August 31, 2010 by lewrich
It is the end of summer, and it has been a while since I have posted here. My apologies to all who have been following. I have taken July and August as months to really concentrate on writing my book Aging as a Spiritual Practice and that effort has paid off. I have written many chapters and am ahead of my delivery schedule. It has been an interesting experience to write the book after blogging for over a year on this topic. “Blog to book” has become a publishing buzzword these days, and indeed many popular bloggers have transitioned to being book authors.
But my experience is that writing a book on this subject of aging is very different than blogging about it. Continue Reading »
Posted in Aging and Buddhism | Tagged aging and flexibility, aging and gratitude, aging and happiness | 4 Comments »
More on Prosperity
I’ve found in talking about Buddhism and prosperity that people tend to be surprised that the Buddha taught laypeople that it was all right to be prosperous. Somehow the way that Buddhism has come into the West—probably through a combination of its counterculture roots and the monastic or meditative bias of the books about it—we have this lingering notion that to be a good Buddhist one needs to be poor. Actually, this is not just our misunderstanding. I once read an article by a Korean Christian minister, who like many of his countrymen converted from Buddhism when he was young.
“We left Buddhism because we were tired of being poor,” he said. Continue Reading »
Posted in Prosperity | Tagged Aging and Buddhism, aging and happiness, Buddhism and prosperity | 5 Comments »
I am currently reading a pre-publication copy of a wonderful new book about illness, entitled How To Be Sick, by Toni Bernhard. Toni was a long-time Buddhist practitioner and law school dean when she came back from Paris, France with a viral illness, and after seven years, has still not recovered. She has what is usually called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, (CFS) but she has been variously diagnosed with twenty or so different conditions, each with its own three or four letter acronym. Just seeing her list of the various acronyms is a teaching in itself about how little medical science often knows about an illness, and how much, in the end, we are on our own. Continue Reading »
Posted in Illness | Tagged aging and illness, Aging and Meditation | 3 Comments »
Recently I have been reading the book The Buddha’s Teachings on Prosperity by Bhikku Basnagoda Rahula. Published in 2008, this book by a Sri Lankan monk who now teaches at a university in Texas compiles and summarizes the Buddha’s teachings for laypeople. For those who are familiar with the Pali canon of Buddhism these are excerpted from the “Short Discourses.” From the time of the Buddha, the Buddhist sangha has always been composed of four classes of people: monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen.
I have often made note of the fact that throughout Buddhist history the literate scribes who wrote down the teachings, generation after generation, were almost entirely monks. Most of the current generation of non-ethnic Buddhists first found their way to Buddhism through books—in the early days from D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism and the various writings of Alan Watts. Continue Reading »
Posted in Aging and Happiness | Tagged Aging and Buddhism, aging and happiness, aging and money, Aging and Spirituality | 6 Comments »
Older and Happier
Some of your may have seen the recent news story about a study (a Gallup poll really) that reported, “Life looks a little rosier after 50, a new study finds. Older people in their mid- to late-50s are generally happier, and experience less stress and worry than young adults in their 20s, the researchers say. “
I’d be interested to know if readers agree. Certainly at the level of basic life stress, young people in college or looking for a job are undoubtedly stressed. It may also be that by the time we are in our 50s we have had a lot of experience with stress, and we don’t experience our stress as stressfully as the young. The study actually mentions this as a possible explanation.
I’m not discounting the truth of the study; it’s just that “happiness” is a notoriously difficult thing to measure or quantify. Continue Reading »
Posted in Aging and Happiness | Tagged aging and gratitude, aging and happiness | 17 Comments »
My apologies for missing a couple of posting dates. I try to post once a week but reality and a busy schedule have intruded—including the need for me to dig in to starting to write my Aging as a Spiritual Practice book.
I thought I would take the opportunity of this post to note the anniversary of the blog. Actually I started a year ago March, but mid-May is close enough I hope. So we have been going for a little over a year, exploring various aspects of aging as it relates to the spiritual life. This is also close to the anniversary of the publication of my first book, Work as a Spiritual Practice, which came out in 1999. How things have changed since then!
Aside from the fact that I and the audience to whom I was writing then were eleven years younger, and in the prime of their productive work life, the whole notion of connecting the workplace with spiritual practice has been overwhelmed and superceded by grim economic realities. Continue Reading »
Posted in Baby Boomers and Aging, Fear | Tagged aging and money, aging and worry | 9 Comments »
Recently I saw the movie Crazy Heart, in which Jeff Bridges won an academy award playing the role of Bad Black, an over-the-hill Country Western singer looking for redemption and a second chance. I thought the theme was quite apropos for my current focus on the joys of aging—one of which, I think, is the possibility and reality of second chances. Bad Blake had had real talent when he was younger, but he screwed up his life in various ways. He was alcoholic, he was married (and divorced) four times, he abandoned his infant son, and his career imploded due to his drinking and bad judgment.
And yet “Bad” was a sincere human being; that was why his fans still loved his songs, which used to pour out of him like water from a mountain spring—until the spring went dry and he was relegated to singing old songs in one-night stands in bowling alleys. Then his now-famous protégé Tommy Sweet, whom Bad both loved and hated, offered him a second chance and in a moving scene Bad is on the telephone with his agent, who is explaining Tommy had offered Bad a chance to open a show in a major venue in front of thousands of people. “No!” Bad shouted into the phone, “No way! Never!” As his agent explained that this would be his one big shot, Bad hedged. “I have to think about it.
“No time!” his agent replied. “Yes or no. Right now.”
Bad is too broke and too desperate to hold onto his grudges. “Yes, yes!” Bad screams. “Goddamn it, yes!”
That was it. That was the start of his second chance. Eventually the second chance came all the way through for Bad, but not before he lost the new woman he loved, had his adult son hang up on him, had to go to rehab to get sober, and endure other losses. Bad, no longer “bad,” even went back to his given name—Otis.
Yes, Bad got his second chance. But it took everything he had to get there. His story is everyone’s story. Continue Reading »
Posted in Baby Boomers and Aging | Tagged aging and gratitude, aging and happiness, Aging and Meditation, baby boomers, Death and Dying | 9 Comments »
March 27, 2010 by lewrich
Well, after spending many weeks exploring the Five Great Fears of Buddhism and of aging, I thought it might be time for a more upbeat theme. How about the Five Great Joys of aging? I don’t know of a succinct Buddhist teaching like this comparable to the Five Great Fears (Buddhism tends to focus on the dark side of existence, because that is wha
t ego avoids) but I’m sure we can come up with some Joys.
To begin with, and to borrow the title of Ram Dass’ book after he had the stroke that left him half paralyzed—how about Still Here? Continue Reading »
Posted in Aging and Buddhism, Beauty, Gratitude | Tagged Aging and Buddhism, aging and gratitude, aging and happiness, Illness as gift | 10 Comments »
March 10, 2010 by lewrich
I’ve spent the last several posts exploring the topic of Buddhism’s five great fears—fear of dying, fear of illness, fear of dementia, fear of loss of livelihood, and fear of public speaking. These are ancient teachings that reflect the universality of these fear states, even for lifelong monastics, who developed these teachings. Fear is the arena of Buddhist practice; all fear ultimately derives from constriction of ego, and the liberation that the Buddha taught goes straight through and into these fears. In one sense, these great fears are ego’s worst nightmare; in another, they are the ground of awakening. Continue Reading »
Posted in Fear, Uncategorized | Tagged Aging and Buddhism, aging and zen, Death and Dying | 12 Comments »
The fifth “great fear” of Buddhism is, strangely enough, the “fear of public speaking.” The other four—fear of death, fear of illness, fear of dementia, and fear of loss of livelihood—are so obviously great fears that it is curious that fear of public speaking is included with them. Certainly those who have this fear can report that it is paralyzing—similar to a panic attack. One person I know who had this fear said, quite calmly, that they would prefer to slit their throat rather than speak before an audience.
There is little teaching or analysis in the Buddhist texts about this fear, so I can only guess about it. Continue Reading »
Posted in Fear | Tagged aging and worry, five great fears, fear of public speaking | 9 Comments »
