Can I Just be 80 Already?

Thoughts on aging, teaching, and time

Me in the last half of my 69th

I turn 70 in July, but I keep thinking I’ll be 80. Then I experience a moment of disappointment that it’s “only” 70.

Once a spiritual practitioner friend of mine was approaching his 70th. He said to me quite disconsolately, “I don’t know why I am here and not with my teachers.”

His teachers had all died. That’s now true for me, too.

I don’t actually feel apart from my teachers. Maybe I even feel closer to them.

But I am entering a time of reconsidering my activities, including teaching and writing.

Maybe my stumble over recalling my age is an expression of a desire for a pause. I mean, at 80, I get to slow down, right?

But these times don’t seem to call for pause. How can I experience pause without actually withdrawing?

Being available

I’ve been teaching non-stop for 20 years and more occasionally for much longer than that.

An aspect of my life as an older-becoming teacher has been the evolving relationship between how my teachers taught and how I teach or want to teach.

Earlier in my life, I was quite militant about sticking closely to my teachers’ methods. They worked. Nuff said.

But over time, I began to recognize that those methods don’t actually work for everyone, or in some cases even feel native to me any longer.

I’ve been trained by quite traditional teachers. You can read that as expecting us students to do a lot of solo practice and at times quite fierce.

It’s taken me decades to feel out where I want to diverge and where I want to dig in deeper.

Offering satsang was my earliest departure. I see my love of satsang as synchronous with my love of “just hanging out with the teacher” and offering my students lots of opportunities to integrate by sharing meals and other aspects of our daily lives.

One of the most important wisdoms I have gleaned from the extraordinary example of Anandamayi Ma is that being available transmits to others something essential about the natural state and the state of natural belonging.

This year, for the first time, I’m not scheduling teachings outside of satsang, our weekly morning livestream practice, and retreats.

I am throwing a lot of dinner parties. If people want more teachings, they’re on demand.

No retreat

I’ve also pretty radically changed how longer group retreats are structured.

In some other traditions or streams of teachings, group retreats are where people do intensive practice. Maybe they practice outside of the retreat setting, or maybe they don’t. But they approach group retreats as a field of sadhana.

My teachers generally used group retreats to train us in sadhanas that we would then bring into our solo practice.

None of my teachers held regular group practices, such as a weekly meditation, satsang, or kirtan. The emphasis was always on solo practice and integrating that into our lives. Groups were for transmitting particular practices, learning, and for periodic rituals.

What I’ve landed on quite recently is using longer retreats to support students to deepen their solo and integrated practice through orchestrated, sustained encounters with the natural state or natural presence.

Retreats are more about experiential impact and less about gathering new sadhanas to do at home.

This has created a spacious field of spontaneity and playfulness. Retreats actually feel more restful and less like a marathon.

Writing and K108

And I’ve always been writing. And speaking.

When I stop speaking, I start writing. Words are always coming out.

But I’ve never been engaged in producing words as much as I have since October 7, 2023.

I’m feeling the need for a change here in line with the change in my teaching.

I’ve been contemplating how I show up as a teacher for decades. But I’m just at the beginning of my exploration of changing how I show up as a writer.

Which brings me to you, my dear subscribers and readers.

You may have noticed a slow-down here on K108. I haven’t lost interest. I’m just pausing more to allow time for the birth of the forms of expression that want to emerge.

Thanks so much for hanging with me here. You are truly appreciated.

And if you want to know what the shape of the future here will be, stick around.

I can’t see that shape quite yet, but I know it will be full of love.

with that infinitely,

Shambhavi

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