Spirituality in the ThirdAge |
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ThirdAge: People who are practicing mindfulness often concentrate on their breath. Why?
Boorstein: In the mindfulness classes I teach, we sit quietly for 40 minutes, then we talk for another hour. What people are doing when they are sitting quietly is trying to pay attention moment to moment to their experience. The practice is to try to stay awake and aware of the breath coming in and out of the body and the sensations of the body.
ThirdAge: How do you see spirituality changing as we move into our older years?
Boorstein: I was 40 when I went to my first retreat. Most people there were in their twenties. I had children their age. I was self-conscious about being old. Now the average age of the meditating community has gotten much older; I'm 60, and I think I am in the middle now. There are people in the class who are 80, 90. We're living longer. People are discovering, especially people struggling with difficult losses in their lives, that there is some sense of greater understanding, greater connectedness that they are missing.
 We're in that period of time when we start to lose friends and family, when our children are growing up and living their own lives, often with difficulty. One of the real pains of later adulthood is needing to say, "My child whom I love and care about so much is having this difficulty that I can't fix as I may have been able to when he or she was younger." We try to be compassionate towards our children even though they're not living the way we want them to, and we need to be compassionate toward ourselves even though we can't give up wanting to try to change them. People sometimes feel "I can't let go having it the way I want so maybe this means I'm not spiritual because I can't let go, because I can't say it's in God's hands or whatever. If I were really a spiritual person, I could do that."
A fundamental truth of the relational life is that, when people we care about are in pain, we suffer with them. We do a wonderful service for ourselves if we have communities where we can tell each other our pain, rather than saying, "I'm fine, I'm fine" and feeling spiritually somehow inferior because we're suffering.
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