Posted in Aging and Buddhism, Aging and Meditation, Aging Parents, Baby Boomers and Aging on Sep 5th, 2009
The last post on aging parents garnered more comments than any other in the history of this blog, so clearly this is a topic that touches many people. The experiences people have range from the touching and poignant (“Do you know who I am, Mom?” “Yes, you’re my baby”) to the heartbreaking (the father whose [...]
Posted in Baby Boomers and Aging, Worry on Jul 7th, 2009
“There is nothing so relaxed as the shoulders of a very wealthy person when the talk turns to money.” Jon Carroll, columnist for the San Francisco chronicle, once said this, and he is probably mostly right. For the rest of us—and even for the wealthy, actually–money is an issue and cause for anxiety. For those [...]
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 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, 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 [...]
Posted in Aging and Buddhism, Baby Boomers and Aging on Feb 17th, 2009
When I was in college I had a class with the eminent psychoanalyst Erik Erikson . He was the kind of inspirational teacher that changes a young person’s life, and his class on The Eight Stages of Man (first outlined in his classic text Childhood and Society) was legendary. He saw the course of a [...]
Posted in Aging and Buddhism, Baby Boomers and Aging on Feb 5th, 2009
The baby boomer generation has been criticized for making every stage of life—whether it be adolescence, college, child-rearing, and now their aging—into a self-referential adventure of transformation and improvement. From that point of view the notion of “Aging as a Spiritual Practice” could be seen as just the latest of these baby boomer projects: “We’re [...]
