  But in that discreteness is also connection.  We are all discrete, but we are also joined—both are so. We are unique individuals, but each of us has the same fundamental nature—Buddha nature.  Touching that fundamental nature—for example in meditation—is paradoxically the way we connect with everyone and everything.    I like to say that when we sit we resume our status as a universal human being.

“Yes, I can feel lonely, but we all experience our humanness  in the same way.  We are all in this together.”  From this realization can come an abiding joy.  How wonderful that I and everything are here.  What a miracle!

So in that sense “everything is connected” and “we are not alone” are two ways of describing the same condition.  Touching that connection means that our all-too-human loneliness has some context.  We grieve for those we have lost, but we rejoice in the connections which have, have always had, and will always have.

We are not alone.

We are also so fragile emotionally.  We are complex beings, with complex needs—most importantly, the need to love and be loved, and the need not to be alone.  It is easy for us to be wounded emotionally, and some of those wounds never fully heal.  And yet we abide, as William Faulkner liked to say.  We are fragile but we abide.

We all seem to have some kind of equipment, some neural circuit or switch, that keeps us from recognizing how fragile we really are.  This switch is called “denial,” and recent research has discerned that it really is a neural circuit, or structure in the brain that censors or blocks painful memories.  Denial actually makes painful memory neurologically inaccessible.  As a psychiatrist friend of mine likes to say, “Never underestimate the power of denial.”

Denial is a kind of gift, too.  Otherwise the level of pain that human beings sometimes have to endure would be truly unbearable and we could not continue to be.

I like to think of meditation practice as an intentional willingness to reach past the blocks of denial, and to open everything up—to face the actual suffering of ourselves and others.  This was Siddhartha Gautama’s first insight and path; everything suffers, he saw that, and he wanted to actually face it and understand it.

Whether or not we are meditators, whether or not we are Buddhists, the process of aging does this too.  When we are children or teenagers especially, the denial circuit blocking the fact how fragile we are seems at its strongest.  That is one reason young men can be trained to be soldiers.  They’re able to block out what it is they have to do.  As we get older, and we have a lifetime of experience to hold and reflect on, denial becomes more difficult to sustain; the truth of our individual and common fragility becomes more evident.

And then there is the last truth, the final fragility, which we deny as long as we can, but eventually cannot—the truth of our inevitable end.

As with most things, fragility can be seen two ways—either as a burden, or as a gift.  It is actually both.  Fragility causes fear, but fragile things are also beautiful and precious, precisely because they are fragile and may not last.  Fragility can open us to the treasure of mutual care and universal compassion.

We are all so fragile.

I think the notion that we are “supposed” to be calm is a common misunderstanding, and a cause for discouragement, among meditators.  “I’ve been meditating for X years, and I still can’t calm my mind!”  This may be a particular problem for those of us who are older, because we know, in the way the young can’t, that “the things that happened to happen” can’t ever un-happen.  Our irrevocable losses pile up, year after year.  It is hard to be calm in the face of those kinds of losses.

Actually, there are three stages, or levels, to mindful awareness. In the first level, we become aware of how busy and distracted our mind is.  In the second level, through attention and concentration we are able to calm our mind and actually enjoy that calm as a fruit of meditation.  In the third level, the distraction of the third level seems to come back, but with even more force.  The disturbances of the third level are actually more real, and more difficult to face because they are so deeply true.

However, there is actually a deep calm in the foundation stones of the third level, one that we may not realize if we just look at the superficial activity of our thinking.  Actually, the disturbance we experience as we face our deep and universal problems (like growing old and losing what we love) is only there because of deep acceptance and the power of our meditation effort.  The deep acceptance invites those deep problems in, and holds and contains them.  It gives us the strength to face them.

It is like the difference between the misbehavior of a stranger, and the misbehavior of our child.  The misbehavior of a stranger is like the first level.  It irrirates us: Why are they like that? The misbehavior of our child is like the third level.  At first it seems to be even more disturbing.  “I raised you and loved you and still you are like that!”  But actually, our attitude is held and contained by our love.  Whatever our children do, we will never abandon them.

According to my teacher, deep meditation practice evolves from the third level.  So here’s to being real!  (Imaginary cup raised in tribute).

There are three parts to transforming mindfulness:  clarity, insight, and re-centering.

Clarity means to know what is actually going on.  In practice it means to drill down beneath the superficial thought that our mindfulness has made us aware of (such as the thought, “I guess I’ll never go to Africa…”) to the underlying emotion—in this case, probably a queasy and anxious sadness.  Feel that feeling, don’t avert from it.  It is who you actually are right now.  To feel the feeling is the first step in liberating and resolving it.  When you actually feel the feeling, you are not owned by the feeling any longer; instead, you are the owner, the boss of the feeling.

Insight means to understand where the deep feeling comes from, and why we are feeling it.  That feeling of sadness is actually not some problem requiring a solution; it is the basic human condition.  From the moment we are born we and everything we love are fleeting and fragile.  That is our only existence, there is no other.  You are not the only one who feels this; everyone feels this (or would feel this if they were actually tuned in to their deep feeling).

Re-centering means to set aside our unpleasant feeling, and return to something more solid.  It could be a thought: “But right now I am alive!”  It could be a deep breath, which proves (in case you doubted it) that you indeed are alive.  It could be a thought of gratitude; “I’m so happy I have a new grandchild.”

Mindfulness, clarity, Insight, Re-centering.  This is the basic transforming meditation of being awake.

Mindfulness, in common parlance, is “noticing what is going on,” particularly about an internal mental, emotional or physical state.  It is basic awareness, or wakefulness, as opposed to unconscious, or automatic, or (as we would say in Buddhism) karmic activity.  It is a higher order awareness than our ordinary sensory perceptions; it seems to be a function of our higher, or more developed  faculty of awareness.

“Aging” thoughts or feelings are a common experience of those of us who are growing older, and they typically sneak up on us when we are trying to do something we used to be able to do when we were younger, like touch our toes or remember a recipe.  They often (though not always) have a somewhat unpleasant emotional tone of regret or frustration.  An anxiety-ridden aging thought can occur around momentary memory lapses; this is a private fear that we often joke about with our friends.

Here are some common verbalizations of aging thoughts (you can fill in the blanks from your own experience):

“I guess I’m getting too old to…”

“I used to be able to…”

“I wish I could still…”

“I guess I’ll never…”

All these thoughts have two qualities in common: comparison and regret.  So the first mission of Mindfulness of Aging is to bring these underlying processes into view.  So when you find yourself saying “I used to be able to…” you can note to yourself, “I’m comparing again.”  When you notice yourself thinking “I guess I’ll never…” you can note to yourself, “Another regret.”

Comparison and regret: two patterns that take us away from our present situation, and that cause us unnecessary suffering.

More on Mindfulness of Aging in the next post!

Basically it refers that moment in your life when your perspective widens to embrace the big picture, and to ask the big questions.  Why am I here? Why is anything here? What is life all about? Why is there evil in the world? Why do people suffer? Is it possible to change the world? And then follows the earthshaking realization that it might be possible to find answers. And we begin our spiritual search, which in Buddhism is called bodhicitta in the Zen tradition is termed “searching for the Ox.” Sometimes there are glimpses of bodhicitta early in life, like the 5 year old daughter of a friend of mine who ran into the kitchen and said to her mother, “If God made everything, who made God?”  Before my friend could figure out what to say, her daughter had skipped out of the room, the question forgotten.  Young children can be momentarily wise, but they don’t have much of an attention span.

More commonly, these questions first arise in mid to late adolescence, when a teenager is first confronting the impending challenge of adulthood, and seeing the world with adult eyes for the first time. Teenagers have a longer attention span than 5 year olds, and often for a time these questions haunt them with great intensity, but more often than not the questions fade as college and then career come to the fore. In midlife, the questions can return, and the bodhicitta that arises when we realize that we are growing old is a main subject of this blog. It is when the first losses of middle age-a divorce, a lost career, the death of a friend or parent-that the bodhicitta emerges with particular and poignant power.  Not for the first time, but with unusual power, we realize that it is all so precious, this life, and it is all beginning to slip away.

This is what the Buddhist path is built for, to meet this moment.  “You are not alone,” says the Buddhist path.  “Countless others have stood where you now stand, countless others have transformed themselves through inner work, meditation and insight.” Over the last fifty years, the traditional practices and lineages of Buddhism have flooded into the West. I was fortunate to meet my teacher, Shunryu Suzuki, when I was quite young-in my early twenties.  I spent the next fifteen years engaged in the rigors of traditional Zen training-a regimen designed for young men. Such rigors are not well suited to middle or old age. 

There will, I hope, always be young people who open early to the thought of enlightenment and are willing to undertake the traditional trainings.  But my guess is that in our world midlife will be equally common as a time for bodhicitta to appear. So I think the special challenge as the West absorbs and rethinks the Buddhist tradition in the light of today’s world, is how to adapt and reformulate the transformational practices originally designed for young bodies and minds for a time of more maturity. So my blog title “Aging as a Spiritual Practice” could be also be “The Spiritual Practices of Aging.”  I will be exploring this topic in depth in many future blog posts.  As Larry King likes to say, “Don’t go away.  We’ll be right back.”

Meditation is another yoga. The word itself is related to the English word “yoke” and it means to join, or become one with. In a spiritual sense it means to become one with the divine. I think that aging itself is a kind of yoga, the “Yoga of Aging,” if you will. The second half of life is the natural time for a human being to turn his/her attention to larger issues of meaning and spirituality. It is when we finally realize in our own body that this adventure of life will end, and that we will return to the divine-or at least go somewhere not here.

Of course many people in their 50s and older go to yoga class for the physical and energetic benefits of what can be had there. But there is a deeper yoga that you don’t have to pay for, and that is the yoga of time passing, of the succession of birthdays that begin to have a different meaning than before.

In the legend of Gautama the Buddha’s life story, there came a time when, as a teenager, he went forth from the protected environs of the palace where he grew up, to see what kind of world lay beyond its gates. The first thing he saw was an old man. It says in the traditional story that he had never seen such a person before, and was shocked. Of course, in real life we see old people, such as our grandparents, from an early age. But when do we actually see them? That moment, which often occurs while we are looking in the mirror, is the beginning of the Yoga of Aging. I’ll be writing more about this inner Yoga in future posts.

For those interested in yoga as we familiarly describe, it the Yoga Journal is the classic magazine on the topic.

This astonishing statement, made by a scientist familiar with all the studies done about happiness, is well worth pondering as it relates to aging—an “objective life circumstance” if there ever was one. It is also helpful in reflecting on whether Buddhism has, or is, a theory of happiness. More on this in a moment.

But first I might as well take this opportunity to explain that I really have two purposes in doing this blog. One is to explore—for myself and others in a way that is actually helpful and useful to people—the experience of aging and its connection to the spiritual aspect of our life. The other is to reflect on my own long study of the Buddhist tradition and my involvement in the spread of Buddhist thinking in the West over the last century and ask the question: Well, is any of this Buddhist stuff actually useful when it comes to the actual experience of growing older?

Most of my Buddhist friends would say, Yes, indeed! I would tend to agree in principle, but I’m not sure how close we are to making the connection between all the lovely Buddhist practices and teachings we have learned and the actual challenges of growing older in the 21^st century—take shrinking 104(k)s for example. I think the challenge of aging will prove to be a good test for Buddhism’s usefulness, and I’m as I go deeper into this project I’m willing to be surprised in both directions.

So back to happiness. The statement that happiness has little to do with one’s outward life circumstances certainly strikes me as a Buddhist kind of observation. The Buddha taught that it is only through transforming one’s inner, rather than outer, circumstances, can true contentment be found. Buddhism has taken a lot of flack through the ages and currently for its weakness in actually dealing with the social and economic causes of suffering, and I think much of that criticism is justified. But when a respected expert in scientific happiness research makes the same claim, we have to look more closely.

I’ll have a lot more to say about happiness, Myers’ book, and the emerging research on “Happiness studies” in future blogs.

Certainly part of the reason is that these aspects of aging are the most difficult to cope with, and are the most trying and frightening. But if my 50 and 60 ;something friends are any indication, awareness of aging starts when most of us are still quite healthy—indeed, at the top of our game, the height of our powers. When we are feeling strong like that, intimations of aging strike us when we realize, “Yes, life is good, but I’m now realizing that it won’t last.” Nothing lasts—this could be a colloquial translation of the Buddha’s most fundamental teaching: All conditioned existence is marked with anicca, transiency, impermanence. But before we mourn too quickly about this, we must also understand that this fact is precisely what makes life so beautiful. A plastic flower, however well crafted, lacks some essential quality of flowerness. Why? Because real flowers begin to fade at the height of their beauty and bloom; plastic flowers just sit there, day after day, just the same. There is a teaching embedded in this easily overlooked fact. We are drawn to the real flower because it is like each one of us—we are beautiful, and we are not going to last.

One of my favorite scenes from literature is the moment in Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek when Zorba—the exemplar of a life passionately lived—is dying. On his last day he climbs out of bed, crawls to the window, pulls himself up, and looks out for the last time at this wonderful world, with all its sunrises and sunsets, suffering and pain, to appreciate it one last time. This is how Zorba lived every day—with full appreciation of the whole of it, the “full catastrophe” as he termed it. The notions of aging, of decline, of the slow sunset of our time on this earth, are just ideas, really.

What is real is that we are here—now, today, in whatever situation we find ourselves. As my teacher used to say, “That you are here right now is the ultimate fact.” Yes, the Buddha was right; life and all its treasures doesn’t last. But that fact can also encourage us to appreciate the living flower, wilting at the very moment it explodes into full bloom. If we all appreciated each other this way every day there would, I think, be a good deal less suffering and conflict in the world. May it be so.