by Mark Coleman
Next, become aware of all the visual impressions of light, form, color, and texture. If your eyes are shut, notice the subtle dance of light behind the eyelids. If they are open, be aware of the dizzying array of movements, shapes, and colors. Also notice the transitory quality of smells and tastes, so that eventually you become aware of all five senses forever in motion.
Now shift your attention to the domain of your heart and mind. Be aware as emotions come, perhaps triggered by overheard conversations, smells, or memories. Be present to the fleeting nature of your emotions as they pulse like waves in the body. Similarly, notice the rapidly changing canvas of the mind. See how quickly and incessantly thoughts, images, ideas, views, memories, and plans come and go, flickering like a never-ending stroboscope.
Stay present, noticing how nothing stays the same for more than a few moments before something else pulls your attention. For ten to twenty minutes, abide in this clear awareness, remaining still in the center of this hurricane of activity. Notice what happens as you open to the ever-changing nature of life.
If your eyes are closed, open them slowly. See how the inner experience of change is mirrored externally. Nothing stays the same for very long, and even what appears solid and enduring, like a building or a tree, is always changing. Our perception shifts with the time of day, the light, the wind, the people passing, and the birds alighting. Experience varies moment by moment. All things are in flux.
As you emerge from this meditation, see if you can maintain awareness of the transient nature of experience. See if this allows you to relate to things in life differently, with less holding on or resistance. When we fully understand in our bones that everything changes, it allows us to appreciate the pleasures of life, to hold them lightly, knowing they will pass. Similarly, it supports our becoming less reactive to pain, since we know that every experience, no matter how bad, will shift. In this way, we find peace amidst this restless sea of change.
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Chapter 5
Meeting Aging with Kind Awareness
The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.
— FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
For many years I have led wilderness backpacking retreats. Such excursions into nature bring so much joy and wonder. On one particular program, I led a strenuous ten-day backpack in the hot, dry desert in Navajo Country that included three men over seventy and one man, James, who was eighty-four years old. It was beautiful and inspiring to see these elders putting on a heavy backpack and hiking for miles every day in silence through the wild red rock canyons.
If that wasn’t arduous enough, after the course ended, James was heading to run in the New York Marathon. His physical capacity brought him great joy, and I was in awe of the way he lived life to the fullest. He kept himself in great shape and served as a role model for aging with grace and passion. This wasn’t so much about his physical prowess at such a grand age but how he moved with such embodied awareness and presence. Few people do what it takes to live as healthily and as attuned as he did. He put into action this quote from Betty Friedan: “Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”
How do you relate to your own aging process? One thing that is self-evident about our body is that, from birth to death, it’s always changing. This is of course obvious, but we are often willfully blind to the truth of change, especially when it comes to ourselves. We don’t see what we don’t want to see! This means we are often surprised and resistant to aging. But trying to hang on to our youth in an entropic universe causes problems! Everything inevitably deteriorates, yet it is still hard for us to grok this. As Mark Twain put it: “I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.”
Since we live in a culture where youth, looks, and external appearance are paramount, the reality of aging leads to tremendous stress, anxiety, self-hatred, and a host of disruptive behaviors. Our consumer culture preys on our vulnerability and our desire for acceptance, inclusion, and love. The beauty and cosmetic industries exploit that sensitivity to market a plethora of products and diets, all offering a promise of eternal youth. It is a race we can never win. Life is a game where nature always bats last.
How do we develop a wise relationship to aging? This takes a willingness to confront the truth and acknowledge what we see in the mirror. To accept our bodies as they are is wisdom, born out of facing what is true over and over through practice. Since this does not come easily, we need to do so with tenderness for the vulnerability inherent in being human. In this way we cultivate mindful awareness to meet this inescapable truth with a caring understanding.
There are many avenues to live our way into this truth. This extract from a poem by Carmelene Siani speaks beautifully about meeting the aging process with grace and acceptance:
Let me hope that while my body may fail in strength
my spirit will grow in wisdom
Let me see that being independent is not necessarily
an end all and be all
and that embracing interdependence
may be the greatest gift I can give those who love and care about me.
Let me look out the window and see not how few summers there are left to me
but how beautiful are the summers left to me.…
Let me look at my body and see beauty.…
Let me be able to lie in my last hour
and feel nothing but gratitude for it all.
Exactly as it is and exactly as it was
When I think of inspiring role models for aging, one person who comes to mind is James Keolker. He was eighty-five years old when he graduated from the mindfulness teacher training program I lead in San Francisco. He is a beautiful example of someone living with awareness and grace as he ages. Since graduating, he has dedicated himself to teaching seniors about mindfulness practice in Napa, California. James recently wrote to me of his work with people in the later stages of life: “One of the hallmarks of working with seniors, a group often marginalized, is their reliance upon the past. However, no singular practice seems as effective in teaching awareness of the present as meditation, breath by breath. They soon realize the past fades, and their fears of the future are quickly set aside with mindful breathing. The mind simply cannot be anywhere but present when fully concentrating on the breath. And in that the joys of the present moment are revealed.”
James and his elder students are living examples of what researchers have been discovering about how meditation helps fend off some of the corroding effects of aging, particularly in the brain. In a 2014 research study using fMRI scans, findings revealed that long-term meditators showed less atrophy in their gray matter, indicating that meditation appears to slow decline of the brain. Similar findings by Lutz and others have demonstrated that long-term meditators show less deterioration in the prefrontal cortex, the insula, and other key areas in the brain, suggesting that meditation practice could reduce age-associated structural and functional brain changes. This is good news if we want to find ways to stay cognitively sharp and clear into our twilight years. Earlier prevailing wisdom presumed the brain would simply continue to decline with age. These attention training practices reveal this isn’t so.
Aging isn’t just reserved for the elderly. We are all physically aging. For myself, I remember being surprised the first time I wore reading glasses. I thought my eyesight was fine, and I was proud that I was in my midforties and still did not need spectacles. When I finally realized I was kidding myself and that my eyes could do with some support, I felt like I could see again with the clarity of a child. Flowers, leaves, and wild grasses took on a new crystal clarity that made me fall in love again with the beauty of the earth.
Yet when I looked in the mirror, I got quite a shock. I saw way more wrinkles than I remembered. Not only was my hair significantly grayer than I realized, there was a lot less of it! The thinning on top was quite apparent now that I could see properly. Oh foolish vanities! How easily we trick ourselves and see just what we wan
t to see, believing the story we tell ourselves.
Fortunately, for wisdom’s sake, the body never lies. It is reality’s gentle reminder that life is finite. Wrinkles are like tree rings; the more lines, the less time we have left in this precious world. Hopefully, we can look at our face and see the lines as grooves of laughter woven into our skin, as creases of wisdom hard-won over the years. Regardless of how the lines got there, they are markers of age, providing a necessary reality check. The key question is how we relate to this truth. Does it lead us into depression and despair? Or does it inspire us to act, to live this life to the fullest, to not take anyone, anything, or any moment for granted? Such awareness can be a catalyst for a full and engaged life.
I have worked with several men in their midfifties who needed the wake-up call of a heart attack to help them realize that aging is real and that flagrant disregard for the body and its limits is harmful. The shock galvanized them to eat better, exercise regularly, and pay attention to their body. It even encouraged some to meditate! Sometimes the clarity that arises with awareness of impermanence is as simple as this. It is so important it could save your one wild and precious life!
When I teach, I encounter many students who have lost loved ones, their husband or their wife, their parents or their children. The shock of that loss woke them to the finite nature of life. They realized how limited time is, which galvanized them to reengage and enliven their remaining relationships and make the most of this fleeting time we have on earth. Similarly, I hear meditation practitioners report how mindfulness practice allowed them to turn to their loved ones, as their health declined, with greater surrender and acceptance. Joanie is one of them.
Joanie spoke to me about her husband, Ron, who was ten years her senior. At one point, he began acting differently — getting lost, not following through, not being responsible the way he usually was. She could no longer count on him, and she sought help from his physician, who diagnosed Ron with Alzheimer’s disease. Having to take charge and deal with Ron’s Alzheimer’s took Joanie out of her comfort zone. She had no experience with it, she couldn’t fix it or change it, and she didn’t know what was going to happen next. She felt a lot of uncertainty and questioned her ability to handle it.
Joanie used her mindfulness practice to help understand her own reactions and reactivity. She often lost patience with either Ron or herself, and sometimes she didn’t interact kindly, snapping at him or criticizing herself. To interrupt this pattern, she tried bringing awareness to it. When feeling tight sensations in her gut, which to her indicated irritation or fear, she tried not to act out those reactions, but she instead took several deep breaths while being aware of the sensations. As she did this, the feelings softened and shifted, and gradually she was able to feel compassion for both her husband and herself and engage with him in a more loving way.
Thanks to her mindfulness practice, Joanie’s eight-year journey shifted from a stressful situation to an adventure. It didn’t take the pain away from slowly losing her husband to Alzheimer’s, but her growing awareness taught her how to find peace with the process, to not make it worse with her reactivity. Over time, she learned to love more deeply and trust life. Ron passed away two years ago and left her the gift of knowing that she has the courage and the tools to skillfully meet whatever life brings with more acceptance and openheartedness.
• PRACTICE •
Embracing Aging with Kind Awareness
I once had a friend who had a twenty-times magnification mirror in her bathroom. I used to tease her that, looking through that lens, of course she would find blemishes and things to worry about on her face. I think anyone would. It makes normal skin pores look like craters! For this meditation, a regular mirror is fine, though using my friend’s mirror would certainly make this contemplation more interesting.
Take some time to sit or stand in front of a mirror and study your face. Study all the contours, lines, wrinkles, blemishes, spots, or other signs of aging. Notice what happens when you do this. Without judgment or condemnation, try to let in the reality of what you observe. Without trying to change it, notice any reactivity — whether to this exercise or to what you see in the mirror that you may disapprove of.
Be sure to do this level of scrutiny with kindness and compassion. Can you appreciate your face and body just as it is, noticing all the ways you have changed through the years? Can you access tenderness for yourself and the vulnerability you feel about aging? Notice if you are able to feel affection, warmth, or love for who you are and how you have turned out in this moment. If that is not possible, can you also hold that experience with care?
Over time, mindfulness practice can help us develop equanimity, the ability to radically accept the way things are. To support that, reflect on the phrases “Things are as they are,” “Life is as it is,” and “The nature of my body is to change and age.” By turning your attention in this way, you plant seeds or reflections of balance and steadiness in the face of transience.
Do some version of this reflection each time you look in the mirror. Rather than judging or blaming yourself for how your face or body are aging, acknowledge the truth of this reality and see if you can meet it with a kind, appreciative attention. See if you can remember this is simply the way nature is. Nothing stays the same, especially not our body.
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Chapter 6
Embracing Death’s Invitation
The most wondrous thing in the world is that all around us people can be dying and we don’t realize it can happen to us.
— MAHABHARATA
Ellen, a recently retired woman from Colorado in her midsixties, attended a nature retreat I led in California. Though you could not tell from the outside, she was living in a tornado of grief. She recounted the devastating losses that had occurred over the preceding two years: both her siblings passed (her sister died in a car accident, her brother died from a heart attack), she lost her father to cancer, and soon after that her only living aunt died.
But her story didn’t finish there. More recently her mother had moved in with her due to her debilitating Parkinson’s condition. Her mother’s physical state quickly deteriorated, and some weeks before the retreat, her mother also passed. Ellen was grief-stricken by the incomprehensible amount of loss. She had lost all the members of her close family in the space of several years. She came to the retreat with tremendous heartache, but despite that, her attitude was inspiring. Undaunted, she was determined to find meaning and perspective in the devastation. She wished to make the most of her remaining years and not take another moment or person for granted.
Coping with the loss of loved ones is one of life’s toughest challenges. However, confronting our own mortality is even harder. Death is the ultimate ignobility. It strips away everything we know and have accumulated. It separates us from what we most love. To the ego it is the greatest humiliation, forcing the ego to surrender its attempt at control and give in to the physical laws that govern this world, including yielding to its own dissolution. In many spiritual traditions, meditation is considered a preparation for death. But how could sitting in stillness with one’s eyes closed, sensing one’s intimate inner world, serve us at the time of dying?
We live in a world that tries to deny the reality of death. In hospitals, death is often considered a medical failure. The dying are hidden away. To see a dead body is a rare event in modern industrial cultures. In recent decades there has been an insatiable quest for youth and peak vitality. Billions are spent annually worldwide trying to counter or hide the effects of aging. While an aspiration for health or long life is natural, denying the reality of death and decay is simply misguided and does nothing to prepare us for its eventuality.
Mindfulness practice offers an altogether different approach, which orients us to meet the truth without trying to hide or whitewash anything. It encourages us to turn toward whatever presents itself, including discomfort and decay. Contemplating death is the purpose of the ancient mindfulnes
s practice called “Maranasati.” In this meditation, you explore the uncomfortable inevitability of your demise, reflecting on the certainty of death and the uncertainty of the timing. You also visualize the process of dying itself. Monks and nuns in Asia practice this in charnel grounds as a way to bring mortality close to home, to release any unhealthy attachment to our physical form, and to see through the belief in the body as who we are.
Many people who have never tried this practice assume that it must be depressing and morbid. The reality, however, is almost the opposite. It is true that contemplating death, taking mortality seriously, can be sobering, but the purpose is to inspire us to seize the moment. It helps us avoid sleepwalking through our lives and prevents surprise when death’s shadow looms or his scythe strikes out of the blue. This meditation is an invitation to wake up and not live on autopilot, assuming life will go on forever. It reminds us to be fully present and awake for each experience, to live like our hair is on fire, as they say in Zen. What would life be like if we lived with that urgency?
Reflecting on death encourages us to stop taking things for granted, to cease thinking that our relationships and our lives will continue forever. Such reflection is an invitation to be awake for each experience — such as, when we say good-bye, really meaning it because we never know if we will have the pleasure of someone’s company again. It reminds us to be fully present for each thing we encounter, each sunrise, each scarlet leaf of autumn, each step our child takes. Carlos Castaneda’s shamanic guide told him to live with death standing just behind his shoulder, as a reminder of the precariousness of this life. Can you live like that? It is life’s hardest lesson but also its greatest invitation.