Aging as a Spiritual Practice
How can aging be a form of spiritual practice? Many people think of ‘spiritual practice’ as attending religious services once a week, a morning devotional, or a commitment to serving others.
Perhaps you have a broader concept of spiritual practice to include anything that nourishes your spirit. This could be walking in nature or gardening. It might be reading sacred texts or writing poetry. You may play a musical instrument or paint with watercolors.
All these things fill a hunger that isn’t filled by chocolate, although I have caught myself trying! I want to propose something you may not have considered as a spiritual process: aging.
Often, I groan as I pull my clothes over a body that has become stiff over time. Seventy-six years, to be exact.
Have you ever noticed that the older you get, the shorter you are….and the farther away your feet are? Or is that just me?
I often find aging to be a pain in the neck. I want to ignore it, but there is always a stiff joint, a new wrinkle, or an ache in parts I didn’t know I had that reminds me that I am not as young as I used to be.
These body parts do what parts of anything do with chronic use and abuse. They rust and dent, and their paint peels and pieces drop off, just about as far from concepts of spirituality as you can get. Yet, I am coming to understand that aging is a spiritual practice as powerful as meditation or prayer.
One of the most significant gifts I have received in life is the need to slow down due to health problems. Those problems have a diagnosis (MS), but today, most of them get lumped under ‘aging.’
When I was in my early 30s, I navigated with a wheelchair and depended on others for transportation and sometimes for “activities of daily living” – ADLs, the medical system calls it.
I often said I lived my old age first. At least it felt that way.
I learned a lot from that time that resembled growing old. I learned how to ask for help, how to fail, how to begin again, and how to be grateful.
I learned (and continue to learn) how to surrender my fears, my foibles, and my future to what I call Mystery, and you may call God or Higher Power. I learned that my relationship with the divine grows as my body yields to the inevitable.
As I ponder how I nurture my soul with various practices like meditation, creativity, and ritual, little has impacted my inner growth and connection to the divine as much as simply growing older.
Embracing Change
How? Well, it begins with embracing change. One of the earliest significant changes we experience in life is puberty. Remember those years? A mix of feeling immortal, invulnerable, and terrified all at the same time.
No longer driven by the insanity of hormones, we can get blindsided by the insanity of aging. “What do you mean my thyroid levels are too low, my joints have no fluid, and my blurry eyes have cataracts.” (Sounds a bit like a car inspection, doesn’t it?)
I learned to accept changes in my body, put on reading glasses, and ask people to repeat themselves. I discovered changes in my capacity, no longer driving myself over the speed limit to arrive somewhere I didn’t know I was heading.
Slowing Down
A good friend and pickleball player was lamenting that at 64, she could no longer play as she did at 34…, yet she finished her last game successfully with a much younger partner. She told me how she listened to her body complaining the next day with its aches and pains.
Well, the bones ached, but what part of her was doing the listening?
That would be her soul.
She could listen, process her needs, and celebrate her successful game because playing pickleball not only fed her body with exercise and her need for being outside but her soul was nourished by being part of a community and finding a cause to celebrate. With a lot of gratitude, she could reflect on her experience with insight and wisdom about approaching her next game. For these reasons, pickleball is a spiritual practice that feeds her soul. I dare say any exercise done with intention and awareness can connect us with our source of wisdom and love if we are open to it.
Slowing
Along with embracing change comes the power of slowing down, waiting gracefully, and experiencing a ‘holy pause.’ We make tiny pauses every day. Eckart Tolle speaks of the pause between an inhale and exhale and the gap between our thoughts and says, “God is in the gap.”
In our slowing down, we grow in awareness of these gaps…and the presence of the divine in them.
Take a moment and feel the gap between your exhale and the next inhale. The more you can do this, the more you will experience a holy pause in every breath you take.
Daily Celebrations
Do you remember a time in your life when you never really noticed a flower bloom, a mushroom’s sudden arrival, or the robin building a nest in the trees? Although these are anticipated and welcome events in my life today, there was a time I was too busy and distracted by life concerns to stop and savor them.
Along with change and slowing down is a growing awareness of life in the cracks and crevices of life…and time to celebrate them. I have taken up photography in the last few years to celebrate everything from new beginnings to evidence of beauty in aging buildings and fences. Some people take up painting and singing, adding beauty to a world hungry for soul food. Others may raise chickens, rejoicing daily at discovering yet another egg.
My point is that our daily lives, along with aging, are spiritual practices if we have eyes to see and a heart to receive.
Whether you have been slowed down by illness or aging (or both), I invite you to reflect on how your soul is strengthened by your weakness (Corinthians 12:9-11).
Or, to put it another way, how have you connected to a strength beyond your natural power as you grapple with the effects of aging in your life?
How is your daily life different than it was twenty years ago, and how is that a celebration or a sacrifice? List all these things and discover that life, particularly aging (with awareness), is a practice that will feed your soul.
Will you join the many readers of TheReflectivePen?
