Successful aging: dealing with fear & taming the mind
Some women navigate the treacherous waters of aging with alacrity and claim to feel liberated as they age. Unfortunately, not me.
If I had a choice, I would never age!
I’ve done heaps of personal development work and try to stay positive and to embrace the aging process as a time of growth. I’ve found it challenging though to identify the gifts that come with aging.
It’s so much easier to see the negatives.
My dodgy memory, the bags and wrinkles, sore feet in the morning and how my armpit skin waves back at me when I’m waving at someone else.
To combat my inappropriate negativity, I’ve adopted all sorts of health practices hoping my body will take me to where my mind wants to be. I practice meditation and the art of ‘acceptance’ so I can view the aging process with equanimity, like some of the more enlightened women around me.
Up until recently I thought I was wasting my time. Thankfully though, my hard work is paying off and I’m starting to have more fun with my aging process. I can see liberation at the end of the line and I might even be one of those women who LOVES being old and I’ll roar into old age fearless and worry-free!
Fear of aging
Our view of aging is driven from fear. We are told we are going to be a burden, old people are seen to be ‘different’ from young people and being old isn’t exactly equated with being desirable. An ‘us and them’ mentality prevails, and we suddenly go from being one of the us, to being one of the them! There’s rarely promotion of the benefits associated with aging, apart from being entitled to a senior’s card. Our youth dominated culture and media have successfully linked being old to being valueless and worst case, clueless.
Also regardless of age, part of the human condition is to live fearfully. We are afraid of achievement, of failure and loss. Mostly we don’t realize we are living in a state of fear. This state of fear is a deadly virus-like condition and it is masked by legitimate concerns. For many of us, the realization of aging brings this fear into the open and then the aging process provides the opportunity to harness this fear as fuel for growth.
It’s never too late to change our lives
In the last decade or so, I’ve increasingly fantasized about having life that is a far cry from where I am now. Up until recently my fear stopped me. I thought I’d missed the boat. That I was too old.
I’ve tried very hard to be a ‘good citizen’. For most of my life I did things I thought would set me up for success, mostly unsuccessfully I might add! I tried to marry successfully, breed balanced children, get money in the bank for retirement, hold down a job with a stable income so I could be a slave to a mortgage. I was fearful of doing things differently but ultimately that fear drove me into personal prison. The realization of aging has started a liberation process and the very fear that kept me from fulfilling my dreams, is now waking me up.
It’s a different fear now. It’s now a fear of not doing things that serve me, that I’ll miss out on the life of my dreams, that I won’t become the woman I thought I should be.
Feeling fear is normal and can be profoundly useful as we confront the aging process
Many of us wager a daily war with fear. Sometimes it’s not obvious, other times a vague concern or even a full-blown episode of doom and gloom. For some, this fear has morphed into deep depression.
There’s a positive side to this fear though. It can be a wake-up call to who we really need to be as we confront our post-youth lives. We can use this fear as a wonderfully useful catalyst and become the woman of our dreams and to ultimately live the life of our dreams.
The first step to harnessing this fear is to start observing our thoughts and their impact on our emotions.
Noticing the thoughts
Once we start acutely observing our thoughts, it’s like we’ve opened Pandora’s box. For many of us, we’ve lived our lives without noticing our thoughts – like running on remote pilot. Once we start this observation process, it is disconcerting to discover what is actually going on in our heads and how our thoughts drive our emotional state. Successful aging, or living for that matter, requires us to see these thoughts and realize which ones serve us, and which don’t, and ignore the ones that don’t.
Once we realize that our thoughts are not necessary ‘correct’ or legitimate and are mostly junk, then we can start to take control and live differently. It’s useful to see our thoughts at a distance and realize they don’t define us and we are not the sum of our thoughts.
Steps to dealing with fear
- Dredge up your fears and examine these in detail. You’ll most likely find they are linked back to deep childhood patterns and self-limiting fixed beliefs you never knew you had. This is one of the hardest things you’ll do but is where the real work of aging successfully starts. Depending on the level of your discomfort with the aging process, you’ll find answers in books, courses, therapy or even processes such as Ayahuasca. I’ve done many Ayahuasca sessions and found this process has been the most successful in generating fantastic insights within the shortest time. I’m a fan of life hacks though and this is not for everyone!
- Read the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. This book changed my life and I hope it will change yours. Read it or listen to it many times and every time, you’ll understand more.
- Start a daily meditative and breathing practice. Don’t worry which one, just pick one and get started. Once you start, you’ll find your way to the perfect practice for you. I kick-started with a 10 day retreat called vipassana and learnt the basics of breath-work and meditation and some useful spiritual constructs that I continue to use today. I now use several meditative practices including creative visualization, listen to binaural beats and theta meditations, vipassana, yoga nidra and kundalini breathing techniques.
- Get super fit and healthy. The only thing we control directly are our bodies. Once you realize this and start caring for yourself and see results, you’ll feel like Superwoman. The journey toward optimal physical health can be the longest and hardest of all, but once you get hooked you’ll not look back.
- Adopt an abundance mentality. Many people claim to be completely happy with their lives and this blog post is not for them. I’ve had to work really hard on this aspect of my life. I’ve crawled through many personal development workshops for thirty or more years looking for answers which I’ve finally found now I’ve got to mid-fifties. I’m extremely grateful to have gotten to to the point where I’m able to write this and not want to run away screaming from my life situation. I never thought I’d see the day! All I know is that the road to peace and self-knowledge is a really hard one for many of us, but we have no choice but to persist with our trek. It absolutely pays off and we have to take it seriously as this is the work of aging successfully.
The work of aging successfully is to figure out what you want from life and absolutely go for it. This doesn’t happen overnight so don’t get demoralized by the people who claim you can find your life’s purpose easily. Also avoid people who believe in the notion of ‘age appropriate’. Think about your death bed daily and focus on what you’ll miss if you don’t act NOW.
