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Chapter Six: “Three Secrets to Aging <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n with <\/span><\/strong>Vibrance and Pizazz”\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Chapter 6 in\u00a0Supercharge Your Success: 14 Big Impact Thought Leaders Share Their Secrets to Health, Wealth, Happiness and Achieving Dreams<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n [Excerpted from\u00a0Ageless Pizazz! Nine Secrets for Turning Up Your Oomph, Having More Fun, and Being More Powerful as You Get Older<\/em>\u00a0by Ariel Lexina Adams]<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>Age cannot wither her,\u00a0 Imagine you\u2019re driving north on Highway 101. It\u2019s a gray day and the sky is darkly overcast. The highway is wet. The fields and trees are wet. You\u2019re in your late fifties, feeling despondent about your life, and you\u2019re hoping this day will be a turning point. You\u2019re driving up to see your wise friend Joan, who\u2019s an energy worker in the small Northern California town of Sebastopol.<\/span><\/p>\n As you drive, the clouds part a tiny bit, a ray of sun breaks through, and then a rainbow forms, making a perfect arc over the highway ahead. You keep driving. The rainbow stays there. You\u2019re getting closer, and it\u2019s still there. Now it\u2019s right ahead, right over where you\u2019re driving. You pass under the still-vivid rainbow. This has got to be a good omen!<\/span><\/p>\n And it was; I was the driver. I drove under the rainbow and up to Joan\u2019s beautiful home, where I spent the weekend with her, and she skillfully helped me retrieve my good spirits and begin to turn my life around. Now, at the time of writing this book, I\u2019m seventy-five. I met my husband and love of my life when I was sixty-eight; we got married at seventy-two, and things keep getting better. I can truthfully say this is the best time in my life\u2014and it can be for you too.<\/span><\/p>\n I was fifty-eight at the time of the rainbow story and for the past few years had been at the mercy of the aging experience. All my inherited beliefs, all the expectations\u00a0<\/span>imprinted on me by my elders and my society were coming to pass. I felt pallid and powerless. Unattractive, with all my sexual magnetism gone.<\/span><\/p>\n When I was a girl in the 1940s I used to listen to a soap opera called The Romance of Helen Trent<\/em>\u2014\u201cthe story that asks the question, \u2018Can a woman find adventure and romance after the age of thirty-five?\u2019\u201d (Maybe you remember it too.) And right around then I read a story in one of my mother\u2019s magazines. It opened with an unmarried woman looking into the mirror on her thirtieth birthday and feeling like she\u2019d lost her chance at life.<\/span><\/p>\n These cultural attitudes about what I had to look forward to as a woman were deeply etched into my mind. Thirty-five loomed ahead ominously.<\/span><\/p>\n But somehow my life unfolded in a different way. When I hit thirty-five I was, after a brief marriage, living in a house with other creative people. I didn\u2019t have a life partner but I usually had a boyfriend. I felt very attractive.<\/span><\/p>\n I had always looked and felt young for my age. When I was in my early forties my students (I was teaching English as a second language in adult schools) said I looked twenty-five. I usually had boyfriends who were younger than I was. I felt like I wasn\u2019t aging, like it wasn\u2019t going to happen.<\/span><\/p>\n At forty-seven I went back to school to do what I\u2019d always wanted: become a psychotherapist. Then one day when I was about fifty I looked in the mirror and saw that my upper eyelids were all swollen. They were puffy and droopy and weighted down my eyelashes. \u201cIt must be a cat allergy,\u201d I thought, and I stopped letting Attila, our sweet orange cat, come into my room.<\/span><\/p>\n So I ruined my relationship with my favorite cat ever\u2014and the eyelids stayed puffy and droopy. It was my first clear sign of aging and I felt betrayed. I realized I had felt entitled to keep looking young\u2014that was who I was, after all. But I had started aging, and would keep on doing so.<\/span><\/p>\n People started calling me \u201cma\u2019am.\u201d Oh, how I hated that! Guys\u2019 eyes stopped lighting up when they saw me, or they\u2019d look right through me. I\u2019d enviously look at a young, attractive woman walking toward me on the sidewalk and think, \u201cJust wait, honey, it\u2019ll happen to you too!\u201d And when some old lecherous guy would eye me, I\u2019d actually be grateful! I had a boyfriend who was younger than I, and on a trip to Mexico, more than once some young person asked him, \u201cEs su madre?\u201d (Is she your mother?) In pictures taken of me during that period I look droopy and apologetic.<\/span><\/p>\n My self-esteem plummeted. The worst part was realizing how much it was based on my good looks\u2014or should I say on what our culture regards as good looks, meaning young looks. I\u2019d thought my self-worth was based on intelligence, creativity, compassion. But no. When I\u2019d started looking older and stopped receiving that reflection back that attractive younger people constantly get from the world, I wanted to dig a hole and crawl into it.<\/span><\/p>\n This went on for a year or two. They were very bad years in my life. Finally I woke up one morning with those insulting voices going in my head\u2014\u201clost your looks,\u201d \u201cnot attractive anymore,\u201d \u201cnot spiritual either,\u201d \u201cwhat good are you?\u201d\u2014and I rebelled.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s enough!\u201d I told myself. \u201cI\u2019ve had it! I\u2019m going to turn this around.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I had studied some Tibetan Buddhism and always loved what Chogyam Trungpa said about skilled farmers: they collected the dung left by their cattle and turned it into fertilizer. And that, of course was what I needed to do with my own negativity.<\/span><\/p>\n So I decided to go get help from Joan, my shamanically trained friend up north. In our sessions, she helped me to go deep inside and retrieve something that was much deeper than all the stereotypes and judgments I\u2019d been battling with: my vibrant spirit. I returned to my life regenerated, vowing to free myself from the age stereotype, and to help other women get free of it.<\/span><\/p>\n I wanted to find an older woman who had been through this transition to mentor me, but I didn\u2019t know any. I certainly couldn’t get help from my mother, who was lonely and obese. So I set out to become<\/em> that mentor. I wrote my master\u2019s thesis on the subject of women coming to terms with aging, and I\u2019ve been working with women on this issue ever since.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve made a deep study of the question \u201chow can we avoid the trap of the age stereotype and live fulfilling, creative, juicy lives?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n And from what I learned (and keep learning), I created my Ageless Pizazz!\u00ae <\/sup>groups, where we use art and play to transform our pain and fear into the power to be who we want to be and live the lives we want to live.<\/span><\/p>\n In the process of this work I discovered nine guiding principles, which are the subject of my book, Ageless Pizazz: Nine Secrets for Turning Up Your Oomph, Having More Fun, and Being More Powerful as You Get Older. <\/em>The first three follow here:<\/span><\/p>\n Come new to this day.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n ~Rebecca del Rio<\/span><\/p>\n It was rush hour at the supermarket and I was standing in a long, slow-moving line. Everyone ahead of me seemed to have some extra quibble or demand, and I was stuck there behind them. I felt myself sinking into heavy, frustrated resentment. My jaws started clenching, my shoulders contracting, my face falling into that droopy, blank stare of someone helplessly trapped.<\/span><\/p>\n Then I caught myself. \u201cWait a minute!\u201d I thought. \u201cIs this how I want to be? Am I maybe just making it worse with this attitude? Yes, I think so.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n So I took a deep breath. Right away I started noticing the tension in my jaws and shoulders, so as I exhaled I let them relax as much as I could, and I made the choice to just be present.<\/span><\/p>\n I kept breathing deeply and started noticing things. I felt the soles of my feet, pressing down into the floor. I listened: I heard some music playing over the loudspeakers, the murmur of voices, the occasional wail of a child. I looked around, starting to actually see the people. Who were they? Ahead of me, a little girl in line with her mother had arranged all their items in a neat, clever pattern on the belt. I exchanged glowing smiles with the child and her mother, and everything around seemed to brighten.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cShe always does that,\u201d said the mother.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cLooks like she\u2019s growing up to be an artist,\u201d I said.<\/span><\/p>\n The little girl grinned.<\/span><\/p>\n Then I saw that the pretty cashier was smiling and making a brief, warm contact with each person in line, doing everything she could to make our experience more pleasant. A man checking out was laboriously, interminably writing a check; the cashier turned back to the next customers with a smile and a greeting, letting them know she was on top of things. A man in a wheelchair was next in line. When he dropped something, she came lightly out from behind her counter and picked it up for him.<\/span><\/p>\n I let myself be lit up by her good will. Magic was in the air. I talked with people, made quips. They responded with pleasure. My tedious wait in line had become a festive celebration, and the energy I slipped into there carried me through the whole day.<\/span><\/p>\n But I could only slip into that beautiful energy by first coming into the here and now and being willing to experience what was already there: my irritation, my body tensing, the people around me, the items on the conveyer belt\u2014the ordinary, day-to-day things that I don\u2019t usually pay much attention to. By doing that, I opened my \u201cdoors of perception\u201d and was able to experience at a deeper level.<\/span><\/p>\n The principle \u201cBe here now\u201d underlies all the others I teach, for if you are not fully present, you cannot feel your feelings, transform your complaints, cultivate your creativity, or follow any of the other principles I offer in my book. When I talk about pizazz<\/em>, I\u2019m referring to a sort of effervescent joy, a deep pleasure in living that, I believe, is our natural heritage. We can tap into it when we allow ourselves to be fully here in the present moment.<\/span><\/p>\n If you are fully here in the present moment, you can begin to touch into your own pizazz\u2014that alert, unprogrammed, spontaneous spirit at your core. The first thing I teach in my classes is a simple practice of sensing your body, looking, and listening, to be done every day. We use it to stay present throughout the evening, go more deeply into ourselves, feel our own presence, power, and connection to the world around us, and express our power in new ways that may surprise us. Part of being fully present is being willing to be surprised, as expressed by Rebecca del Rio in the poem that I quoted at the beginning of this section:<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n And part of what gets in the way of being present is expecting something in particular and being stuck in a particular outlook. So secret number two is about managing our expectations.<\/span><\/p>\n ~Oprah Winfrey<\/span><\/p>\n By expectations I mean the ideas or beliefs you have acquired about aging over your lifetime\u2014conscious and, more importantly, unconscious.<\/span><\/p>\n These expectations are key because they affect our memory, our hearing, our overall health, our enjoyment of life, our sense of ourselves, and our life expectancy.<\/span><\/p>\n Dr. Becca Levy of Yale University has done a number of studies on what she named \u201cstereotype embodiment.\u201d All around us\u2014on TV and radio, in ads we receive in the mail, in the assumptions people make when they talk\u2014are stereotypes of aging, and when we\u2019re young we don\u2019t question them; we just let them in, as I let in the \u201cover-35\u201d stereotype communicated in the Helen Trent soap opera.<\/span><\/p>\n These stereotypes live inside us as unconscious expectations, and then as we get older we start to automatically embody them. That\u2019s what I was doing when I was feeling so unattractive. Maybe we start to slump a bit. Or our voices get more apologetic, or sharp, or gravelly. We talk about our \u201csymptoms\u201d more. They even become a viable topic of conversation!<\/span><\/p>\n Dr. Levy found that our conscious and unconscious attitudes about aging affect every aspect of our lives. In one study, for example, elderly Chinese subjects performed better on a memory test than elderly Americans\u2014because, she hypothesized, the Chinese tend to have a more positive view about aging than the Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n As we unconsciously start to embody the stereotype, our identity starts to change, like that of a Hunter College librarian I knew in the late 1960s. I was in my 20s then, teaching English. One day I was wearing a fashionably short skirt to work and stopped by the library on the way to class. The librarian, who was about 40 and still attractive, remarked cattily, \u201cHmmph! The instructors are getting snappy! Not in my day!\u201d I wanted to say, \u201cYou mean it\u2019s not your day anymore?\u201d I vowed not to follow in her footsteps.<\/span><\/p>\n Then, when I reached my 50s, I got sucked into the aging stereotype in spite of myself. But now, in my 70s, I still do consider it \u201cmy day\u201d\u2014even though I\u2019m not wild about twitter and cell-phone apps.<\/span><\/p>\n Another psychologist who has done amazing work to show that it\u2019s our expectations that fuel our aging symptoms is Ellen Langer, who in the fall of 1981 created a total immersion experience for eight men in their 70s. She had come to see that a psychological \u201cprime\u201d could trigger the body to heal itself. The prime in this case was a five-day stay in a converted monastery in New Hampshire, where the environment was set up to reproduce the era when the men were 22 years younger: 1959. (Grierson, 2014)<\/span><\/p>\n At the beginning of their stay, a few of the men were arthritically stooped, others walked with canes. They were assessed for dexterity, grip strength, flexibility, hearing and vision, and memory and cognition. From the outset the men were treated as if they were younger; for example, they had to carry their belongings upstairs themselves. They wore the clothing styles from 1959; listened to Perry Como and other popular singers of the day; watched Ed Sullivan on black-and-white TV, and Jimmy Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder<\/em><\/strong>. On tables and bookshelves were magazines and books from that year. They discussed, always in the present tense, \u201ccurrent events\u201d such as the first U.S. satellite launch. Everything was set up to create the illusion that they were back 22 years earlier. There were no mirrors, no recent photos or publications to spoil it.<\/span><\/p>\n At the end of their stay they were assessed again. They were found to be more supple, with greater manual dexterity and better vision; they walked taller and, according to independent observers, looked younger.<\/span><\/p>\n In another study, in 2010, the BBC sponsored a re-creation of Langer\u2019s project, called \u201cThe Young Ones.\u201d Six aging former celebrities were driven via period cars to a country house retrofitted to 1975 and lived as their earlier selves for a week. When they emerged they showed a marked improvement on the test measures.<\/span><\/p>\n One, who had rolled up in a wheelchair, walked out with a cane. Another, who couldn\u2019t even put his socks on unassisted at the start, hosted the final evening\u2019s dinner party, gliding around with purpose and vim. The others walked taller and indeed seemed to look younger (Grierson, 2014).<\/span><\/p>\n Now we have a name for the phenomenon that\u2019s driving our aging: “stereotype embodiment.” So what do we do with it? How do we un-embody the stereotype, and is that even possible? How do we divest ourselves of a stereotype?<\/span><\/p>\n The first thing is to identify it as a belief, or set of beliefs, and not as ourselves.<\/span><\/p>\n A client of mine, Carol, succeeded in doing this. Carol was a successful therapist, wife, and mother who was participating in one of my Ageless Pizazz groups. She came in with the belief that life got boring as you got older, and guess what? She was feeling bored with her life. In the group she was able to turn that belief around. She told us stories of her wild adventures as a young woman and realized that that wild young woman was still alive in her. She began to really relish who she was, and near the end of the group she took off on an adventure, a trip she had been wanting to take for a long time, and came back and told us about it with sparkling eyes.<\/span><\/p>\n So after identifying the belief and acknowledging it, we find ways of changing it, or replacing it, as Carol did by calling up her youthful self and going off on a trip. We look for models\u2014and, now that the health-conscious Boomers are into their 60s, there are many good models out there. We imagine different ways of being and try them out. We hang out with other people who will validate our new, chosen belief. And one thing we do a lot in my Ageless Pizazz groups is play with it. Read on.<\/span><\/p>\n ~George Bernard Shaw<\/span><\/p>\n Because play, which is activity that we do purely for enjoyment, has no goals outside of the activity itself, we may tend to relegate it to a lower rank of importance than money-earning, career-enhancing, or household-maintaining pursuits. But most of us, except for the most hardened puritans and workaholics, know deep in ourselves that play is of core importance in life. It makes us come alive. It connects us to each other. It gives color to our lives.<\/span><\/p>\n Just for fun, here are some things people have said about play:<\/span><\/p>\n Describing the importance of play for adults, Margarita Tartakovsky (2012) lists some of its benefits. On a practical level, play has been shown to<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/h5>\n
nor custom stale\u00a0
her infinite variety.\u00a0
<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Shakespeare,\u00a0Anthony and Cleopatra<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nMy Story<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
A Turning Point<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
Secret Number One:<\/span> Be Here Now<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
“Remove the rigid overcoat of experience . . .”<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
<\/a><\/a>Presence and Pizazz<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
Come new to this day.<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
Remove the rigid overcoat of experience,<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
the notion of knowing,<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
the beliefs that cloud your vision.<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
Leave behind the stories of your life.<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation.<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
Let the old,<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
almost forgotten scent of what-if<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
drift back into the swamp<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
of your useless fears.<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
Arrive curious,<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
without the armor of certainty,<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
without the planned results for the life<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
you\u2019ve imagined.<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
Live the life that chooses you,<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
New with every breath,<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
New with every blink of<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
your astonished eyes.<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
Secret Number Two:<\/span> Expectations<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
“I know for sure that what we dwell on is who we become.”<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
Turning Back the Clock<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
Freeing Ourselves from the Stereotype<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
Secret Number Three:<\/span> Laughter and Play<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
“We don\u2019t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.\u00a0“<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n
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The Benefits of Play and Laughter<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
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