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At a later time, when he was still young, black-haired, and endowed with all the blessings a prince is born to have, he shaved off his hair and beard, “put on the ochre robe and went forth from the home life into homelessness.” Prince Siddhartha Gotama – the Buddha before his Awakening – lived the way a prince would or should. His father had provided him a life that meant total refinement, but for Buddha that only meant clinging unnecessarily to material things, which had nothing but a temporary sojourn with a human being. Could we term aging – since that is the subject of this article – a small fragment of these material possessions? Let’s see! Let’s also see what do we mean when we use terms as reversing aging, and do we always mean what we say? When we age our hair turns gray, we get wrinkles, our skin thins and dries, there is more flab here and less there, senses of taste, hearing and smell get impaired, and worst of all what suffers a distortion is the last thing we would prefer to have – contours of our bodies. This is on account of the diminished muscle mass. What would surprise many of us is that we actually reach maximum muscle strength by age 25 or 30, after which it either remains that way for some time or sets on a reversal trail – depending on how well or how badly we take care of our overall health. In other words, as says Deepak Chopra, “when we think we have aged, we have actually stopped growing.” At this stage, most of us start “reversing aging” whereas we should basically be thinking of handling the stoppage of growth healthily. The stoppage in growth is a natural biological process and so is what we term as aging. This is a universal rule – that of creation and destruction – that applies to human beings as much as it does on everything else in this universe. Creation is birth and destruction is death. Vedas name it as a “change of state” enacted in the great “Cosmic Dance” where a total change of state is a fundamental rule of existence, both for us, and for the Universe in which we live. Human bodies undergo numerous perceptible and imperceptible changes right from the initial stage of conception. Many things grow and many things keep on dying within and outside the womb. It is a continuous cycle of creation-destruction, creation-destruction and so on, till we reach a stage when some of our cells, parts, tissues, faculties etc refuse to grow. Certain cells in our bodies called fibroblasts can only reproduce themselves a limited number of times. After a certain age, the cells refuse to divide further. We can neither control this, nor can we reverse it. Two cell biologists, Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorhead, termed this phenomenon as cytogerontology in 1961. They suggested that the aging is a quality not of an organism, but of the cells that make it up. We thought otherwise? Didn’t we? “This,” remarked the biologists, “is at the core of aging, and as we progressively lose our substance we become aged.” That is inevitable! The questions that could be, are: Should we be grieving on something that is inevitable? Should we be wailing on a form that is to be formless at a later stage? Should the concept of aging be so frightening that we brood over on its reversal just after a prime time of age 30? If the answer to all these is ‘yes’ then we are hapless victims of a material possession, and if the answer to all these is ‘no’ then we are getting to understand what Buddha has said. In the later case we can work towards aging gracefully and not reversing it gracelessly. The best thing is to accept age as it descends on you – slowly, smoothly, healthily and gracefully. Wellness Wisdom Archive Author Interactive : Write to Sanjay Get Connected Promotional Support All Wellness Wisdom articles are copyrighted and reprint or distribution, electronic or otherwise, may please be done only after seeking the author's permission through the Reprint Request form below. |
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The world of ayurveda:
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| the origin of ayurveda |
| The ayurvedic concept of life |
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