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Episode 2: Aging One Breath at a Time · The Oldster Radio Hour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: There's some point in your life where it kind of hits you,
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_03: not as an idea, but as an emotional thing.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I'm aging.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: I'm getting older.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: And behind that insight is, I'm losing something.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_03: I'm losing something now, and sooner or later, I'm going to lose everything.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to lose everything.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: My health,
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to lose my friends,
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to lose my spouse, I'm going to lose my life.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_03: And facing that and addressing that and transforming your life to embrace that
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: and find joy in that, that's what I mean by aging as a spiritual practice.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's the Oldster Radio Hour, Episode 2,
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: Aging One Breath at a Time.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the Oldster Radio Hour.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Sari Botten, your host and the founder of Oldster Magazine.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: This is our second episode,
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: which we're calling Aging One Breath at a Time,
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: a title that comes from my conversation with today's guest,
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis Richmond, a Buddhist priest, meditation teacher, and author.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: Recently,
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: I got to take a course Richmond teaches through Tricycle,
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: The Buddhist Review, a magazine and online learning center.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: The course is called Aging as a Spiritual Practice,
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: and it's modeled after Richmond's book by the same name.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: In 2021,
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: I launched Oldster Magazine in part sparked by my curiosity
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: about other people's experiences of getting older.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: But mixed in with my curiosity was anxiety, something that hasn't gone away.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: I know from working with contributors to Oldster that I'm not alone.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: Aging is a common source of anxiety in many people.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of uncertainty about our futures and what will happen to our bodies
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: and minds the longer we use them.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: We worry how healthy and able will we remain for how long?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: What about those close to us?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: One of the biggest hardships to contend with as we get older is loss.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's unfortunately the natural order of things that the longer we live,
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: the more things, people, and capabilities we stand to lose.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: Richmond addresses those concerns in both his course and his book.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: He reframes aging as an inescapable reality,
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: not only one to accept and make peace with, but to also savor and enjoy.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: He offers ways to shift our perspectives,
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: knowledge he's gained through his life and his training as a Buddhist priest,
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: and simple meditation and breathing exercises to help us ground ourselves in
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: the present rather than worrying about the past or the future.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: He also reframes elderhood as an achievement and honor.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: The course's tagline gives a nice little taste.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: Getting older is the greatest teacher.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: In the show notes, you'll find a link to Richmond's course.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: You can save 25% using the code Oldster25.
• 3:24
  [music]
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome, Louis.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: Glad to be here.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'll start off by asking you,
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: what makes aging a spiritual practice and what does that have to do with
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: the Buddhist concept of impermanence?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_03: That's a good place to start.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: Well, let's just start with the phrase spiritual practice.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: That's not the most common phrase people have, but spiritual practice is extremely common.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: Probably the most common spiritual practice is going to church.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_03: Prayer, meditation now is very common.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: And those things are
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_03: all addressing fundamental or ultimate questions, I would say.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_03: We don't go to church to make money.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_03: We don't pray typically to advance our career.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_03: We're asking the universe, you might say,
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_03: Why am I here?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_03: What's my purpose?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: What's the best way to live?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_03: Those kinds of questions.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: I use the phrase because it's completely neutral in terms of what kind
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_03: of religion you have or multiple religions or no religion.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_03: A spiritual practice is when you turn your attention to the basics of our existence
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: as human beings.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_03: And yes,
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a Buddhist,
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: and one of the core teachings of the Buddha is what's often called impermanence,
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_03: which means what it says, things don't last.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_03: Or to put it the way my teacher did, everything changes.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_03: Everything changes.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_03: This is a fundamental truth of, it's a spiritual truth, it's also a scientific truth.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_03: But the word impermanence is not, it's kind of an intellectual word.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_03: I prefer talking about it more emotionally.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: And the word I use is loss.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, loss is definitely a big part of getting older.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, it is.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_03: And loss is a feeling.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_03: We all know what that feeling is.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you lose weight.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_03: Money, you lose a job,
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: you lose a partner,
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_03: you lose a trusted friend,
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_03: you lose your health, you lose the ability to play tennis, whatever it might be.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_03: Loss is painful.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody likes loss.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: But I should point out that in order to lose something, you first have to have it.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: So there's two sides.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: And this is really the core of Buddhist teaching about loss,
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_03: is that the most important thing we have,
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_03: you might say, is our life, the fact that we're alive.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: And aging,
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_03: we'll talk about this a little later with one of your other questions,
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_03: but there's some point in your life where it kind of hits you,
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_03: not as an idea, but as an emotional thing.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I'm aging.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: I'm getting older.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_03: And behind that insight is I'm losing something.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_03: I'm losing something now.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: And sooner or later, I'm going to lose everything.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to lose my health.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to lose my friends.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to lose my spouse.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to lose my life.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_03: And facing that and addressing that and transforming your life To embrace that
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: and find joy in that,
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_03: that's what I mean by aging as a spiritual practice, all of that.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: It starts with loss and opens up like a flower.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_03: You notice on the cover of my book, the publishers put a nice flower.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's a flower going to seed.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's a beautiful flower.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: And that's each of us.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_03: We're flowers, we're beautiful, but we're not going to last forever.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: And when we see that, our practice, our spiritual practice of aging begins.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: So that's how I would respond to that.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: How do meditation and inquiry help us to enjoy old age?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: And are there specific meditations and inquiries that are most helpful?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's interesting.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: Early in my book, I quote my teacher, We were all young kids.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: This was 50 years ago.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_03: You know,
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_03: we were,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_03: many of us in the counterculture,
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_03: which is pretty far in the past now, but some of us older folks remember it.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_03: And we asked him, why do we meditate?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_03: Because he was a meditation teacher.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: And he laughed and said, so you can enjoy your old age.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: And we laughed because we didn't really understand.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: We thought he was joking, like, Throwing something off.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_03: But he was quite serious.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_03: And now that I'm quite a bit older than he was when he said that,
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_03: I'm beginning to really understand his point.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_03: And here's the point.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: And the kind of meditation we did, Buddhist meditation, had to do with focusing on the breath.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: So let me discuss that.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_03: Because one of my first points, both in my book and the online class, is...
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_03: What I call aging one breath at a time.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: Aging one breath at a time.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_03: Aging is intimately connected with time.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_03: When you realize you're aging, you also realize a number of things about time.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_03: Time is marching along.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have infinite time.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_03: Someday time will run out.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's all about time.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the things that older people experience
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: and science is validated is your experience of time changes as you get older.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: You know, when you're a kid, an afternoon can seem so expansive.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's like infinite.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_03: But when you're older, a whole year can go by and you think, where did that year go?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I just had a birthday.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: I just went to my Son's college graduation and, you know, all of that.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_03: What's that all about?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_03: And when you sit still the way we do,
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_03: and this is now very popular all over the world,
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_03: and focus on your breath,
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_03: something very interesting happens to time and our experience of time,
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_03: and you realize that As each breath comes and goes in your meditation,
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_03: it's almost like a clock.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_03: I characterize it as like a grandfather clock because it's very spacious
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: and dignified, like a, you know, a great big pendulum swimming back and forth.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I meant to say swinging, but I said swimming.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: You swim in your breath and the breath.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: Everything breathes that's alive.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: Even a single-celled animal respirates.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_03: And what's interesting about the language about breath, let me speak about that.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, the word spiritual comes from the Latin word for breath.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_03: It means breath.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: And expire means breath.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_03: To breathe out, we expire.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: It also means to die, okay?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_03: When you expire, you die.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_03: And inspire, think of what that means.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_03: To be inspired literally means to breathe in.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_03: So breathing in and breathing out are a way to tune in to the essence
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_03: of your living being, And also, it's a kind of miniature life.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_03: Each time you breathe in, life comes.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_03: Each time you breathe out, life goes.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: And one day, you will breathe out and you won't breathe in.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: One time we asked Suzuki, what happens when you die?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_03: And he said, nothing.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's the same as each breath.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_03: So that kind of breath meditation is very helpful to understand exactly how fast
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: or slow we're aging.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_03: And the answer is we age in reality one breath at a time.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_03: And attending to that,
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_03: doing that every day is a wonderful way to cut through all of our Anxiety and fears,
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: which we'll discuss, and emotions about aging.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_03: Breath is how you really age and it's actually quite ordinary and quite calm
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_03: and quite comforting, really.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: What are the stages of aging and how can our awareness of them affect our experience
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: of getting older?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, for my book and also in the class, I came up with these stages.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_03: Just very briefly, there's four.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: The first one is really the most important, and I'll discuss it in some detail.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's what I call lightning strikes.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_03: Lightning strikes is when it hits you at some point in your life.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, my gosh, I'm getting old.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: And it is like lightning,
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: and I have many stories in my class and also my book,
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_03: and I'll tell you my own story in a minute.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: The next stage is coming to terms with that.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_03: You have to face that.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's something new.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_03: It comes into awareness.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_03: And once it comes, it never goes away.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_03: You have to deal with it.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_03: You have to face it.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_03: The third stage I call adaptation.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_03: This is when the
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_03: new person that you have become in the face of this new awareness becomes
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: Comfortable.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_03: You become comfortable with it.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: You realize, well, this is how it is.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_03: This is who I am going forward.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: The last stage I call appreciation.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: And I have a great story in my book.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if it's in the class about I interviewed a 107-year-old woman for my book.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_03: A woman who started to weave when she was 90 and became an award-winning weaver at 102 and
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_03: And the statement that I still remember,
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_03: she was this very tiny woman,
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_03: and she said, you know, this is my life, I have no other.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: And all around the room were her weavings,
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: beautiful things that represented her appreciation of
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_03: her age of being old,
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_03: because she didn't start until she was 90.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: Going back to lightning strikes, this can happen in a number of ways.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oftentimes, it's an illness, a serious illness.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_03: And whether you're in your 30s or 40s or 50s,
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_03: if it's serious enough,
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: it really impresses you about the fact that you're getting old.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_03: I had cancer when I was quite young, 35 years old, and I'll talk about that in a minute.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_03: It can also be when your parents...
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_03: You could be hale and hearty,
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_03: but then suddenly you're dealing with an elderly parent who can't walk
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_03: or is bedridden or has cancer.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_03: And you have to, as the adult child or the family, suddenly have to deal with that.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's a big crisis for a lot of people.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_03: And that's another way that people...
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: Reflect back in their own life and say, well, mom or dad is going.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: I haven't been thinking about it and I'm going to go too.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_03: That lightning can strike that way.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_03: I've been dealing with
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: that, yeah.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, it's very common.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: And also, just very briefly, you can have all four stages happen in one event.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_03: In my case, my doctor said, well, you have cancer.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: And the first thing I thought about was...
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_03: My family, I had a nine-year-old son and a wife, and am I going to be there for them?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_03: He said, well, it's pretty curable.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_03: You know, this is a reasonably good cancer.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: And that was like lightning.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: 35, that's, you usually don't think about growing old when you're 35.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_03: I was young.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_03: I had my own business.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_03: I was successful.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_03: You know, all the outward signs and stuff.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I had to come to terms with that stage two.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: It took a little while.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_03: I wake up in the morning and I wouldn't remember that I had cancer for a few minutes
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_03: and it hit me.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: A lightning would hit me again, you know.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: And then I had to adapt.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_03: I had to live my life as a cancer patient.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_03: And many people in your audience have been through that
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_03: or they know people who've been through that.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_03: You go through chemo.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: It makes you sick.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_03: You go through radiation.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: You think you're going to die.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: And I came through that really a different person.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: And the fourth stage of appreciation,
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: of course,
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: I appreciated still being alive, not dying from cancer, and it's never left me.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: So that's just one example of what I mean by these stages that begin with that lightning.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_03: And I bet if you get comments back from your show,
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: people will say, well, yeah, This is how lightning struck for me.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody's got a story.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: How old are you now?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_03: I'm 79.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you've survived another 40?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: More than 40 years.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: And the doctors in the old days, they would never say cure about cancer.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_03: But now after 40 some years, I'm going to die of something else, not that cancer.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Can you just mention what the four stages of aging are?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so lighting strikes, that's the big one.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_03: And then coming to terms,
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: in other words,
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_03: there's the old you that didn't have the lighting,
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: and then there's the new you, and there's a kind of, which you am I?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: You know, am I the old or the new you?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_03: You've got to come to terms with that.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's kind of a battle, like I woke up and, no, I don't have cancer.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, wait, I do have cancer, you know?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_03: That's stage two.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_03: Stage three is adaptation.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_03: You move gradually into the new person and it gets integrated.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_03: And you realize this awareness will never go away.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: You are now a person who understands their aging.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_03: And then eventually,
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_03: like Sarah,
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_03: the 107-year-old woman,
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_03: the fourth stage you appreciate The life you have and all the things
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_03: that you didn't notice that are so wonderful about life.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_03: Those are the four stages.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Why are so many people fearful about aging and how does this relate
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: to Buddhism's five great fears?
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: How can we release that fear or face it?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I found this teaching in the old Buddhist text.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's not a well-known teaching.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_03: Very briefly, the five fears are fear of death, fear of illness.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: They say fear of unusual states of mind.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: Let's say fear of dementia, which is very big now because we're living long enough.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_03: And the fourth one,
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: fear of loss of livelihood, fear about money, fear about not having enough money.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_03: The fifth one is very strange.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_03: I won't talk about fear of public speaking.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_03: But there was a clue for me because fear of public speaking is a phobia.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's a recognized phobia.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: You panic when you have to.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_03: I've never had that,
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_03: but I've known people who have and they're going to die up there at the podium.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_03: All of these fears are kinds of panic.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_03: They're Things you just can't face, they're so difficult.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: Let me talk about the fourth one first,
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_03: rather than fear of death,
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_03: which is kind of obvious about aging,
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_03: but fear of loss of livelihood is very,
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: very common and painful and difficult for people who are near in retirement,
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: just past retirement.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: You go on the web and there's just endless amounts of articles and I live in
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: a senior living 55 plus community.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I've lived there for seven years and I'm okay financially.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: I had my own software business and I worked hard to build a nest egg,
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: but a lot of people are
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: really afraid about this.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: Also, some of the people here are quite elderly.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_03: They're in their eighties.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_03: They're in their nineties.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: They're actually dealing with serious illness or death as a daily concern.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_03: So.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: I'm even more convinced than when I wrote the book 14 years ago,
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: fear is a common companion for aging people, for elderly people.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_03: How do you deal with it?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I have a spiritual practice in the class called Calm Lake,
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: where you visualize a calm lake to deal with anxiety.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_03: But fear is, and this is Goes to my Buddhist background.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_03: Fear is actually a teacher for us.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_03: When we're afraid, it points us to something that we need to really look at.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: And the worst thing you can do about fear is to run away from it,
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_03: to self-medicate with substances, to numb yourself so you don't feel it.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's very hard to face your fears.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's even harder when you're alone.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's good to have a companion.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_03: There's just a random statistic I'll throw out,
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_03: which said people who are married live longer than people who don't.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_03: Part of that is you can talk about your fears over the breakfast table.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_03: This is very important.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_03: So the short answer about how you deal with fears is Is you pay attention to your fears.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_03: You appreciate your fears as guides.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: They're like spirits that come to you and say, you need to look at something.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_03: You need to do something.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_03: Whatever it is, appreciate your fears.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_03: I've never talked to anybody who liked being afraid.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's an unpleasant thing.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: About financial precarity,
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's becoming an even bigger issue as we live longer and are in danger
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: of outliving our money.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's something I think about.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: I also started Oldster when I couldn't get a job at 54.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I remember reading that and I really felt for you, but I know how common that is.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: I know how common that is.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know,
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: from my point of view,
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_03: I had a book proposal out there for a year to do another book.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_03: Younger people are wiping me out.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_03: I can't get a contract.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's coming for everybody.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_03: Or it is in AI, exactly, although that's in there.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_03: But it's, I mean, my book was about Buddhism and technology, which included it.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_03: But there are a lot of people half my age who know way more about it than I do.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_03: Publishers want to publish those people.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_03: So it's hitting everybody.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I did appreciate your saga about that.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_03: And maybe that was kind of a minor lightning striking for you, it sounds like.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: It was.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: And fortunately, I found, at least for now, a good solution.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: What are the advantages and honors of elderhood?
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: And how can we move past societal stigmas associated with aging to accept that role?
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_03: This topic is really interesting.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: I have a whole chapter in my book and I address it in the class.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_03: Elders used to be honored in every society.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: I'm speaking traditional society before the Industrial Revolution,
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_03: before the demise of extended families where grandparents and cousins and aunts
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: and great aunts lived in a dwelling with children and all of that.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: There was a time when you didn't need a word like elderhood.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's a little bit of a made up word because you don't see it around.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: It's not used that much.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: We talk about childhood.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_03: That's common.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_03: We talk about adulthood.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_03: We don't talk about elderhood anymore.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_03: And so when I do my book readings, when I do workshops on my book, people are sad.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_03: They know that when they were children,
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_03: their grandparents were there,
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_03: and the grandparents had honor, and the grandparents knew things.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_03: Not just knowledge like you can get on Google or AI.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_03: What you know as an elder,
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: and I don't know if this is always going to be true,
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_03: but I'm going to put it out there.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think your chatbot knows zip about elders.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_03: Why?
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_03: Because it hasn't lived as a biological living, breathing being.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: What elders know and what you can't Google unless you Google what somebody has said
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: about it is what it's like to live a long life.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_03: And there's two aspects to this that are important.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: One is External elderhood, like how you can function as an elder in society.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_03: Then there's the inner quality of elderhood,
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: which whether you go out there and do something or not, inside you feel
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: Your own sense of honor and dignity because you have experienced a whole life as a human being.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_03: And if you go to any place like a senior living community and sit with people
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: and ask them about their life and they begin to talk and tell stories,
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_03: you realize that their innate elderhood is In there,
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_03: they're just waiting for an opportunity to express it.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm a big fan of bringing elderhood back,
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_03: but I sort of feel that the way the world is going,
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_03: highly technological,
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_03: highly computer-based,
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_03: that it's going to be a while before people fully appreciate Not knowledge,
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_03: because elderhood's not about knowledge.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_03: You can get knowledge on your local chatbot or Google, which is now AI-driven.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_03: You can't get wisdom.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm using wisdom in a particular sense, which means it's in your heart.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's not in your brain.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_03: They all talk about, you know, with AI and stuff, it's going to be like the human brain.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: It's going to be better than the human brain.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: It'll take over the human brain.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_03: They never talk about the human heart.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_03: We talk about the human heart.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: We don't just mean the physical organ.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_03: We mean something else.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_03: And we all know what we mean.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_03: And elderhood is about the human heart.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_03: That's what it is.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I always,
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_03: when I see somebody at the store with a cane or a walker,
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_03: you know, trying to find their groceries and stuff, I always...
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_03: Remind myself that person has wisdom.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_03: They may or may not know it,
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: and they may be struggling physically, but there's a whole life story in there.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_03: Everyone has it who's older.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_03: And just to say it,
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_03: just to acknowledge it, to point it out, to call it out, I think is very valuable.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: So that's my speech, such as it's about being an elder in elderhood.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I've never understood why birthday cards make fun of people for getting older.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like, from a young age, it just never added up to me.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_03: Who makes fun of elders?
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: Birthday cards.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: Birthday cards make fun
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_03: of you.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, birthday cards joke about how old you are.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I just, it never made any sense to me.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know that that's like,
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: One of the most common forms of birthday card is that,
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: you know, you're making fun of somebody.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you know.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_03: Wouldn't it be great if somebody could do birthday cards that honor elders?
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I have a sense of humor and I like to kid around,
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: but there's just something about that line of joking that has never made sense to me
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: because I feel like we should be looking to people who are older.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_03: We should.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Honoring them and also like learning from them and I just don't get the old fart line of...
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_03: Ridiculous.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_03: But, you know,
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: I would guess that in traditional societies,
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_03: to disrespect an elder would be very bad.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_03: You would be shirmed if you did that.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of a reverence, and that's where humor comes from.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: But it just never made any sense to me.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, anyway, next question.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: What roles do gratitude and acceptance
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: play in aging as a spiritual practice?
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_03: And this has been picked up by a lot of psychological material recently about aging.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_03: But, you know, gratitude is the counterpoint to sadness or depression when you're older.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_03: And I have a specific practice in the book,
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_03: and it may be in the class too, which I call the gratitude walk.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_03: Walk, W-A-L-K, the gratitude walk.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_03: Just very briefly,
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_03: the gratitude walk is you take a walk,
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_03: just like you often do,
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_03: but you are attentive to anything you see or hear on the walk for
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_03: which you can feel gratitude.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_03: The time I came up with this was before I wrote the book, but I...
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_03: I was very, very ill.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_03: I had nearly died from a disease in my early fifties and I was in a rehab hospital
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_03: and I was in a wheelchair and my wife wheeled me out to a path through some woods
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_03: and there were some blackberries growing.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I reached up and, you know, I, I tasted the blackberry and I just overwhelmed.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I nearly died,
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: so I certainly appreciate why, but I really felt so grateful for the blackberries.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_03: So that was the genesis of this gratitude walk, which you can do.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_03: I often, when I take a walk, I'm particularly attuned to dogs.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_03: I love dogs and there are a lot of dogs here where I live.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm grateful for all the dogs, you know, dogs.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_03: Dogs aren't typically mean.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_03: Most dogs are very nice and they like you.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_03: And there's one dog that we meet every Saturday.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_03: He's an eight-year-old, she is an eight-year-old golden retriever.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_03: And she loves us.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_03: She loves us.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_03: She runs up and she's just shaking with excitement to see her friends and everything.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_03: And what you feel in situations like that is gratitude.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_03: There's probably chemicals in your body.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_03: That make you feel good dopamine or something.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_03: But I think aging people need to cultivate that because it is a medicine.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_03: It is the elixir that counterbalances the underlying sadness
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_03: that are various losses, which do accumulate as we get older, I have.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_03: I also have what I call my loving kindness prayer, which I've adapted.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: This is another spiritual practice I offer, and I'll just briefly read it as we conclude.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_03: This is adapted from a Buddhist prayer, and I'll just recite it.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's very short.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: As I grow older, may I be kind to myself.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_03: As I grow older, may I accept joy and sorrow.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_03: As I grow older, may I be happy and at peace.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's the prayer.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_03: And then you do it again,
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_03: and you say,
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_03: instead of as I,
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: but you can say,
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_03: may each of us,
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: those are your circle of friends,
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: people that you know, may each of us be kind to ourselves.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_03: And then finally you say, may all beings, everyone, be kind to themselves.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's not that easy to be kind to yourself when you're older.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_03: You start to be very critical of yourself.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_03: I know I'm critical.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_03: I drop things.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not quite as quick.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_03: I'm still pretty quick, but not as quick as I used to be.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_03: And I drop things and I say, stupid.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_03: You're so stupid.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_03: It has nothing to do with stupidity.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_03: It has nothing to do with any kind of criticism.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_03: And I have to step back and be kind to myself and realize it's okay.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, when I was 20 years old, I never dropped anything, but now I'm 79.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_03: I drop stuff.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_03: That can extend into so many areas of your life to offer kindness to yourself, offer acceptance.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_03: This is a wider aspect of gratitude that...
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_03: Believe me,
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_03: I've had people say of all the things that I've taught,
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_03: this little prayer is the thing that helps them the most.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_03: So I encourage your folks listening to try it, to use it.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_03: It does help.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's a kind of prayer.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_03: And prayer,
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_03: just to conclude,
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_03: circle back from what I first said at the beginning,
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_03: prayer is our most universal spiritual practice.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_03: And In the end,
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_03: if you could say one thing,
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_03: people could say,
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_03: tell me one thing that I can do about getting older, I could say, pray.
• 35:59
  [music]
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I really enjoyed this course and the book.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: It made me feel like I should be meditating
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: and doing breathing exercises more often,
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: which is something I've been saying my entire adult life.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, me too.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I kind of have my own meditation practice.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: I garden, which puts me in a really nice meditative state.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I guess we could stand to have a regular meditation practice.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: But you do remember that time on our third date where I invited you up
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: to my apartment to loan you my Jon Kabat-Zinn meditation tape and you just bolted
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: on me with it?
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, of course I remember that.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was all going too well.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_02: We'd had some really nice dates.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: I met this cute,
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: smart, funny guy, and he takes me up to his rundown but massive and amazing loft.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was the apartment, wasn't it?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: It was the apartment, because I was like, oh no, this is too good to be true.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: This is not going to work out.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: I better get the hell out of here.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I hightailed it out.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, yeah, thanks, buddy.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I was getting ready to take your coat and continue with the date.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: You were just gone.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was really terrified.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: But then you called two days later and you were like, do you still like me?
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: And we went out again.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_02: I still like you.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I still like you too.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we've been together ever since and that was 23 years ago this week.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_02: And here we are.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: And here we are.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you for joining us for the second episode of the Oldster Radio Hour.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: The Oldster Radio Hour is produced by Brian Macaluso.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: Our sponsor is Ruthann Harnish.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: We are considering taking on additional sponsors,
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: so if you're interested, reach out to us at oldstermag at gmail.com.
• 37:47
  [music]