Sharon Salzberg, Too Old

Too Old!  Too Old?

"How to have strength of heart when we have confront cruelty, directly or indirectly?

One of the terrible things about experiencing the cruelty  that can flow from others toward us, whether through racism, or through sexism, or through sex, or through being dismissed as secondary, or through any of the many varied ways we might be categorized, filed away, and ignored by someone, is the way it grinds us down.  It is all too easy to begin believing this projected image of ourselves as someone not worth much, to take that in and begin to live from that reflection as thought it were true,.  To get back in touch with kindness is to get back in touch with our own bigger, vibrant, more expansive potential, instead of being defined by the limited, biased vision others put upon us.  Why see ourselves through the distortion of their particular lens?

Even if others don't intend to harm us, their careless disregard or easy assumptions about us can be demeaning.  There's a story that I've always enjoyed from the time of the Buddha about a nun named Citta who was very elderly when she first entered the order of nuns and began her meditation practice.  Many of the other nuns and monks would say to her, 'You know, you're really old; you should just take it easy.  Just slow down, relax, and don't try to practice very much.  Have a nice vacation as a nun for this last period of your life.'

But she had tremendous motivation for freedom, and she thought, 'No, I really want to meditate,' even though so many told her she was just too old, she should give up the aspiration.

One day, despite the comments from others urging hesitation, Citta decided to walk up a mountain.  While walking, she said to herself, 'At the end of this day either the hindrances (to enlightenment) will have died, or I'll have died.'

She walked up the mountain, spent time on top meditating, and as these stories always end so happily, she became fully enlightened.  Then she proceeded to walk back down.  At the bottom, it is said that the whole community gathered around her and exclaimed, 'You look really good, what happened to you?'

We are all too often told by someone that we are too old, too young, too different, too much the same, and those comments can be devastating.  Any of us might recall being misunderstood, overlooked, abandoned, treated unjustly.  When we succumb to this we belong to others and are in exile from ourselves.  To return to ourselves we have to be in touch with what we fundamentally care about, that which allows us to know who we are...We use the practice of lovingkindness meditation as a way to recover our innermost knowledge of that linkage, as we dissolve the barriers we have been upholding and genuinely awaken to how connected we all are," by Sharon Salzberg from "The Force of Kindness: Change Your Life with Love