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Archive for February, 2009

Nothing Happens When You Die

Posted in Death and Dying, tagged , , , , on February 26, 2009 | 19 Comments »

Nothing happens when you die: Two contemporary Buddhist masters—Suzuki Roshi and the 16th Karmapa—both said this.  When the Karmapa was dying—according to people who were there—he opened his eyes and said, “Nothing happens.” And in Suzuki Roshi’s book Not Always So he says, “Don’t worry about dying.  Nothing is going to happen.” Well.  This is [...]

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Be Flexible

Posted in Aging and Spirituality, Baby Boomers and Aging, tagged , , , , on February 25, 2009 | 6 Comments »

Flexibility is an important key to healthy aging. A recent 77 year old reader recently commented about growing older, “The first thing that comes to mind is that barriers began to weaken and crumble. I am willing to think in new directions, to be open to new ideas, to be less defensive about what I [...]

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Aging, Buddhism, and Happiness

Posted in Aging and Buddhism, tagged , , on February 23, 2009 | Comments Off

In the excellent book The Pursuit of Happiness by David G. Myers, Myers quotes fellow happiness researcher Richard Kammann as follows: “Objective life circumstances have a negligible role to play in a theory of happiness.” This astonishing statement, made by a scientist familiar with all the studies done about happiness, is well worth pondering as [...]

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A Real Flower is Beautiful

Posted in Aging and Buddhism, Beauty, tagged , , , on February 20, 2009 | 4 Comments »

A reader from Israel writes, ‘It is hard not to notice that most of the material one can find about aging is all about illnesses and sickness. However, I am trying to find more of the positive angles of old age.” I think he is right, and that is one of the reasons I started [...]

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Transforming Loss Into Contentment

Posted in Aging and Buddhism, Baby Boomers and Aging, tagged , , on February 17, 2009 | 2 Comments »

When I was in college I had a class with the eminent psychoanalyst Erik Erikson .  He was the kind of inspirational teacher that changes a young person’s life, and his class on The Eight Stages of Man (first outlined in his classic text Childhood and Society) was legendary.  He saw the course of a [...]

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Love Has Everything to Do With It

Posted in Aging and Buddhism, Baby Boomers and Aging, tagged , , , , on February 5, 2009 | Comments Off

The baby boomer generation has been criticized for making every stage of life—whether it be adolescence, college, child-rearing, and now their aging—into a self-referential adventure of transformation and improvement.  From that point of view the notion of “Aging as a Spiritual Practice” could be seen as just the latest of these baby boomer projects: “We’re [...]

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