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Aging and the Thought of Enlightenment

tibetan-nunThe “thought of enlightenment,” or bodhicitta, is a key doctrine of Great Vehicle Buddhism. 

Basically it refers that moment in your life when your perspective widens to embrace the big picture, and to ask the big questions.  Why am I here? Why is anything here? What is life all about? Why is there evil in the world? Why do people suffer? Is it possible to change the world? And then follows the earthshaking realization that it might be possible to find answers. And we begin our spiritual search, which in Buddhism is called bodhicitta in the Zen tradition is … Read More

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Encephalitis: The Year I was 90 Year Old

Beginning in July, 1999 I became 90 years old for a year.  What happened? I was struck suddenly with viral encephalitis and within hours was in a coma so deep no doctor thought I could survive.  Obviously I did survive and regained all of my abilities and functions, but it took several years.  I tell about this ordeal in my book Healing Lazarus. Later I would joke with people about the “year I was 90 years old” (no offense to those who are 90 years old and healthy, but that was the phrase that kept popping into my head).  … Read More

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What is a Spiritual Practice?

tree-with-raysI’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. Other familiar spiritual practices are singing hymns, reciting a mantra (or saying a rosary), bowing, and meditation.

I borrowed the phrase “Aging as a Spiritual Practice” from the title of my first book, Work as a Spiritual Practice. In that book I adapted many … Read More

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The Yoga of Aging

yoga-sunsetI believe there is a Yoga of Aging. The word “yoga” has come to mean the various classes and workshops that people go to for stretches, postures, and the associated benefits to health and energy. Since it was first introduced here early in the 20th century, yoga has grown tremendously and is now an integral part of the cultural landscape. But the word originally included the entirety of spiritual practices developed in ancient India; the physical yogas so popular today are only one of them.

Meditation is another yoga. The word itself is related to the English word “yoke” … Read More

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Gratitude is This Moment

thankyouGratitude 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, “Gratitude is this moment” is what came out. Just that we are here is something to be grateful for, even before we are grateful for anything else.

A few posts ago, I talked about Horizontal and Vertical Time. Horizontal time is how we usually … Read More

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Nothing Happens When You Die

Nothing happens when you die: Two contemporary Buddhist masters—Suzuki Roshi and the 16th Karmapa—both said this.  When the Karmapa was dying—according to people who were there—he opened his eyes and said, “Nothing happens.”

And in Suzuki Roshi’s book Not Always So he says, “Don’t worry about dying.  Nothing is going to happen.”

Well.  This is the kind of out-there statement that skeptics of Buddhism point to as a way of discrediting it.  Of course something happens, they say—you die!  That’s something, isn’t it?

Clearly Suzuki Roshi and the Karmapa were talking about dying at a different level. … Read More

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Be Flexible

flexiblereadyFlexibility 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 consider to be right or wrong.” In other words, he was flexible.

When I asked a psychiatrist friend recently what he noticed about his clients around issues of aging, he replied that flexibility seemed to be the key to aging well. … Read More

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Aging, Buddhism, and Happiness

In the excellent book The Pursuit of Happiness by David G. Myers, Myers quotes fellow happiness researcher Richard Kammann as follows: “Objective life circumstances have a negligible role to play in a theory of happiness.”

This astonishing statement, made by a scientist familiar with all the studies done about happiness, is well worth pondering as it relates to aging—an “objective life circumstance” if there ever was one. It is also helpful in reflecting on whether Buddhism has, or is, a theory of happiness. More on this in a moment.

But first I might as well take this opportunity to explain … Read More

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A Real Flower is Beautiful

lotusflowerA reader from Israel writes, ‘It is hard not to notice that most of the material one can find about aging is all about illnesses and sickness. However, I am trying to find more of the positive angles of old age.” I think he is right, and that is one of the reasons I started the blog. There is indeed a voluminous literature about illness, the dying process, death, and grieving.

Certainly part of the reason is that these aspects of aging are the most difficult to cope with, and are the most trying and frightening. But if my 50 … Read More

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Transforming Loss Into Contentment

Retired farmerWhen 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 human life in distinct developmental stages (he coined the term “identity crisis” to signify the special life challenge of late adolescence).  In his view, the eighth and last stage of a human life was the Integrity stage, when we look back on our life … Read More