Posted in Aging and Meditation, Aging and Spirituality on Jul 18th, 2009
The aging brain can learn and grow. This new conventional wisdom—based on the latest neurophysiological research—replaces the old conventional wisdom (which was that the brain has only a fixed number a cells set at birth and that older people cannot learn with the flexibility of younger people). So much for conventional wisdom of any kind. [...]
Posted in Aging and Buddhism, Aging and Meditation, Aging and Spirituality, Baby Boomers and Aging, Death and Dying on Jun 27th, 2009
We are all so fragile. We are, first of all, so fragile physically. When we are born, we can’t even feed ourselves or survive without continuous attention. And throughout our lives there are so many things that can go wrong, but mostly do not. It is actually amazing that the incredible intricacy of body and [...]
Posted in Aging and Buddhism, Aging and Meditation, Aging and Spirituality, Baby Boomers and Aging on Jun 20th, 2009
I often say, paraphrasing my own teacher, that the purpose of Buddhist meditation is not to be calm, but to be real. Being real doesn’t exclude being calm, if that is what is happening. But being real is not some particular state of mind; it is the mind in accord with the actuality of things—“real [...]
Posted in Aging and Buddhism, Aging and Meditation, Aging and Spirituality on Jun 10th, 2009
So what do we do with our aging thoughts? How can we transform them from exercises in comparison and regret into more wholesome insights that nourish us? (If you are tuning in to this blog for the first time, read the last post, “Mindfulness of Aging part I”.) There are three parts to transforming mindfulness: [...]
Posted in Aging and Buddhism, Aging and Meditation, Aging and Spirituality on May 28th, 2009
In this post I’d like to explore the practice of “Mindfulness of Aging.” Mindfulness is one of the basic practices in Buddhism, but the precise reasons why it is effective (particularly in chronic pain management) are not yet well understood. Mindfulness is sometimes characterized in Buddhist texts as “bare noting,” and is often coupled with [...]
Posted in Aging and Meditation, Aging and Spirituality on May 17th, 2009
A woman in her fifties recently told me about a dream she had had. In the dream she was at a party and saw a tall, attractive man in his early thirties standing alone with a drink in his hand. The woman went over to talk to the man; in the dream she was young [...]
Posted in Aging and Spirituality, Baby Boomers and Aging, Death and Dying on Apr 17th, 2009
In my experience as a Buddhist teacher and spiritual guide, for many people the first time the deep truth of aging hits is when our parents become ill and die. This tends to happen when people are in their 40s, when they themselves still feel young, still remember college and their first jobs, still are [...]
Posted in Aging and Spirituality, spiritual practice on Mar 13th, 2009
I’ve put the phrase “Spiritual Practice” in my blog title, but it may not be clear to many readers what that means. A spiritual practice is something you do with the body, with speech or with thought that evokes or develops the spiritual in us. The most common spiritual practice in the West is prayer. [...]
Posted in Aging and Spirituality, Gratitude on Mar 3rd, 2009
Gratitude is this moment. Or as my Buddhist teacher Shunyu Suzuki liked to say, “That you are here is the ultimate fact.” But wait. What do we mean, Gratitude is this moment? We might more naturally want to say something like, “Gratitude is to appreciate this moment.” But somehow when I started writing this post, [...]
Posted in Aging and Spirituality, Baby Boomers and Aging on Feb 25th, 2009
Flexibility is an important key to healthy aging. A recent 77 year old reader recently commented about growing older, “The first thing that comes to mind is that barriers began to weaken and crumble. I am willing to think in new directions, to be open to new ideas, to be less defensive about what I [...]
