Monthly Archives: November 2012

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Aging is stressful.

We began by discussing suffering from the aspect of an aging brain as a peculiar form of Dukkha, the Pali word that Buddha used as he began teaching his first five followers. It is clear that life is stressful, and many of the stresses of life are intensified with aging. When Shunryu Suzuki ( a Japanese Zen priest, the first abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind ) was asked why we should meditate, he said, “In order to enjoy our old age.” I understand that to mean that if we invest a little time and energy learning to let go, old age will not be so stressful. If we let go a lot, our suffering will likewise be reduced to a larger degree.

One of the challenges of aging is discovering how our full memory banks require more time and patience to access what we intend to say or think. This morning I awoke with the impulse to schedule a time to walk with a friend. I determined to send him an email as soon as I opened my computer. Lying in bed I could not recall his name. Immediately fear and irritation arose. “Why can’t I think of his name? I must be losing my memory.”

But I paused and decided to change this negative talk, and started breathing into my memories of other walks with my friend. Instead of trying to remember his name, I breathed into the pleasant memories that spontaneously arose picturing his face and the places we walked. Irritation returned as I realized his name was not coming.  How can I send him an email without remembering his name. More breath. More waiting. A little self-compassion for a brain with such a large rolodex of pleasant memories. Still no name.

Gradually I began to hear the name ‘Phil’ arise, but I knew that was wrong. I set Phil aside, but it returned again and again. More irritation. Rising impatience. How long will this game last? Then I recalled other incidents when the name I was looking for returned later when I least expected it. There was no solace in that thought. I wanted to remember NOW. More breath. Using Thich Nhat Hahn’s gatha, “Calm” on the inhale, “Ease” on the exhale. More waiting.

I suddenly remembered a second friend who often asks about my first friend. David’s face came into my memory and I heard his voice kindly asking, “How’s Tom doing.” Suddenly I had it, but there was still a feeling of dissatisfaction and irritation. I glimpsed myself looking through my email contacts for “Tom” and failing to find the correct name. Then I smiled. My friend spells his name “Thom,” not “Tom.” I needed to include the silent “h” to find the right address to send the email. When I realized that my earlier attempt to retrieve his name had turned up “Phil,” I saw that the second letter in the wrong name was also “h.” I had filed Thom’s name in a category of unusual four letter names, names with silent “h” near the beginning.

Instead of feeling irritation at my failing memory, I smiled at the richness of the fabric of my memories. I could let go of my irritation and fear.  It was silly to bemoan the speed of retrieval when the patterns of associations were so interesting. Instead of leaping to the conclusion that my memory was “going,” I was able to pause and breath into a new insight about the way our neurons wire together. The pleasant memory of David asking after Thom was a joyful connection that brought more delightful memories forward, but I needed to pause and let compassionate breathing unlock the mystery. Finally I noticed a feeling of gratitude for the rich fabric of friends woven into my life. Instead of irritation and despair, Mindfulness practice opened me up to joy and gratitude.

The stress had arisen because of the fact that my left brain speed is slower than I remember it, and I am attached to the memory of who I was in the past. How can breath into acceptance of the way things are?  I cling to a deep impulse for certainty and impermanence. I want my former speed of remembering to be sustained indefinitely into the future. But that is not the way things are.  When I breathe into the reality of this aging brain, new mysteries arise that I never conceived. Retrieving memories need not be stressful; they can result in pleasant delight in the complexity of the brain. But the mindful pause for the breath is significant. Compassionate breathing into the whole of the memory banks allows for new creativity, new wiring to take place. What fires together, wires together. Allowing the irritation and fear to dissolve, new pathways, pathways of acceptance and joy have been built. Accepting those new pathways is actually much easier than struggling with old patterns and grasping.  Renunciation is a relief, not a reluctant loss.

Last post I wrote, “Aging is a lifelong futile grasping for certainty, permanence and immortality.” Perhaps this description of the second truth is not so ennobling in its current phrasing. How can I re-phrase this truth to resonate more with the mystery and creativity of everyday experience? Maybe tomorrow I will make another attempt…

Exploring memory functions with mindfulness

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Welcome Posting – Opening to Aging

Aging is stressful.

Aging is a lifelong futile grasping for certainty, permanence and immortality.

Whenever we let go the riddle is solved.

Old age, illness and death are all workable.

These are the Four Ennobling Truths of Aging. If they sound vaguely familiar, it is because they are patterned after the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, expressed 2500 years ago and still inspiring millions of awakening beings. The Buddha taught that when a person grasps at experience, there is suffering; and when a person lets go and learns to meet life experience with equanimity, compassion, and wisdom, suffering is dissipated.

Learning to open to suffering and the suffering of others was the Path which the Buddha offered to his followers, a transformative and empowering Path. Millions of followers across two millennia have embodied and verified that Path. Part of what they have discovered is that compassion and wisdom flow from the steady application of mindfulness to the stresses and challenges of life. Thich Nhat Hahn has accurately named it the “Miracle of Mindfulness.” This blog will focus on the exploration of a mindful Path in the process of aging, an approach to Aging as a Spiritual Practice.

In the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx, a riddle is posed: ‘What is it that walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three in the evening?’ Oedipus answered: ‘A man, who as an infant crawls on all fours, as a youth walks on two, and in old age walks with a stick. Part of Oedipus’ wisdom was his insight into the inevitability of aging, and his equanimity in the face of it.

Let’s take a closer look at these four statements.

Aging is stressful. It starts with gentle reminders when muscles lose their tone, eyes dim, ears strain to hear. The rolodex of our memories becomes full to overflowing until the retrieval of information is frustratingly slower. Visits to the doctors become more frequent and more disheartening. Sleep becomes simultaneously more difficult, more necessary, and less satisfying. Loneliness, embarrassment, powerlessness, despair, depression, and fear become daily visitors to the altar of our awareness. Our friends move away, become sick, or die. Our family structure becomes decapitated as the older generation dies off. Inevitably our own generation of siblings and cousins take their places as the elder statesmen and women, reiterating the same litany of complaints and regrets, another variation on a familiar organ recital. Gradually our own generation begins to die.

One person lamented that the Golden Years does not arrive with altogether warm and fuzzy feelings. It fact, they arrive bringing disquieting discoveries:

“thinning hair, declining vision and hearing, slower, less certain movement, arthritic hands, increasing weight, more time spent with doctors, now including specialists and technicians administering tests. All seemingly bringing the same message — exercise more and lose weight. A repeating message which only brings no delight but gathers momentum.”

Memory is stressful, both in the coming and the going. The aging brain is a “post-traumatic” brain. It contains trauma in every corner: memories of assassinations, wars, death, sickness, personal tragedies, and not just headlines from forty, fifty years ago, continuing reminders from yesterday’s bad news. On the one hand we are conditioned to believe that the aging memory is full of regret and disappointment. On the other, we begin to lose the details of our own life: the names of familiar places, people and things are retrieved slowly or not at all.

But is it possible to re-frame the traumatic memories the aging brain still holds on to? Of course, in addition to the trauma and loss, there are contrasting images of joy, and wonder, victory and accomplishment, praise and fulfillment. Are we condemned to calibrate like grocers on the scales of profit and loss – good and bad? Positive or negative? Up or down? Is meaning ever found in dualistic comparison? How does memory integration proceed? How do we link up the disparate incidents of our lives into a narrative that forgets all dualism and has meaning?

These are some of the questions to be explored in this blog.

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I decided to take a walk in the rain before I posted this. Getting the blood circulating is always a good idea for an aging body with spiritual ambitions. As I walked through the neighborhood, I was struck once again by the beauty of autumn, the rain-soaked bark of trees highlighting leaves changing to red, orange and yellow, gray skies pressing down gently on all the eyes peruse. Suddenly I caught sight of a tender-hearted leaf, dangling from a branch, saturated with rain and ready to release to the unknown. One beat, and then it let go its hold to the tree, and floated down into the duff below. How many leaves have aged today, released today, begun another cycle of return today? Was it stressful for them? Why does autumn make us so sad?