From Suffering to Peace

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 want 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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