Herein lies the age old question: ‘How do I live happily ever after forever and ever in health?’
Physically speaking: You can’t. Sorry.
Metaphysically speaking: It is possible to maintain wellness despite the physical state of the body. In fact, you existed long before you got the body you’re currently living in. You’ve been around since Christ was a cowboy, as the Canadian sages say.
The trick to living fully (and dying well) is understanding the relationship between the body, the mind, and the spirit (my fav topic).
So how do we transcend all the aches and pains and limitations of our bodies? We stop allowing our minds to identify with the mortal body, and start identifying with the underlying primordial essence that animates our physical bodies. In essence, we zoom out. We put the body into larger perspective.
(Crickets chirping)
Obviously, this requires a bit of an overhaul of our mental faculties. The mind doesn’t like so much when we realize we can exist without it…actually, without the constant chatter of the mind, we can enjoy what the guru’s call ananda, or bliss. Our egoic mind would have us believe that we are a body that happens to have a soul (or like, something in there, that makes us think and walk and talk), instead of believing we are a soul that happened to receive a body in order to function on this planet.
Sounds blasphemous to some, but this is the belief underlying such ancient religions such as Buddhism and yoga (note that I am a cheerful agnostic who enjoys sampling all sorts of religious philosophy).
So what does this hippy dippy philosophy have to do with the fact that your steady march towards the grave is upsetting you? Quite a lot, actually.
Several billion people on Earth believe in the concept of reincarnation (the belief that the spirit continues on in a new form after biological death). In physics, the law of conservation supports this possibility, stating that energy can neither be created, nor destroyed, only transferred from one form to another. But I’m not here to talk about physics (you wouldn’t learn much, believe me).
The point is: most religions agree that there is some sort of life after death. If this is the case, the body dying is not the main issue…In fact, it might be an upgrade if you’ve played your karmic cards right. Yogi’s call the identification with mortality ignorance. Ouch.
Ram Dass used to casually refer to death as “dropping the body,” which he described as the feeling of relief one gets after removing a tight shoe. NBD.
If we spend our relatively short lives here worrying about death, we sort of miss the show, as it were. Osteopathically speaking, my job is to boost overall wellness in people. That involves not only consideration of their physical health, but the consideration of the biopsychosocial model, which is to say, our life experiences and conditioning (which have an effect on our biology). Our mental health impacts our physical health. And we could go one step further to add that our spiritual health impacts our mental health, especially if we’re constantly low-key stressed about our inevitable demise (cue Jaws music).
We’re all in decline. This world was never meant to sustain us forever. Eventually, all life completes its cycle and goes back to where it came (the great unknown, in any case). But if our underlying vitality is omnipresent and omniscient, then we really don’t have much to worry about. We’ll be around again. Maybe with better legs, or straighter teeth. So why not enjoy our moments while we’re here? And hey, if you get tired of visiting planet Earth, you can work on improving yourself each time you visit in order to burn off your ego and reach moksha (liberation from the cycle of life and death).
But how can we enjoy ourselves if we’re constantly distracted by all of the things that irritate us?
It’s hard to sustain joy if we’re constantly weathering the physical ups and downs of our ever-changing lives. If we base our happiness on our external circumstances such as our careers, our houses, the car we drive, the body we got, then we are unlikely to be happy all the time. Mainly, because all of these factors are shifting all the time. But if we switch gears and go inward, connecting with the deepest part of our being (much silence and meditation, or like, insanely excellent concentration, is required to touch this sacred place), then we find that our true nature is actually joy, and that it is not dependent on whether our partner took out the garbage this morning. Imagine!
The future is a projection. It’s a fib your mind is telling you to reassure you that you’re going to continue to make it just one more day. In a mortality based view-point, the ego saves itself to see tomorrow time and time again…it is the director, protagonist, and audience in lila, the ever unfolding drama of our superficial lives. But in reality, tomorrow never arrives. All we have is right now. I would suggest we accept a change in mental attitude and not sweat the small stuff. The cost is too high.
Transcend the idea that you will cease to exist when your time is up. It will take a real mental load off, and give you space to breathe. It will put your piddly physical aches and pains into perspective at the very least. I mean, at least you’ve got a body to complain about, am I right?
Work with connecting to the underlying light that shines on the mind and floods your body with vitality. Go straight to the source. When you work on wellness from this deepest level, you will see a significant boost in physical and mental wellness.
Time spent in nature and meditation and gentle contemplation of they mystery of life will lend itself to this practise of connecting to yourself. It will be a slow and gradual peeling away of ego, one layer at a time, but it will bring you bliss.
Worth it.
Amanda is a Halifax-based Manual Osteopathic practitioner who has trained with the College d’Etudes Osteopathique as well as the British College of Osteopathic Medicine. Amanda practises a heart-centred approach to Osteopathy and enjoys working with humans of all kinds.