Reflections in a full-length mirror

"And the full-length mirror may be even more nakedly discomfiting. Who is this staring back at us ? This seemingly unchanging me is confronted by this thing I own as "my body". And yet how can it be no more than something dangling at the end of my mind ? For as the body deteriorates, its pains multiply, disturbing the "I" who once took my body very much for granted.

Women in particular may begin to feel more at home in their bodies only with the onset of ageing. There are various possible reasons for this, such as the alienation experienced by women traditionally presented as objects of desire and in some cultures repressive attitudes to sex and the body.

For the most part, however, our youthful embodiment tends to be narcissistic, stimulated by a commercialised culture of physical improvement, youthful appearance and obsessional sex. With ageing we begin to experience embarrassment with our bodies and even revulsion. A once-prized exhibit becomes a liability.

Most religious traditions have tended to revile the body. The concern has been to discourage any inclination to identify with our sensuous flesh - and even more so with somebody else's. Women especially have been seen as (for men) dangerously embodied creatures and a threat to ascetic rectitude.

So far I have supposed a dualistic understanding of mind versus a 'seperate' body, a split mind/body person. Krishnamurti once observed that all the miseries of the world were to be found in even the smallest gap between this and other, in other words in dualistic perceptions. Here the challenge of old age is for the self to embody itself, for mind and body to be experienced as one.

Such an embodiment can occur spontaneously when the self-consciousness of body and mind are lost in some absorbingly creative task, in athletic and sporting skills, in making love and so on. Pairing meditation with hatha yoga makes for a particular valuable embodiment practice. And the practice of bare awareness...is, of course, also a healing embodiment, working with the physicality of emotion and particularly with physical pain...

As our ageing body accumulates aches and pains these become not a distraction from cultivating meditative awareness but an ally, strongly holding our attention and keeping us earthed. In the mind's meditative experience of the body, body and mind become the one presence which is no longer an awareness of any thing. This in its purest form is an awakening from life's dream."

Ageing: The Great Adventure (A Buddhist Guide)
Ken Jones (2003)