Aging is an emotionally challenging experience for most people at least at times, and is sometimes one of the most difficult. Mindfulness meditation, thankfully, is a friend that can help create more ease with the process.
Studies have found that meditation seems to create improved physical health benefits such as lowered blood pressure, better cancer outcomes, slowing structural degeneration of the brain, and many others. Thus, meditation may be able, as the years march on, to help to simply keep us healthier and full of vitality for longer.
Most meditation techniques take some degree of intentionality and effort, which have us “swim upstream” against the common human tendencies towards lethargy, numbness, and unconsciousness. I have found that the effort that I put into my meditation practice tends to spark positive effort in the rest of my life, in helping me to stay mentally and physically active and lively, which leads to feeling relatively young compared with the alternative.
Also, when we practice mindfulness, we often notice and directly perceive that everything is changing, all of the time. As we meditate, we watch all varieties of human experience – the breath, body sensations, sounds, emotions, thoughts, and all else – come into being, exist for a while, and then disappear, in a never-ending flow. Eventually, many meditators directly learn that there is nothing that we can hold onto for long, and that it works best to let the river of life flow without fruitlessly trying to grab onto it or push anything away. This growth can help us to have less clinging and resistance as the major elements of our life – jobs, homes, love partnerships, and all else – change, as they come into being and then depart.
In mindfulness, we cultivate a sense of spacious, patient friendliness and acceptance for all that we perceive, even the phenomena that we don’t like. We take the attitude, “Hey, it looks like I have a pain in the knee today, and also my mind is busy and scattered. Well, I wouldn’t choose either of those – but, it just is what it is, perfect in its own way. I will mindfully open to and make space for it.” This willingness to tolerate undesirable experiences can also help to us create more of a sense of acceptance and allowing as we notice that our body is sagging and skin wrinkling, that we have less energy and physical resilience than we did when younger, that the section in our address books for friends who are no longer with us is growing longer, and other such things that we might otherwise tighten up against.
Finally, for many some meditation can end up being part of a spiritual path. Some find that when we get very intimate with the exact human that we are and the exact way that the world seems to us, something more expansive, transcendent, and luminous may shine through it all. Experiences like that have helped some people to feel less fear and more openness about the final destination at the end of aging. One can discover that the whole process is just another part of life, like eating or sleeping, and, in the end, need not be that much more strange or disturbing.