Guest Posts

Fear of Aging – by Keith Wommack

Posted on by Dr. Toni

What we fear can only keep us in captivity
Keith Wommack, In Your Words

Recently, when asked, “What can fear do to you?” I was reminded of two experiences.

The first started with me asking a Sunday school class of first-graders: “What would you say if someone wanted you to pray for them?”

A visitor to the class, a young girl, spoke up and confidently said, “I would tell them that they were safe in God’s pocket.”

A few hours later, my phone rang. A man who had a physical problem asked me to pray for him. Because the girl’s simple but confident response had so impressed me, and because I understand the cause of most problems to be fear, I was led to say, “You are safe in God’s pocket.”

He began to cry and hung up, without giving his name.

A week later, he called back to report he’d been healed of the physical problem the instant he hung up the phone. He also stated that for the next few days, every time he tried to smoke cigarettes, they tasted terrible. Not only had he been healed of the physical trouble, he’d stopped a long time habit of smoking, as well.

Yes, the girl’s pure trust in God’s constant care inspired a prayer that erased the man’s fear.

The second experience I was reminded of took place when I stepped out of a dressing room and into a packed church auditorium. I was suddenly nervous. Anxiously, I stepped over to a chair, sat and waited for the prelude music to finish.

My fear was puzzling. I had freely performed in a rock band in front of small and large audiences for many years. And although I was about to conduct my first church service of a three-year term, I was prepared. Everything I needed to conduct the service was in place on the podium. There was nothing to worry about.

Then, while the music continued, I recognized that the fear wasn’t mine but rather waves of sympathy from the audience. Many people have a fear of public speaking, and I was mentally sensing this fear.

I affirmed to myself that the fear wasn’t mine, and that I didn’t have to suffer from the thoughts of others.

When the music stopped, I stepped up and began the service. Immediately, the fear vanished. I found that I had the ability to stop being afraid. I could stop being a victim of fear.

What can fear do to you? It seems a lot. Anxiety, fear and worry can be mentally and physically harmful. Jere Daniel in a Psychology Today column, “Learning to Love Growing Old,” wrote, “Fear of aging speeds the very decline we dread most. And it ultimately robs our life of any meaning.”

I’m discovering that we experience what we think and that fear seems to be able to negatively touch every part of the body, if we allow it. I’ve found it effective to filter my thoughts through spiritual reasoning. Many call this prayer.

As I was listening to the prelude music in the church auditorium, I realized that fear was not a power to be battled with and defeated. The thought, “I am afraid,” was not mine. Not only did I affirm mentally that the fear wasn’t mine, I also knew that no power apart from God could govern my being.

If one glances through the King James version of the Bible, it is hard not to spot one of the 70 times “Fear not” appears. The second book of Timothy has helped me when I’ve been afraid. It states in part, “God has not given us a spirit of fear. But he has given us a spirit of power and love and self-control.”

Jeff Levin, in his book, “God, Faith, and Health: Exploring the Spirituality Healing Connection,” writes, “The best study conducted to date on the topic of religious attendance and health found the most amazing results. It showed that the protective effects of frequent participation in church can last a lifetime. … Published in the American Journal of Public Health, [one] study found that frequent religious attenders had greater survival rates — that is, lower mortality — that extended over a twenty-eight-year period. Frequent religious attendance in 1965 was still reducing the risk of dying in 1994.”

If we are children of God, a fearing soul is not who we really are. Fear keeps us from living freely as spiritual beings. However, fear disappears when we glimpse our identity as the image of the divine.

Keith Wommack is a syndicated columnist, Christian Science practitioner and teacher, husband and stepdad. He is a legislative liaison for spiritual healing and Christian Science in Texas.

http://www.statesman.com/life/faith/what-we-fear-can-only-keep-us-in-2402785.html

Guest post on Mindful Aging

Posted on by Dr. Toni

Mindful Aging
by Lenore Flynn

In two days I will celebrate my 59 birthday. For most of my adult life I have viewed my birthday as a day to rejoice. All the things that have been my life have sprung from that day. I love to think of my parents on that Sunday morning happy at my arrival; my mother always said I gave her the perfect family she wanted, 2 boys and 2 girls. I am sad she is no longer here to wish me a happy day.

Some years it is a day I indulge myself in whatever I want: shopping, a massage, eating something I like, going to the movies. Some years it is a day to reflect. This year it seems like it will be for reflection.

In Buddhist practice there are 5 Recollections recited as part of the daily liturgy. They are a call to be mindful of impermanence. Thinking things will stay the way they are is the path to disappointment.

The first recollection is “I am of the nature to age, I will grow old.” This one is so easy to forget when you are young and healthy. You don’t want to remember it. Our culture rallies against it. I recently subscribed to a health magazine as a favor to a neice and page after page is about how to look younger, fight off the aging process. As if appearence really had anything to do with health and aging; I am going to age no matter how healthy I am or how good I look.

The second recollection is “I am of the nature to be sick, I will grow ill.” This human existence has its price and that is this body will get sick and need care. I bring this one to mind when I get sick and find myself fighting with my illness in anger. This poor body maintains as best it can and cannot escape its nature. We should be compassionate toward our bodies.

The third recollection is “I am of the nature to die, someday I will die.” Pretty grim for most people. The denial of this truth causes so many problems. Not that we need to embrace death ahead of time but to acknowledge its reality and inevitability gives us an impetus to pay attention. The Zen tradition admonishes the practitioner that death comes quickly so don’t squander your life. Today, right now, pay attention. Wake up!

The fourth recollection is “All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will be separated from me.” Nothing is yours, really. No thing and no body will go with you when you pass away from this life. Anyone who has been alive for any time has watch a parade of things and bodies come and go. This is advice against holding on, clinging to things. We cling to ideas, possessions, loved ones, ways of life.

The last is about karma. A popular idea nowadays but a really important one. “I own my karma, I am born from my karma. Whatever I do, for good or ill, of that I will be the heir.” This is the call to mindful in every action, every interaction. This isn’t a tally system (you did this so you get that); it is more about the fact that an action causes a reaction; your actions put things in motion. Generate good.

So on the eve of this year’s birthday, I am recollecting my good fortune to be able to know these things and take them to heart. To appreciate and be grateful for the wonderful, beautiful things I have seen, felt and heard. To appreciate and be grateful that I live in safety, warmth and knowing. I can watch my resistance to some of these recollections; I certainly want to be ageless, healthy, eternal, and never separated from people and things I love. Mindfulness of these recollections is not morbid or depressing unless we make it so. If we make the fact the sun comes up every morning depressing it would be no different; it will still come up. What we can choose is whether the light shines on us or not.

Lewis Richmond on Belonging

Posted on by Dr. Toni

Human beings of every age need to belong. This is a need so basic that we rarely think about it unless loneliness brings it to our attention. As children, most of us safely belong to our families.

Part of growing into adulthood is widening and deepening our various circles of belonging. We belong to our schools, our social groups and friends (and these days our social media contacts too), our community of co-workers, clubs, churches and neighborhoods. On the upward slope of life’s mountain, there is a growing richness and complexity to our belonging, which nourishes us as an essential food.

It is only past midlife that the slope turns downward, and our lifetime of belonging begins to thin out. Children move away. Parents become ill or die. The peak of our career passes, and we edge toward retirement. Friends move or drift away. I think this is part of what used to be called “midlife crisis” — a marked shift, at first slow but gradually accelerating — of belonging. This shift is one of the universal losses of aging, and unless we pay attention to it and adjust for it, this loss can have a deleterious effect on our quality of life, our health, our mood and even lead to depression and other serious illness.

In my new book Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser
I cite some of the current scientific research about the importance of belonging, and how essential a factor it is for healthy aging. I also introduce the concept of Elderhood, that final “hood” that follows childhood, adulthood and parenthood. In traditional and village societies from time immemorial, elderhood was a time when the community invited its elders into new kind of belonging. In traditional elderhood, elders were the holders of the stories and the histories of the community, the keepers of knowledge about animals and plants and means of survival, the loving companions of young children. Elders had lived through frost and famine and war, and knew how to prevail in the face of disaster.

During the recent tsunami disaster in Malaysia, the populations of some low-lying islands survived only because the elders in those communities knew and remembered the early signs of an impending tidal wave and sounded the alarm to get the people to higher ground. Tsunamis were so rare that none of the younger adults knew the signs, and without the elders’ warning would have perished.

In modern post-industrial societies, these traditional roles for elders are vanishing, and elders are left to themselves to discover their own individual ways to regenerate new ways to belong as old ones fade away. This is not an easy task. When I present my book to audiences, people often plaintively tell that they have much to offer, but no one seems inclined to listen. “I have stories,” one women said. “A lifetime of them. But I can’t get my grandchildren to stop texting and watching their iPads long enough to listen.”

Indeed, this is our world now. One of the real fears of growing older is that as our family and social networks fray and our adult children move away to live their own lives, that at some point we will be fated to live out our last years in some institutional setting. And those fears are real. The research indicates that the incidence of clinical depression and depression-related illness is two to three times higher in such facilities than when elders — even very aged ones — can still live independently.

We all know that this state of affairs is not right, but what can be done? As I like to say, only half-jokingly, “76 million baby boomers can’t be wrong” — about their aging, that is. The sheer size of that demographic group will force our society to adjust. It will be painful, but in the end there is no choice. Elders need their elderhood, and the larger society needs it, too. A purely youth-oriented, consumer-driven society is neither healthy and sustainable, and one of the deep contributions the baby boomer generation can make is to educate us through their activism and voices that young, middle, and old need to be knit together as one whole cloth for society to prosper and grow.