Good day good people,
One of the things we know about committing to a Wisdom way of living is that it is about responding to the beckoning call to be awake. To wake up, or wake down as some spiritual teachers have called lately, to live and relate consciously, and to choose practices, environments, and people that we support and are supported by in that same aim.
One major area most of us tend to be asleep to is our relationship with aging. Cynthia Bourgeault recently wrote a facebook post about this that was so timely I thought I would share what she said here in case you didn't see it. She says,
... it becomes more and more clear that America is basically repelled by the aging process and largely clueless about the deeper spiritual possibilities that may lie coiled within it.
The teachings unveiling these possibilities still abound in the world’s wisdom traditions, where the term "conscious aging" is not simply a polite euphemism but an active pathway of spiritual metamorphosis: in a sense, the capstone project of an entire life’s journey.
What does it mean to age consciously? ... For each one of us? In putting together these preliminary guidelines, I am drawing deeply on Helen Luke’s iconic book 'Old Age' and Ladislaus Boros’ 'The Mystery of Death,' two modern spiritual classics that have collectively laid the foundation for my own understanding. I am also drawing on a bit of my own work-in-progress as what once seemed far off now becomes the intimate landscape of my day-to-day life.
TEN PRACTICAL GUIDELINES FOR CONSCIOUS AGING
1. Honestly accept the journey into physical diminishment as the new learning curve in your life and embrace it with curiosity and beginner’s mind. Keep facing forward with a gently yielded heart; that is always the direction from which the new integration emerges.
2. Monitor and intelligently manage your changing physical circumstances. Don’t push beyond the limits of what you can responsibly sustain—not routinely, anyway, and above all, not to “prove you can still do it” through some heroic overexertion. Binge exertion becomes increasingly costly as you age.
3. Maintain your physical body in good work working order. Fix what’s broken and easily repairable, but don’t waste vital being energy trying to reverse the aging process itself. Become familiar with your new rhythms of replenishment and resilience.
4. Be as self-aware as you possibly can, keeping a particularly watchful eye on habitual or deeply engrained self-images and personal mythologies that no longer correspond to your present season of life and that can all too easily put you at risk.
5. Watch what happens when you try to draw energy from an outmoded image of yourself. Note how there’s a certain compulsive or “forcing the fit” quality to the will itself, combined with an overall narrowing of the spaciousness and freedom of your awareness. You get an immediate rush of “Ah, I’m my old self again!!” But that is exactly who you do not want to be. Your old self is the sacrificial lamb you will lay upon the altar of your deeper becoming.
6. Pay close attention to what people are mirroring back to you, noting any obvious discrepancies between how you think you’re handling yourself and the responses you’re receiving. Notice in particular when people seem to be taking up the slack for you, or when your willful self-positing becomes increasingly high-maintenance or stressful for others; inquire directly and adjust accordingly.
7. Be alert to new traits or features emerging in yourself, perhaps previously unexplored: new qualities of being, new interests, new facets of your selfhood that you may have previously underplayed. Be curious about them; give them space to grow. There is plenty of newness still percolating within you; you simply have to look for it in slightly different places.
8. Do not confuse physical vitality or “youthfulness” with being-vitality, which comes from deeper inside you and is entirely the fruit of your inner work. Being-vitality will shine out through even a shattered container.
9. Remember that you have not only an outer body, but an inner body as well: your kesdjan or second body. Through certain types of spiritual practice (for me, the Gurdjieff exercises; for others, embodiment practice such as yoga and and tai chi), you can begin to touch it directly and sense its subtle flow as the life within your life. This is the more subtle current that Boros calls “the rising curve of being;” it will ultimately carry you through the birth canal of death and deposit you in your fully attained kesdjan selfhood. Become familiar with this inner body; ride it; trust it.
10. Throughout all of life’s passages the same instructions hold: “THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH.” Honesty, openness, and gentle acceptance (a.k.a., “surrender”) create spiritual suppleness, the true mark of being-vitality. Insistence, clinging, contraction, and willfulness create spiritual sclerosis, the infallible mark of being-malaise at whatever season of life you find yourself in.
—Cynthia Bourgeault, baby Wisdom Elder
I trust this will give us all, regardless of our age, much to ponder.
With love,
Heather
Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses
Monday, July 15th
Reading: Still Water by William Butler Yeats
We can make our minds
so like still water
that beings gather about us,
that they may see,
it may be,
their own images,
and so live for a moment
with a clearer,
perhaps even with a fiercer life
because of our quiet.
Chant: stilled and quiet is my soul, in [Love’s] presence I take my rest (by Sister Helen Marie)
Tuesday, July 16th
Reading: The Most Important Thing by Julia Fehrenbacher
I am making a home inside myself. A shelter
of kindness where everything
is forgiven, everything allowed—a quiet patch
of sunlight to stretch out without hurry,
where all that has been banished
and buried is welcomed, spoken, listened to—released.
A fiercely friendly place I can claim as my very own.
I am throwing arms open
to the whole of myself—especially the fearful,
fault-finding, falling apart, unfinished parts, knowing
every seed and weed, every drop
of rain, has made the soil richer.
I will light a candle, pour a hot cup of tea, gather
around the warmth of my own blazing fire. I will howl
if I want to, knowing this flame can burn through
any perceived problem, any prescribed
perfectionism,
any lying limitation, every heavy thing.
I am making a home inside myself
where grace blooms in grand and glorious
abundance, a shelter of kindness that grows
all the truest things.
I whisper hallelujah to the friendly
sky. Watch now as I burst into blossom.
Wednesday, July 17th
Reading: When we are with You,
what fear of loss could we possibly have?
You change every grief to gold.
You give us the key to each world we come to.
You sweeten the lips of those we love,
and You open their mouths in desire.
You are beyond all guessing.
yet within each guess.
Hidden,
yet beginning to be revealed.
We have fallen into the sugar shaker.
We are the ground beneath You.
Let someone else describe the sky.
Hold us in silence.
Do not throw us back into some discussion
–Rumi
Chant: When we are with you, what fear of loss could we possibly have. We swim in Mercy, as in an endless sea (from the words of Rumi and a translation of Psalm 103 put to song by Susan Latimer)
Thursday, July 18th
Reading: We will want the good that is in us all,even in the worst of us,to flower and to grow.But first of all we shall want sunlight;nothing much can grow in the dark.Meditation is our step out into the sun.
—Bill W.
Chant: Christ [in] all, the light in all, the Seed sown in the hearts of all, Christ [in] all, the light in all, the [Good] sown in the hearts of all (by Paulette Meier)
Friday, July 19th
Body Prayer (video found here)
Here I am, as I am
Holy, Human
In this world, as it is
Sacred, Profane
Ever connected, in this wondrous luminous web
Ever abiding, in the Heart of God
Saturday, July 20th
Reading: “Compassion forms the essential bond between seeking God in meditation and all forms of social justice. For the more we are transformed in compassion, the more we are impelled to act with compassion toward others.” ― James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God
Sunday, July 21st
Reading: “I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, and so I created the worlds both visible and invisible.”4 Both the saying itself and the understanding that illumines it derive from a profound mystical intuition that our created universe is a vast mirror, or ornament (and the Greek word “cosmos” literally means “an ornament”), through which divine potentiality—beautiful, fathomless, endlessly creative—projects itself into form in order to realize fully the depths of divine love.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind