THE NEUROPLASTICITY OF ELDERS
"Our brains are constantly being shaped willingly or unwittingly - most of the time unwittingly," states Richard Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds.
Davidson comments that we live in an attention economy where everyone and everything – advertising, the news, social media, technology – everywhere, all the time, constantly demanding a piece of our attentional pie. As a result our brains are getting reshaped accordingly.
With the overflow of information and distractions, our attention is under siege, and we are losing the battle. Our brains have little unoccupied attentional space, especially when it comes to aging.
When it's about growing older, our attentional space is inhabited by unsolicited cultural conversations, podcasts, videos, and family and neighbor stories. But, unfortunately, these outsiders are jamming our brains about getting older.
One underlying context within which these outsiders operate is that aging is a problem. And when aging is held as a problem, the neurons in your brain's attentional wing are about resolving or avoiding a problem—programmed to resist aging.
However, the problem of aging is not a problem. According to the definition, a problem is a matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with and overcome. So what are the chances of you overcoming aging?
The current relationship with aging is layered with fear and loathing. It might be time to renovate your brain's attentional space, allowing an altered relationship with aging. A relationship that isn't threatening or defeating but empowering, exciting and enlightening - because aging will happen no matter what.
In our elder work, we use meditation; we've found that it's the most effective way to open up fresh attentional territory in the brain –an uncorrupted, unspoiled territory.
And when standing in this uncontaminated territory, you can see your aging, death, and dying in a new light. You can pay keen attention to your humanity and your divinity. You can be graciously hospitable to the parts of you that you always try to turn away from.
Meditation allows you to form a new and empowering relationship with aging. Meditation displaces the already-always conversations about aging and opens a way to look at yourself and aging healthily. Best of all for our work, meditation opens the attentional space to consider new challenges.
Our particular challenge for people is to become an true elder.
WHY MEDITATION WORKS
The neurons of your brain signal one another, forming connections that enable everything from bodily movement to your thoughts and emotions. The neurons form networks, and the more these networks are used, the more established they become in the brain.
Your brain can form new connections, produce new cells and reshape existing connections to be more effective and efficient. It slows down with age but still occurs.
You were born with many more brain cells than you require. So over time, sculpting is another form of neuroplasticity. Sculpting is the brain's way of generating efficiency and discarding cells not in use. Sculpting and rebuilding are natural and neural and constantly occurring.
When confronted with new challenges, your brain reorganizes and restructures to respond to these situations. Therefore, the more regularly your brain is exposed to a new challenge, the more it reorganizes itself and establishes the path more firmly.
For instance, as an elder, your brain can deal with complex emotional challenges successfully navigated by healthy forms of regulation. Moreover, these more established and lasting neural pathways promote greater well-being and allow more authentic self-expression.
In our work, we create an ecosystem to create conscious challenges. Challenges that generate a purpose more significant than the past. Challenges require shedding previous identities and assuming an elder's roles.
Physiologically, these new challenges produce a state of coordination and balance between the brakes and accelerators of the nervous system. As a result, these new challenges increase the capacity to regulate the body and increase alertness, awareness, and energy.
So meditation allows you to carve out new territory from the existing attention-aging regions of the brain. Meditation allows you to see yourself freshly. Meditation lets your past be passed. Meditation opens the attention space to take on significant challenges. Engaging in significant challenges allows you to incarnate as an elder.
WHAT I'M LEARNING
The most interesting phenomenon is occurring. Not just the late-aged, but several middle-aged are calling me about becoming an elder.
If we hold that elder is a way of being, it is not time-related. And if it isn't time-related, it isn't age-related either.
At our last retreat, we had people from 59 years of age to 84. I thought that was the sweet zone. But after the last few weeks, those ages are asking about participating in our retreat.
As with the last retreat, we only have room for 16 participants. Two of the three people who have already asked to come are in their 40s.
These registrants are successful entrepreneurs who have crossed their latest financial and professional finish line. But they all report there is something vitally missing from their lives.
Somehow they sense that becoming an elder is what they are looking for. They want to drink from a deeper well. They want to discover a new hunger. They would like more of the divine in their lives. They realize that the finish line is always moving. www.requestingwisdom.com/retreat
WHY RED MOUNTAIN FOR OUR RETREATS?
Part of our work at our retreats is in the context of a pilgrimage. A pilgrim is a person who journeys to a sacred place for self-discovery and spiritual connection. To walk silently through the Colorado Plateau's majesty and in reflection and meditation, the Colorado Plateau becomes such a sacred place.
If you would like to come on this pilgrimage, on this transformational journey to being an elder, www.requestingwisdom.com/retreat Or if you have questions or concerns www.requestingwisdom.com/contact