Author: lewrich

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Aging and Spirituality: An Update

My book Aging as a Spiritual Practice has been out for six years now, and has garnered a wide readership among Buddhists, Christians, leaders and members of aging study groups, and many others.  The concept of aging as a spiritual path is still fairly new; my book is one of the few out there that really makes the case that the aging process itself has spiritual dimensions.

 

So as I resuscitate this blog for a new year and new look at this topic, I thought it might be good to begin by discussing why and how aging and spirituality … Read More

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Welcome to Lew’s Aging Blog

Hello Everyone,

This month is the sixth anniversary of the publication of my book AGING AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE.  The book has been quite successful.  It continues to sell steadily and will keep doing so as new people discover it and discover their need for what it has to offer.

So I have decided to resuscitate my Aging Blog to provide a forum for readers of the book as well as the interested public to read about my latest thoughts about aging as a transformational process, as well as hear about the latest aging research.

Come back and visit the … Read More

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Aging Parents 2

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 dying words were obscenities).  As I said in my last comment to the previous post, “These posts explore the pain that is at the very center of what love is, and what life is.”

The cultural context for our Western way of dealing (or not … Read More

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Aging Parents

Recently on the Tricycle “Aging as a Spiritual Practice” forum which I moderate  there has a been a lot of discussion about elderly and aging parents.  Certainly there are a myriad of practical problems that come up—nursing homes, dementia, medical decisions, and so on—but underlying these there are more basic spiritual issues.  How do we feel about the sudden reversal of role… Read More

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Lonely But Never Alone

Loneliness often increases as we grow older.  Certainly when those we know begin to pass away (which may start when we are in our 50s) there is a kind of loneliness that comes and cannot easily be assuaged.  Their loss is permanent.

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.”  … Read More

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Brain Plasticity

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.  Once, during an illness, one of my doctors gave me a 500 page book on “Psychopharmocology”—a technical text on the effects of drugs on the brain.  I read it as best I could—it was quite technical—and returned it to my doctor.

“Interesting!” I said, “what … Read More

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Money!

“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 of us who are older, and whose future ability to make money is declining, it may be even more so.  “Fear of loss of livelihood” is one of the Five Great Fears… Read More

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We Are All So Fragile

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 mind … Read More

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Mindfulness of Aging Part 3

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 thinking”, as Suzuki Roshi would say.

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 … Read More

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Mindfulness of Aging Part 2

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:  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 … Read More