Ten Practical Guidelines for Conscious Aging
“There is plenty of newness still percolating within you; you simply have to look for it in slightly different places.”
As the humiliating debate around whether Joe Biden has “aged out” of the presidency continues to play front and center on the American political scene, 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 teachings, 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? What might it mean for Joe Biden? 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
