Tara Brach - Fear of Aging - Finding Freedom in this Impermanent World – Part 1 (2021-03-17)

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Fear of Aging - Finding Freedom in this Impermanent World – Part 1 (2021-03-17) - While it's natural to have fears of what's ahead, when we learn to face the inevitability of change and loss without resistance, we discover true peace and freedom in the midst. In a very direct way, our awareness of impermanence awakens unconditional loving. These two talks explore the ways we habitually deny or resist reality, and the three interrelated pathways—refuge in the present moment, love and awareness—that liberate us. NOTE: The quoted prayer "And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well" is from 14th century mystic, Julian of Norwich, in her work "Revelations of Divine Love."

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. A young therapist who I'm mentoring wrote to me on her 30th birthday, and she shared her fears of aging. The inquiry for her was, how will I get my needs met if I'm no longer young, cute, smart. And really, the inquiry of nobody will care about me as an adult the way they would as a child. And there are many in their 20s who fear the fact that they're going to have to be taking

on all the responsibilities of an adult and mourn the lost freedom of youth. And then in the last weeks I had a question from a man in his late 70s, how to deal with the fear of depending on others as he got older, losing independence. Another woman in her 70s asked me about how to work with her fears of running out of money. So many have that kind of fear fantasy of, I'm going to be penniless and homeless on the streets. Another woman in her 60s, the fear of being alone. There's fear of aging throughout the spectrum. And like all fear, it's about what's ahead, what's coming and what will lose. And of course, we've got a lot to lose. We're attached to a lot of life. I'm going to name some things you

might sense what's yours. I mean, most of us want to in some way look at attractive, often look young, are attached to being healthy, attached to being strong, having a full libido, being competent with daily tasks, feeling a sense of being powerful, mentally clear, financially secure, to be contributing, to be a player, to be relevant, to be able to take care of ourselves, to be independent. and we want to hold on to those we love and we want to hold on to our own lives. So there's different levels perhaps of depth or charge, but whatever brings up attachment for us, whatever it is, none of it lasts.

You know, whatever we do have, we lose. and how we face this reality of our impermanence of mortality, it's really at the center of spiritual life. So what that means is to the degree that you deny or resist impermanence, you'll suffer. and, and this is really the spiritual promise, as you open to the reality that these bodies and minds and lives are temporary, there's pain, but through being with that pain, through opening, you'll open to loving and living more fully. So that's the promise that it's in opening to the reality of impermanence and loss that we actually get to live it fully.

In a profound way, what this means is that we touch peace, that rather than tensing against what's ahead, we rest in a kind of presence that feels that all is well. And isn't that really what we want to be able to trust that all's well right here, you know, that it's going to be okay, that even with the pain of sickness and loss, even with death, in the deepest way, all is well. I mean, isn't trusting this the only way we can relax? I think about Krishna-Merti, he's an Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher,

who in the later part of his life really surprised his followers, his audience. And this is what he said. He said, do you want to know my secret? They were very alert because they've been following them from decades. And many still fail to grasp his teachings. So here he's saying, do you want to know my secret? This is my secret. I don't mind what happens.

I don't mind what happens. This is a letting go of the belief that something's wrong with aging, with sickness, with dying. It's a profound radical acceptance of what's unfolding right here. And it's the beginning of freedom. It's the portal to freedom. One Buddhist master describes it as a heart that is ready for any, anything. I really like that. A heart that's ready for anything. You can just feel that in that readiness there's just this open, tender presence. So this talk and reflection, as you can tell,

is really going to be focusing on aging and impermanence and inevitable loss, really how we're relating to what's unfolding. And before I continue, let's take our own pulse, inviting you to do a bit of a self-reflection. And if it helps to close your eyes or lower your gaze, feel your breath, just come right here. What expressions of aging, of impermanence or loss, are you? you facing? What are you aware of? Are you of aging to do with your body or your mind? Are ways that your life is really distinctively changing, things you've had to let go of?

When you bring to mind your life is moving through time and maybe you sense the next five years or ten years or twenty years depending on how old you are, when you sense what's unfolding, what's ahead. How are you relating? How do you relate to the sense of yourself as aging? Is there reactivity like fear or wish it was different? Avoidance? Grief or is there acceptance? The heart that's ready for anything, a kind of curiosity and openness, ease? Is there a sense at all's well, it's going to be okay. You can keep considering this, and if you're a journaler, you might want to journal a little of how am I relating to aging? For me, the awareness of this body's impermanence is pretty much daily, you know, what's fading or going. I'm definitely

reminded each evening when I can't stay vertical past 8.30 p.m., but especially I noticed when I was traveling more, and that was before a pandemic, that increasing vulnerability of age of not being able to count on my energy level, increasingly difficult to teach in the evening, you know, going to different time zones. So I'm 67, and with many, I have a lot of friends around my age and older, actually, and so much the conversations are inevitably include, well, how's your body doing? How's your health? And one friend described this as our organ recital, you know, just going through it all. And I'm blessed right now to be in a very good health season.

And I don't take it for granted for a moment. Very aware of how this body's only becoming higher maintenance, you know, how much I have to work to not lose muscle and balance and so on, how I have to keep upping my level of my hearing age. Someone sent me this, I'll share with you a bit ago. An 84-year-old man went to the doctor for a physical. A few days later, the doctor saw him walking down the street with a gorgeous young woman on his arm. The next time the doctor saw him, he asked him how he was doing. Great, said the old guy. I did just what you told me. Get a hot mama and be cheerful. I didn't say that, said the doctor. I said, you've got heart murmur, be careful. I enjoyed it. I'm kind of putting it in without it being too

relevant, but it actually helps to be light about it because, you know, we can get so grim and tense. But to name, honestly, for myself, where I feel real vulnerability around what's ahead, it's when I imagine the suffering of dear ones who are seriously ill. That's kind of what I tense against, especially one who's young, and losing them. And so in this domain, when this comes up for me with each of them, I have to purposely deepen attention and I have to watch out for where my inclination with them are to want to fix, make better to find answers and how that, because that blocks just the pure vulnerability and sorrow that's there. So I have to keep opening to be with

vulnerability. And in the moments that I do, I find my way to that very large tenderness that has room for the inevitable comings and goings. It's a heart space that's more at peace. So we'll look together at the habits that prevent us from being with reality and the pathways home to peace, to inner freedom, to finding happiness in the midst of this living, dying world, really. to start by saying that we humans live with the apprehension of our demise, probably more than any other species, because of our cognition, that we have the capacity to project in our mind and symbolically represent and then feel into a sense of the future. So we're fearful of impending failures and losses and the loss of life.

and for millions of years we've been using bite, flight, freeze. The survival brain has actively protected our vulnerability and we protect our lives with it. And we need our survival brain to make it. And here's where the suffering comes in. It's when due to our cognitions, we fixate on the future. we habituate to expecting danger and loss and our survival brains regularly activated in trying to control things. So it dominates our life experience. So it's all about surviving, not flourishing, and it locks in to overdrive. So from the perspective of the awakening of consciousness,

this is a developmental arrest where in our human development, we get caught in trying to fight whatever makes us feel vulnerable and rather than doing what we need to do just to survive but continuing to wake up, that we get locked in that phase. And we're trapped in this kind of fearful reactivity of a threatened self. rather than accessing and living from our whole brain, from our wise heart, from our awake awareness, which is our potential. So if we look at the universal patterns of self-protection, how they come up around aging, what we see is we tighten our body, you know, when we feel threatened, when we think

there's something ahead that's dangerous. We tighten our body and we started very, very early on with anything we're afraid of. We are so familiar with tension. We often don't realize how our posture and our entire body is in some way tensing against what's around the corner, tensing against what's ahead. So that's something to watch. Just to notice how one level of fight-flight freeze is this constant chronic tensing of our body against what's ahead. And then there's the contractions in the mind where the things that frighten us about aging

and about loss, there's avoidance, there's denial, or else the mind contracts by obsessing. and fixating, are blaming. A woman sent her son an email and it said, start worrying, details to follow. We know what that's like, that it's kind of like that anxiety that's looking for a place to glom on. So these are, you know, I'm just naming the different ways that our survival brain can dominate and keep us small. and reactive rather than living from our fullness. When we're feeling that sense of something bad's ahead, fear of aging, the fear of loss, we have all sorts of ways that we try to numb ourselves to control our feelings.

And we use substances, whether it's marijuana, alcohol, sugar and food, we overuse to in some way control and manipulate how we're feeling. Many of us overwork so that we don't have to come into feeling that anxiety and that vulnerability. Are we distract ourselves online? And then we have all these behaviors of over-controlling our own bodies. Again, that fear of aging, trying to do that age prevention kind of activities will over exercise or become anorexic or get addicted to fixing our body and our face cosmetically. So these are just, again, survival-brain-driven ways that we avoid facing reality, making peace with reality. And one of the biggest is that we get controlling of others.

rather than opening to how this life is, we try to fix others, change others, get them to behave as we want because it helps us temporarily feel more safe and in control. One story, a little girl sitting and watching her mother do the dishes and she notices that her mother has several strands of white hair sticking out of her brunette, basically brunette head. So she asked, Mom, how come some of your hairs are white? And her mother replied, well, every time you do something wrong, make me upset, one of my hairs turns white. A little girl thought about this revelation for a while and then she said, so mama, how come all grandma's hairs are white? So these control strategies, guilting. So of course, the most pernicious survival. survival brain strategy of avoiding the out-of-control feeling of loss, of insecurity is aggression, where we in some way try to dominate oppress and violate others as a way of securing our position. And again, this is in a deep way we're trying to avoid vulnerability to secure ourselves by being on top of

others in some way. And, you know, many of the most vehement white supremac are white people who are low in our society's caste system economically insecure, not feeling valued or respected, because they're the ones who fear that those at the very bottom of the caste system, which are black people, indigenous, people of color, will threaten their status. So they cling to being above the lowest level, keeping that population down. And it's not just the white supremacist. It's like anytime there's domination, there's a need to secure one's position which comes out of fear. So not facing our fears, whichever way they take shape, not facing our fear, not facing our security, about feeling valuable, powerful, making it leads to having our survival brain run

our life and harm others. And so this is our predicament, is that we each have these survival strategies to avoid the vulnerability of feeling powerless, of aging, of loss, and what happens is they block our living. When we're dominated by fight-flight-freeze, we're not present. We lose intimacy with our inner life, with each other. Really, we forget our belonging to spirit. John O'Donohue wrote that we manage our lives so fully so as to miss out on this great mystery we're involved with, trying to block out the reality

of impermanence we actually miss out. We're in a trance, we're kind of sleepwalking through our lives. It's only when we truly face reality that these lives are temporary, that we really face that, that we awaken and live from our heart. And so this is actually the crux of the story of the Buddha's emergence into spiritual life. The seminal experience that led to his spiritual practice in awakening, he was a young man, Siddhartha, living this really protected life with every conceivable pleasure in these what are called pleasure palaces and in his father's kingdom.

But something in him motivated him to go beyond the palace gates and see what life was really like. In other words, he was motivated to come closer into reality. And what happened when he left the palace gates was he encountered a sick person, then an old person, and then a corpse. And when he asked, well, this happened to me too, he was told, yeah, this is all of us. And then he saw a wandering monk walking very serenely through the streets.

And the inquiry that shaped his life became, how in the face of impermanence do we find peace, happiness and freedom. That's the inquiry. And his story is all of our stories. I mean, every one of you in some ways has stepped beyond the palace gates. Either you were forced to or you chose to, but you did. And are facing the realness of aging and loss. everyone. We are all facing this inherent insecurity of life, that it's out of control and it's more in our collective psyche now than ever with the global pandemics that have been happening, the sense that we don't know what's ahead, we can't secure ourselves, we're vulnerable. And what happens to most of us,

when it's very close in and personal in our lives. When we lose somebody or when we get a diagnosis that lets us know that we're not here forever, there's a waking up, there's a deepening of presence. Many people talk about how much they value what's going on. But we also have the habit of trying to get more comfortable and we go back into our trance some. We numb or ignore or get back into controlling behaviors. So we swing some. But we've all stepped outside the gates.

And you might reflect, and we'll just take a moment again to pause here. Again, kind of taking your own pulse here, taking a few breaths, feeling yourself right here, and then just exploring, you know, how in your life have you most consciously left the past? palace and where has that happened? Where you've really been faced with perhaps the loss of a relationship, somebody dies, relationship fails, something that's kind of shook the grounds and you realize life's not under your control and things happen, losses happen. Maybe you've been faced with your own mortality through an illness, maybe aging is very

very, very distinctive. So how have you faced this fundamental insecurity that we all live with? And how has it served awakening for you? How has it deepened your understanding and wisdom? And are you aware of your strategies for warding off reality, for blocking, ignoring, denying, perhaps using substances to numb yourself or overworking, trying to fix things that can't be fixed, controlling, blaming, aggressing. What are your strategies when you're going back into trance? Here's what we can trust is that we all go back into forgetting, blocking, get habituated, but awareness doesn't fully go back to sleep.

There's a place in you that knows that these bodies and minds are of the nature to come and go. And a part of you that knows that you need a way of relating to this that will give you inner freedom, that we all have to find a way to work with fear and loss. My most direct, jarring experience of stepping outside the palace was about 15 years ago when I spiraled into a serious illness and it lasted so long and I kept getting worse that I had no confidence or certainty that I'd ever recover.

and I had to cancel a lot of my teaching because I never knew if I'd be well enough to show up. And for several years, my mobility was really severely limited. I couldn't walk up and down any sort of incline. So this was loss. I was athletic and very attached to being in nature and outside and moving. It was a huge loss. and of course I was very attached to being able to work and teach and serve. So anyway, I had a face true insecurity around the whole process of aging and sickness and loss.

I was evicted from the palace. And I've shared about this a lot because it forced me more deeply into that universal spiritual inquiry. You know, how do we find peace, happiness, freedom in the face of an uncontrollable and permanent existence? And my prayer became very conscious and focused, may I love life no matter what? You know, may I find peace and happiness in the face of this loss? And I wrote my book True Refuge out of that experience because, the book tracked three archetypal pathways that for me became very alive and very immediate as the pathways to that peace in the midst of living and dying.

And those pathways are articulated beautifully in the Buddhist tradition as Buddha, Dharma, and Sanga. And they're completely interrelated. And Buddha is referring to the awareness that lives through all of us, our formless being. Some might call it spirit or divine. So taking refuge in that's the first Buddhist refuge. The second, Dharma, means belonging to truth,

the direct contact and knowing of what's right here now, taking refuge in presence. So there's taking refuge in our spirit and awareness, there's taking refuge right in the present moment. And then the third refuge, Sanga, is, in Buddhism, refers to the community of spiritual seekers. And more broadly, it's really a refuge in love, in the love that connects us with all beings. So each of them brings up the other. And each is a true refuge.

It's a pathway to trusting really in the midst of all this insecurity of life that all is well. It's really that trust that really frees us. So what we'll do now is explore how we open to each refuge in the face of aging and loss. And we'll start with the refuge of truth, the experience of waking up to this present moment, Because it's really the starting place for most mindfulness training. And then in the next talk that I'll be giving, we'll be looking at how we take refuge in love and an awareness as we work with aging. So taking refuge in truth means waking up from the stories that keep us resisting and

fighting reality. and opening into the embodied experience of the moment. The pathway to truth means we have to wake up from our head and come into our heart and body. And that's really right at the center of our meditation training, the skill of waking up from our thoughts, you know, noticing thinking, thinking, not judging them, just recognizing them, and coming right back here now.

that skill is really right at the center of taking refuge in the Dharma, in the truth, in the moment. And in particular, this is the suffering of aging, is that we get caught in fear thoughts about what's ahead. And that then creates a biochemistry of fear in the body and we get caught in that circling. and we're living in a kind of chronic, anxious state. And that's what prevents us from really finding peace and freedom. And you've probably noticed this compulsion to fixate on what bad is going to happen around the corner. That's the survival brain. That's a survival brain that's kind of driving our thoughts to look for what's wrong

and keeping us in this kind of tense, vigilant state. So during one of the hardest seasons of the illness I was describing, and this was in my 50s, 15 years ago to 10 years ago, it lasted about five years, I spent a week in the hospital. I had bradycardia, my heart pulse were very slow, I was very, very weak. and I had to go in right at the time of our winter retreat, and I remember so well having to cancel because I was set to lead it and how my husband Jonathan and many of my friends were there and here I was up here in Virginia in a hospital. And my brain just was obsessing about the future, how much life I'd have to let go of and

trying to figure out what was wrong with me and how much worse I would get. So this is the survival brain in action. And at one point there was an inner voice that just went, I'm suffering. This is suffering. Any thought of what's ahead was depressing or scary and I was trapped in fear and my mind just kept lurching ahead. And I'm sure as I say this, many of you are familiar that if you've lost a dear one, someone very close or after at a divorce or you've had a diagnosis yourself that's very serious, any thought of the future can be pure pain. So that's what was going on. And I remembered the words of Rumi who said in one of his poems, Forget the future.

forget the future. I'd worship someone who could do that. So that became a real practice support. I'd have thoughts about the future, keep coming up, and I'd just breathe and say, okay, come back, forget the future, come back to just this, just this. And when I say just this, I mean, just these sounds or just see the sky out. of the window or just feeling the hospital gown on my skin or the feeling of the hard floors I was walking up and down the corridor in the hospital. Just hear the sound of the murmuring

of the nurse with another patient just this much and I kept very concretely just anchoring myself in just this, just this. And I have found myself and working with others, that when caught in a disturbing future story, which many aging stories can be, to fully anchor in now, just even using the words as I described it, sound of the car, sound of the wind, feeling myself sitting on the chair, air on the face, you know, ache in the back, dog sleeping on the chair, you know, to get ourselves right here, really helps. And of course, right here, if we keep paying attention, it's going to include the feelings that we don't want to feel. So back to the hospital, I would see myself lurching

into the future and I'd right here, right here. And I'd have to really feel, there was a lot of disturbance in my body. And another teaching really helped me. with that, which are the words, meet your edge and soften. And this one takes a real willingness. Meet your edge and soften because I would be lurching ahead with my mind. I'd come back here, but here was fear in my body. And when fear arises, it's because there's something that we're facing that feels unfamiliar, unknown, potentially painful.

So meet your edge and soften. willingly contact that vulnerability and this is the portal. This is the entry to true refuge, taking refuge in truth, taking refuge in Dharma and presence, is willing to contact that vulnerability, willing to meet our edge and soften, meeting reality, reality. It inevitably means meeting vulnerability. And if there's trauma, and I always like to remember to say this, it has to be done really, really gradually and with support. And we have to feel stable enough and resourced enough. Our meeting our edge can really be overwhelming. But for me, it wasn't trauma. It was just really, really, really pain.

And so I'd go under the future thinking all the fears of losing my life and losing everything that I really enjoyed and I'd get in touch with that deep existential fear, losing what I love, breathing with it, sitting down into it, saying yes to it, softening the resistance and feeling it, feeling it, this real knot and heat and daggered feeling in my chest. And gradually I found myself touching under that fear into a real purity of grief. So rather than the fear, meeting my edge and softening, soften me into deep, deep grieving, this kind of heartbreaking open. And when I really allowed that process, it opened into this very vast and tender space.

It's really what our hearts are when we're not resisting reality is vast, tender space. And it comes from meeting our edge and softening over and over. This is what it means to take refuge and truth in the moment, letting what's here be here and opening to it. And by doing that, here's what happens. We shift from being imprisoned in that sense of I'm a separate self and resisting. We shift from that identity where we're tensing against the future to occupying that tender presence, which is a sense of wholeness, which is a sense of belonging to everything,

of having the world in our hearts. And with that, with that shift in identity to becoming that wholeness, that tenderness, that space, the belonging that we experience lets us know that all is well. That is the feeling, that all is well. So as I say this to you, I want to share one of my favorite stories, and I don't know if I've ever spoken it in a talk, I heard it years ago, and I only remember a little bits of it, but it was about a Tibetan woodcutter.

And he was a very humble and wise man and many people would come to seek his wisdom. And in the early decades of his teachings, he taught these very deeply empowering practices with intricate visualizations and mantras and Tibetan yogas. but as he got older, his teaching got increasingly simple. And his final years, people would come just as many people, but he'd tell them, you know, I can't remember all those words, postures, all the images. But his teaching was just rest in reality.

Just know that all is well. Rest in reality. know that all as well. I love that because I've learned all sorts of teachings that the four this is and the six that's and the 10, this is a lot of teachings that we have to remember a lot of pieces and many, many yoga postures and many visualizations and all sorts of stuff. But it's true that as we get older or I'll speak for myself, I can't remember a lot of things. And especially when I'm rattled, when I'm feeling shaken up in some way or fearful,

it has to get really simple. And that's what I love about these three refuges. And right now we're talking about the refuge in truth in the present moment. there's something very, very simple, just come here and feel and be with what's right here. That we can remember, resting in reality, discovering that all is well. Here, now, always, a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything. and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. Costing not less than everything is such a powerful phrase because we have to let go of our

ideas and thoughts of the future and the past. We have to let go of it all and just hear now always what's. right here. And yet that's the portal. In that presence with what's right here, we discover a spaciousness and a tenderness and an ease that lets us trust. So we'll do a short practice on finding refuge and truth in presence when we are afraid of what's to come. And then as I mentioned, the talk that'll follow, it's part two on fear of aging, we'll look at how taking refuge in love and taking refuge in awareness, they're so interwoven, also brings us to that deep peace and well-being. If you'd like to,

you might let your gaze go downward or close your eyes. Invite yourself right here. Feel your body breathing. Listen to the sounds that are here. Feel the aliveness in your body. And I'd like to invite you to a sense in your life if there's anything that you're tensing against about the future. Anything to do with aging or loss could be your own body,

your own mind, finances, security, future loss. could be losing others to take a moment to whatever comes to mind, to sense the way that you think about it that ends up frightening you, just you're imagining into the future, whatever typical way you might envision the future that's scary. There may be images, words, words in your mind and see if you can now put a frame around all of that, just as if you're turning the thoughts into a static picture, just put a frame around it and say, okay, this is the future. And then just tell yourself there's nothing ahead. Let's forget the future, let's be right here. And again you might be aware right here of sounds,

here coming into the body of your body breathing and you might very honestly feel into what's underneath those thoughts in your body because when we're afraid of the future that fears in our body and you can check kind of the midline of your body, your throat, your heart, belly. Let's put your hand wherever you are aware of feeling the most vulnerability. very gentle and feel that willingness to meet your edge and soften. And if it feels like it's too much at any point, open your eyes, notice what's around you, reground yourself, move your attention away. But if you can, just sense this willingness to gentle into the fear.

to breathe with it, to feel it, to let the lightness and tenderness of your touch kind of be a companion. You might even ask what's wanting attention, what really wants attention inside and bring a very caring presence and it feels tolerable, really explore what it means to truly soften and allow what's here to be here, continuing to breathe with as if you could breathe in and touch what's here directly with your attention, breathe out and feel the space and the tenderness that's around it, continuing to arrive right here, right here. It's as if your heart is saying yes to whatever's here. I see you, I feel you, acknowledging the realness with real tenderness, allowing.

Become aware of the quality of presence that's here. The awareness and tenderness that's being with the pain, the vulnerability, the tender vulnerability. The tender heart space is here. Sense that you can allow whatever is hurting, allow the fear plays to float in that heart space. That there's room. You might even sense that heart space is so spacious, so vast, that includes all of us, all of us living with the fear of loss, the insecurity. It's so universal. Continuing to sense, that presence, that heart space, really as home that in remembering this presence that can include in such a tender, open-awake way, in remembering this, there can be fundamental

well-being, true refuge. And if only we attend, we can find our way again and again into this pure presence, this place of knowing and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. As you're ready, taking some full breaths and opening your eyes. So thank you, friends, for being willing to explore. There's something about this openness to directly facing the reality of our lives that actually brings alive the love and the awareness that we're afraid to lose. It's a pathway actually that leads to real joy and full beingness.

So it's a pleasure to be with you in it, and I look forward to continuing this exploration next round. Blessings. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.