Dying Well

The following material is excerpted and based on the book, Every Breath, New Chances: How to Age with Honor and Dignity (A Guide for Men) by Lewis Richmond. However, much of the information speaks to both men and women. The intent here is to share a number of valuable insights.

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My entire generation is moving toward its end. Doctors can help us with our physical suffering but not with the mental suffering that accompanies the loss of power, authority, and meaningfulness—along with the physical decay—that are the final hurdles of human life.

Learning to Die Well

We are all dying, and our only viable option is to strive to die well. Dying well means, first and foremost, accepting what is happening to us without evasion or excuse.

It is our egos, our illusions of a separate, graspable, identifiable self, that must learn to face and accept the inevitable declines and losses – if we are to end our days with joy, dignity, acceptance, and the internal freedom to step aside from our own limited distractions and concerns and not miss the miracle that we participate in until our very last breath.

This is something we can do, but in order to do it, we must accept what appears to be so difficult for us—loss, weakness, and disappearance. It can be done, and there are legions of elder exemplars to demonstrate how. … There is no such thing as dying. We are either alive or dead, and while we’re alive, we’re participating in a miraculous, star-lit universe. Why miss a second of it? Why not learn to love our growing old? (From the Foreword by Peter Coyote)

May we come to see that aging is not something to avoid or conquer, but an experience to be explored and understood.

Aging is a Two-Faced Coin.

On one side is loss—loss of virility, strength, power, possibility, opportunity, and health. On the other side is transformation and growth. This transformation is not an intellectual concept. It is not something that can be grasped merely through reading or thinking. The aging journey is emotional; it happens in the realm of feeling.

Conscious Aging

In spite of what is covered in health magazines, aging includes considerably more than a good diet, listening to your doctor, and getting enough exercise. There is an inner aspect of aging—a quality of personal growth and development—that many of us may not be noticing or tending to. This is what may be called “conscious aging,” and it is not something we are typically taught how to do.

Five Fears that Men Have About Aging

Paula Spencer Scott, writing for the online magazine Caring has identified five fears that men have about aging: (1) impotence, (2) weakness, (3) retirement and irrelevance, (4) loss of independence, and (5) losing your mind (or having your wife or partner lose theirs).

However many fears we have about aging—it is okay to be afraid. In the aging journey, fear can be our guide and friend. It can help us surmount obstacles such as loss, anxiety, and depression and help us see where we can renew our life and start fresh on new ground.

The Real Work of Aging — Emotional and Intuitive

The real work of aging—the aspect of aging that can be positive and transformative—is emotional and intuitive. Of course, our intellect can manage some of the outer challenges of aging—exercise, diet, medicine, physical check-ups, and so forth. But the real drama of aging, the domain in which all the important changes happen, is in the realm of our emotions. It’s how we feel about aging, more than what we think about it, that really matters.

Much of the material online and in print magazines written about aging falls into one of two categories—it is either practical but superficial (five tips for how to feel ten years younger now!) or health oriented. This material takes a different approach.

We hope that you already know—or can find out—practical information about how to stay healthy and energetic as you grow older. But there is a whole other dimension to aging—the inner dimension—that isn’t about hints and tips, diets, exercise, or supplements. This inner dimension is happening beneath the surface of our life, like a subterranean river that flows beneath ordinary consciousness. It might surface occasionally in our dreams, our anxieties, and our random thoughts, but to really enter that river and navigate it well requires a specialized tool—the tool of intuition.

Intuition

It used to be thought that women were more intuitive than men—however, there is no real gender difference. Men can be as intuitive as women, though they may not notice their intuitive insights with the same ease that women do.

The emerging field of intuition research has also identified three characteristics of intuition: (1) It is quick (three times faster than ordinary thinking). (2) It operates outside of conscious awareness. (3) It needs little information from the outside world to make its decisions. Intuition seems to reside in a much older part of the brain than thinking does.

Intuition Has an Important Role in Aging

You may only think about aging occasionally, when something—like seeing your face in the morning mirror—brings it to your attention. But intuition is tuned into aging all the time. It knows exactly how old you are, it knows all about the subtle changes in your body and mental functioning.

When it comes to aging, intuition is your inner hourglass. Remember, though, that intuition is unconscious. We aren’t usually aware of it, but intuition has ways of letting you know indirectly what it is up to. It does not use words or concepts; that is the language of thinking, and intuition is not about thinking. Intuition sends us its messages and insights through a physical sensation, an emotion, or an image—the way a dream does.

When we are overly focused on what we think and aren’t tuned to body and emotion, we miss the message intuition is trying to tell us. Intuition knows things that we may not be consciously tracking.

With regard to aging, intuition knows that we are slowing down and that our bodies are changing in myriad ways. It also knows that someday we will die, and all the things that we love and cherish will vanish. That’s not something we like to think about, but at all times, day or night, intuition is aware of that.

In short, intuition is where the deepest truths of your life reside.

The book, Every Breath, New Chances, provides tools to help one get in touch with one’s intuition, become comfortable with it, and trust it.

Deep Mind

Lewis Richmond writes that in order to enhance your capacity for intuition and deep emotion, I have created a series of imaginative exercises to help you to explore these inner resources.

I call these exercises deep mind reflections. I came up with the term deep mind because it points to the part of your mind where intuition resides and also because it helps engender deep acceptance.

Deep mind is not some magical or exotic place; it is simply the part of your mind that becomes visible when you are quiet. I also thought of calling this realm quiet mind. You can think of deep mind as the “quiet you.”

Deep mind includes intuition, but it also includes imagination and memory. Like intuition, it is always watching and waiting, just under the surface of your busy, thinking mind, ready to help you when you need it, and ready to invest any situation with deeper insight.

Every Breath, New Chances

A Buddhist teacher once said to me, “Every breath, new chances.” He told me that this principle had helped guide him through difficulties in his own life. When I asked him to explain this phrase more deeply, he replied that it meant three things:

(1) everything changes;

(2) every change can be an opportunity; and

(3) sitting quietly and sensing the breath helps those opportunities to reveal themselves.

Every breath, new chances means that no situation is fixed and that any situation can change—sometimes for the worse, but often for the better. Life is full of surprises. This is a core Buddhist principle and also a psychological one.

A psychiatrist friend once told me that the advice he gives to patients who feel stuck is, “There is always something you can do.” This is similar to what my Buddhist teacher said. The challenge is discovering what that “something” is.

Every breath, new chances could also be a description of intuition and how deep mind reflection works. The reflection uses the resource of intuition to help us see a situation with fresh eyes and with new perspectives. It helps us tune in to our gut feelings about where to go and what to do, as we journey into unknown territory, a place where there are no marked trails and we have to scour the landscape for clues.

Every Breath, New Chances — And the Journey of Aging

Aging is a journey like that—a decades-long adventure with many byways and surprises. It has an itinerary that is partly known and partly unknown. To some extent there is a map—we can partly see where we are going as we age—but the map is not complete. Some parts of the map are filled in, some parts are unclear, and some seem to be blank.

Deep mind can help us fill in this map as we go. When we come to a fork in the road—when, for example, we are deciding whether or not to retire and what to do afterward—intuition and the principle of every breath, new chances can help us decide what is best.

The journey of aging doesn’t go on forever, of course; it comes to an end when life ends. But death and dying are not the focus of this book. My interest is in helping you negotiate your living journey, so that long before the end approaches, you can say, “This life I have lived is good. I leave with no regrets.”

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Source: Richmond, Lewis. Every Breath, New Chances: How to Age with Honor and Dignity (A Guide for Men). Foreword by Peter Coyote. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2020. [Sub-headings supplied by website designer.]

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Postscript: Book Description

Every Breath, New Chances: How to Age with Honor and Dignity — A Guide for Men

Aging is a journey: a decades-long adventure of new opportunities and surprises. For many men, the decline in virility and power that accompanies age can be a tough pill to swallow. When these fall away, how do we make sense of who we are? What does it mean to be a man?

Drawing from research, interviews, and personal stories, Every Breath, New Chances shows readers how to turn toward the changes associated with aging and to re-evaluate losses and transitions as new avenues for joy, self-discovery, renewal, and growth.

Delving into topics such as divorce, single living, retirement, and encore careers, each chapter includes a contemplative practice called Deep Mind Reflection to help readers navigate the fears and aspirations that come along with changes in relationships and work.

This book addresses the more challenging realities associated with illness, substance abuse, and mortality, while empowering readers to compassionately embrace next steps and spiritual preparations for their final decades of life. This book does not proffer tools for staving off an inevitable part of life; rather, it offers frameworks and strategies for peacefully embracing it.

Source: amazon.com.au

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