You can run from it, but you can\u2019t hide, so the inevitable question is<\/em><\/p>\n W<\/span>ith avoidance, rigidity, or resignation on a mournful protest through your remaining years? Or will you enhance the quality of your future life, no matter how long it may be, meeting aging with acceptance, curiosity, resilience, and gratitude?<\/p>\n This is a critical question to ponder as there is no denying that aging brings challenges \u2013 many of which you would rather not experience!<\/p>\n During my career as a psychologist specializing in treating mid-life and older clients, everyone who arrived at my consulting room shared a path of determined pursuit for the magic beans that would inoculate them from the pains and sorrows of life, only to experience continual disappointment.<\/p>\n I will not bore you with a recitation of my own and my clients\u2019 failed attempts of searching for paradise, as they would simply mirror your creative efforts, and you know what your failed endeavors have been!<\/p>\n The reality is that there is no way to transcend this human existence, a life that Buddhism accurately characterizes as comprising 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. But be clear that aging is not all bad news, for advancing years bring not only memento mori as a reminder of our mortality, but it also offers memento vivere as a remembrance that we must fully live the time that is still available.<\/p>\n Aging, therefore, can be a gift \u2013 a gift of conscious engagement with time, providing the opportunity for personal growth and development to become all of who you can be. However, what is needed to realize this potential is a practice that unwraps the gift of agency over your life, the understanding that you can impact your day-to-day, moment-to-moment experiences in ways you may never have thought possible.<\/p>\n Mindfulness is just such a response, for it offers the potential to meet both aging tasks – to remain cognizant of your limited existence while fully living each moment of your life. Make no mistake that mindfulness\u2019s goal is bold \u2013 it invites you to be aware, experience, and accept whatever is occurring in the present moment.<\/p>\n While mindfulness has been practiced for millennia, fast forward to the twentieth century when Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) treatment program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.<\/p>\n Starting in 1979, the program initially addressed stress conditions, but over the years, its applicability has extended to ever-widening audiences experiencing physical and emotional concerns. I have practiced mindfulness for over 30 years and discovered it to be especially helpful with mid-life and older psychotherapy clients interested in taking charge of effecting change in their lives.<\/p>\n What I found so powerful through applying mindfulness to life\u2019s experiences is that it invites you to consciously live this life, your precious life, in the most healthy, satisfying, and meaningful way possible. Mindfulness offers the possibility of a compassionate way of being during your mid-life and aging years by inviting you to create an engaged and vibrant personal connection to three aspects of time\u2019s inescapable presence:<\/p>\n The first invitation is to maintain your awareness that there is no stopping time. Mindfulness does not claim magically to create or extend time since that is impossible, for as Napoleon reminds us, \u201cYou can ask for anything you want except time.\u201d This invitation for ongoing awareness of time passing is remembered by evoking the rhetorical question, \u201cIf not now, when?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The second invitation concerns your experience of time \u2013 figuratively and literally to wake up to the unfolding nature of each moment. A 2010 Harvard study found that, on average, we are NOT paying attention to what we are experiencing 47% of the time!<\/p>\n This is a critical finding because attention turns out to be the brain\u2019s boss \u2013 all cognitive and emotional activities follow where you put your attention. As the Jedi master, Yoda, succinctly concludes: \u201cYour focus determines your reality.<\/em>\u201d With our Western culture\u2019s emphasis on personal responsibility, it is sobering to realize how little control you have over where your attention is focused during your waking life!<\/p>\n And this inattention to the task at hand does not just leave us basking in blissful fantasies or memories, with the study\u2019s frank conclusion aptly summarized in its title, \u201cA Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind<\/em>.\u201d We end up missing our life, missing it moment by moment, leaving us feeling dissatisfied and unhappy!<\/p>\n Mindfulness invites us to take charge of our attention by training our focus to be present where we want it, when we want it, moment by moment.<\/p>\n The third invitation involves establishing a new relationship with time. To be aware and present during pleasurable moments, such as sitting on a tropical beach sipping a favorite beverage, is not likely that difficult for most people. Still, mindfulness recognizes that life is not all blissfully enchanting!<\/p>\n Therefore, the task becomes learning how to be in relationship with all of life, including more complex and challenging experiences. It does not mean you must like or enjoy such times because some of life is undeniably painful.<\/p>\n Instead, the quality of your relationship with each moment will depend not so much on what occurs but critically on your attitudes and beliefs toward it. Learning how to meet these inevitable provocative events will, in no small measure, determine the overall quality of your life.<\/p>\n Mindfulness acknowledges these three invitations through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, to all you experience with an attitude of acceptance and non-judging. It is a simple concept to understand but requires training to enjoy its benefits.<\/p>\n Daily practice over an 8 to 9-week program of instruction is typically undertaken to learn and integrate skills and attitudes to meet the three invitations to each moment. While this investment of time and energy may appear considerable, it is not arduous and, in fact, usually is experienced as a welcome addition to daily life. Many of my students in their seventies and eighties commonly conclude that they wish they had learned and employed these skills thirty years earlier!<\/p>\n Mindfulness does not promise to transcend your human existence; it lays no claim to creating a blissful existence. Instead, it offers a proven learning process to transform your awareness, experience, and relationship of moment-to-moment events and encounters, especially those of a more challenging and painful nature.<\/p>\n The application of mindfulness practice to numerous physical and emotional concerns has been studied extensively over the years. Results indicate positive benefits, including reduced symptoms, enhanced quality of life, reduced emotional reactivity accompanying increased emotional tolerance, and improved cognitive efficiency.<\/p>\n Research has also found that it potentially slows the normal shrinkage of the brain. At age fifty, long-term meditators\u2019 brains have been found to be \u2018younger\u2019 by seven and a half years compared to brains of nonmeditators of the same age. While no research indicates that mindfulness can reverse brain atrophy, it is possible to believe that it can be slowed.<\/p>\n Since retiring from my clinical practice in 2017, I have volunteered to teach mindfulness to hospice bereavement and palliative care patients. Most patients have been between fifty to eighty-nine years old, and many have never heard of mindfulness before enrolment.<\/p>\n The benefits expressed by participants have been very gratifying. Despite their considerable personal losses, they have found ways to meet their sorrow and pain while also finding ways to experience their life openly and wholeheartedly.<\/p>\n Common evaluative comments include feeling \u201cgrounded; more peaceful; confident; kinder to myself; appreciative and accepting of life; settled; gained valuable new tools for not only my grief but my life in general<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n The benefits initially unearthed with mindfulness endure with practice. Rod Butters, 58, is a Hall of Fame Canadian Chef, Restaurateur & Author based in the beautiful Okanagan Valley of British Columbia with his dog Olive. Since a heart attack in 2014, he has been practicing mindfulness and enjoying its continually unfolding benefits:<\/p>\n \u201cAs a Chef\/Restaurateur of 4 award-winning operations, stress in all forms is a consistent part of my day, every day. The practice of mindfulness has certainly helped combat the physical and mental challenges of my career. I can appreciate with gratitude the moments of my day, and most importantly, my heart is healthier in all ways. It has without a doubt saved my businesses and my life.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Not a bad return for your investment of mindfulness with yourself! It is a gift at any age, but at this time of your life, I envision mindfulness practices as offering self-sung serenades, encouraging you to lovingly court and support yourself throughout your aging moonlit years.<\/p>\n For if not now, when?<\/p>\n How to apply mindfulness to the gift of aging<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12963,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160,161],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall-2022","category-fall-2022-features"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12826"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13186,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12826\/revisions\/13186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyaging.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How Are You Going to Meet It?<\/h3>\n
Aging Can Be a Gift<\/h3>\n
Applying Mindfulness to Life\u2019s Experiences<\/h3>\n
Awareness<\/h4>\n
Experience<\/h4>\n
Relationship<\/h4>\n
Positive Benefits of Mindfulness<\/h3>\n
Dr. Gordon Wallace is the author of the award-winning book Moonlight Serenade: Embracing Aging Mindfully<\/em><\/a>. For more information, visit www.embracingagingmindfully.com<\/a>.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"