We have inherited an albatross. It hangs about our necks in the form of a widely accepted, negative, highly destructive view of aging. It’s ugly and simply untrue. Now is the time to explode any false beliefs you may carry about aging—time to reveal amazing truths which lie buried beneath them.
NATURE’S RULES
Like a beautifully designed engine, your body has been created to live a long and healthy life fueled by nature’s own molecules, not by “drug therapy.” Driven by powerful corporate entities, for more than a century, mainstream medicine has been doling out artificial chemical drugs to suppress symptoms while making little progress towards improving health or slowing age degeneration. Prescribing potentially dangerous drugs in the belief that they can improve the long-term wellbeing of your body year-by year has turned out to be a fruitless task. Back in 377 BC, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, wrote “Natural forces are the healers of disease.” Nothing has changed since then. It’s time to take a whole new view of the aging process, to discard false beliefs and learn the art of ageless aging. It’s also time to celebrate the process together.
QUESTION EVERYTHING
In the 1970s and 80s, when interest in gerontology—the study of aging—began to be supported by government funding, age researchers fell into a mire of confusion, primarily because they lacked any conceptual foundation for understanding the nature of aging in its many facets—biological, psychological, and spiritual. They became obsessed with disability, disease, and chronological age instead of seeing the experience of aging as a whole, in all of its positive as well as its negative aspects.
Since then, the media has come to focus on the weakness and pathos of the elderly. Scientific literature on gerontology is still obsessed with the issues of nursing home admissions, frailty, and the economic costs of looking after our impaired elders. It is all part of the negative obsession that we as a society seem to have developed with aging. As a result, very little accurate information has become available to bring us a positive understanding of how human beings can function effectively in later life.
IGNORE THE LIES
How long you live rests largely in your own hands. So does how well you live, how much vitality you have and how good you will look in 20 years’ time. Ageless aging is not an accident of fate. Neither is it heavily dependent on the kind of medical care you get, nor on your genetic inheritance, although certainly both have a part to play. It depends upon how you choose, right here, right now, to live your life from here on out. And this is regardless of how much self-neglect you have poured on yourself in the past.
Almost everybody has heard of death curses. Psychological literature is laced with accounts of how Aboriginal witch doctors have brought about the death of the young and healthy by cursing them. No sooner do these people learn of the fate which has been cast for them than they begin inexplicably to sicken and eventually to die. It appears that through complex biological processes, their simple belief in the curse brings about destruction of their organism.
LAY THE GHOST
In so-called civilized society, we look upon such phenomena as anthropological curiosities—products of primitive superstition which simply don't touch us in our more enlightened age. What we are not aware of, however, is that most of us in the civilized world live under our own brand of “death curses”. They may be subtler than those issued by witch doctors, but they can be every bit as potent in bringing about the physical and mental decline which we have come to associate with aging. Common, unconscious notions such as “retirement”, “middle-age”, “It's all downhill after 40” and “At your age you must start taking things more easily”, are widely held. They can exert a powerful effect on the process of aging by creating destructive self-fulfilling expectations about age decline. Instead of facing the future full of confidence and excitement about what lies ahead, optimism is replaced by anxiety as we are warned to “Be careful”, or “Don't take chances on a new career at your age.”
Most of us hold a lot of false notions about aging and life expectancy. These ghosts need to be laid before we can make ageless aging a workable part of our lives, for they are truly legends of the fall, and like many false legends, they carry the warning that if you believe in them, the belief itself goes a long way to making them true. So deeply entrenched are these negative legends in the worldview of our culture that each one needs to be examined quite carefully before we can begin to transform them.
TO HELL WITH LIES
To most people in the West, old age brings ghastly images of decrepitude—not pictures of vigorous and sexually active old men and women intensively involved in work and looking forward to what comes next. The potential for creativity and enjoyment which is wasted in age-degeneration in the developed countries of the world is shocking. So is the cost to the state in providing medical treatment, hospitalization, food and care for people for whom aging has become a nightmare of physical pain and emotional isolation. Few of us even come close to fulfilling our psychobiological potentials. Instead we look forward to a steady and inexorable increase in morbidity and mortality from one disease to another. Applying the principles of ageless aging, however, will give you a very different view. For the same principles which help keep your skin smooth, your muscles firm and your vitality and creativity high can also reduce the incidence of chronic disease and postpone degenerative illnesses so that if they occur at all, they come only very late in life.
BASIC PRINCIPLES
So much for the myths of aging. The next time you find yourself grunting when you get out of a chair, or refusing to play run-around after a young niece or nephew on the grounds that you are too old, think again. Forget the myths and remember three important facts:
- FACT ONE: It is biological—not chronological—age that matters.
- FACT TWO: by improving your ability to adapt to stressors and maintain physiological balance and function, you can effectively prevent accelerated aging and the degenerative diseases associated with it.
- FACT THREE: There is even better news. Even when negative changes in your body have already taken place, by making alterations to the way you live and eat, many —in most people even all—of these changes can be reversed.
This means that in medically measurable terms—the hard-core parameters doctors use to register health and degeneration such as cholesterol levels, fasting blood sugar, insulin levels, triglycerides, blood pressure and all the rest—aging can now be reversed, rejuvenating your body and de-aging your life.
What was once a pipe-dream, followed by rich eccentrics who had themselves injected with monkey glands or drank snake blood in an effort to grow younger, has become a real possibility. It can be done right here, right now. For me, these three facts add up to the most exciting information to come out of 20th century science related to establishing and maintaining high level health. For the first time in history, ageless aging is possible for each of us—a journey into wholeness, authenticity and fulfilment. What could be better than that?
SACRED TRUTHS
- Your body is a multi-dimensional organism, not a machine: We are body, mind and spirit—so interrelated that they cannot be separated.
- Each of us is an utterly unique being. Health at its most profound level is a full expression of that uniqueness in everything we are and do.
- By improving our ability to adapt to stressors and maintain physiological balance and function, we can effectively prevent accelerated aging as well as most degenerative diseases associated with it.
- Where negative changes in the body have already taken place, most can be reversed. This is measured by hard-core parameters doctors use such as cholesterol levels, fasting blood sugar, insulin levels, triglycerides, blood pressure and all the rest.
- Natural methods work best for regeneration and rejuvenation.
- It’s time to learn to live and think in ways that encourage the best possible expression of our genes.
- Regeneration is a process by which the body and psyche rid themselves of whatever does not support the highest levels of gene expression, strengthen physical vitality, and empower greater expression of your authentic nature.
- By living out our unique biological, spiritual and creative potentials, we not only fulfil ourselves, we also bring the greatest gifts we have to offer our family, our community and the world as a whole.
Of all the subjects that you asked me most often to write about, how to age beautifully tops the bill. I’m glad. Since I am now 74, I have learned a lot about all of this. So I plan in the weeks and months that lay ahead to send you a number of weekly newsletters and release a number of Sacred Truth videos on how to make practical use of ageless aging principles in your own life, regardless of your age. Be sure to sign up so you can receive them. I look forward to sharing all of this and more with you in the future.
