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Essay Excerpt:
One way to work with aging is to take some time every day to reflect on the fact: I am subject to aging. Aging is unavoidable. We might allow the significance of these thoughts to sink in, or imagine what it would be like to be old and infirm, to move slowly, to have limited physical powers, to be dependent on others. Many people are in this state right now, and we see them with a blind arrogance, the arrogance of (comparative) youth and health. But we are all subject to the same law. We are brothers and sisters in our liability to sickness, aging, and death.
Whatever feelings come up around this contemplation... let them be and just observe them. Over time you will flush out a great deal of previously unfelt fear.
Another way to work with aging might be called naturalistic observation... [examining] the small things that happen every day in our lives. Often we suppress these things and try not to notice them, or at the other extreme grow depressed and panicky, lost in our identification with the aging condition of the body. But in practicing with these incidents, and with the mind-states that arise, we do something very valuable. We liberate ourselves from the mind-states and from aging itself. That doesn't mean we don't age. It means that the mind doesn't suffer from the body's aging...
There are other forms of practice that deal -- somewhat indirectly -- with the aging process. One of them is called asubha meditation, meditation on the unloveliness of the body. It revolves around a classification system in which the body is divided into thirty-two parts. You learn the parts as they are traditionally listed, take them up one by one, recite them inwardly, and reflect on them. You begin with the hair on the head, go on to the skin, the fingernails, the teeth, and so on.
After a while you start to unzip the body and look at what is inside. You find blood, urine, feces, all kinds of unsavory substances. If you've developed any kind of samadhi -- a concentrated, peaceful, collected state of mind -- before you begin, the practice becomes quite vivid. It once made me nauseous. It also wipes out any chance for feeling sexual attraction, and is thus used to help celibate monks diminish sexual feeling. It can also be of immense help in seeing the true nature of the body: there is this body, but it isn't me or mine...
...I think the key question is: Can you live the life you have? Can you work with what you've got? One of my students used to care for the elderly, and she had some wonderful stories. One of her patients was ninety-three years old, was confined to a wheelchair, and had degenerative vision problems. My student took her Aldous Huxley's book The Art of Seeing, and when she came in to see her patient later the woman was doing the exercises in the book. She always had a sense of possibility; she would say, "I'm going to stand up and walk down this hallway," even though it wouldn't particularly change her condition; she just wanted to do it. She wanted to do what she could...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Larry Rosenberg is the founder of Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, a guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and the author of Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in 1932, Rosenberg grew up in Brooklyn; his father, who had Marxist leanings, came from 14 generations of rabbis. Rosenberg went to Brooklyn College and received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Chicago. He accepted a coveted job in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, which he describes as having been a "staggering" disappointment. He then studied Zen with Master Seung Sahn both in the U.S. and in Korea, as well as spending time in Japan (Zen training) before coming to Vipassana (Insight Meditation), which he studied in Thailand and in the U.S.
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