Life After Retirement

 

Photo Credot: Gracious Quotes

Life After Retirement

For most people, by the time they become slightly wise, life is more or less over for them. It takes a lifetime for them to experience what life really has to offer. The experience of life leaves most people wounded instead of wise. But if people with so much experience behind them could make their life’s experience into wisdom, their wisdom could be useful for the world in so many ways. We would like to make life after retirement very productive.

Different people retire at different stages but generally, there is such a thing called retirement because our body has reached a certain level of incapability. So, we bring our work down to a lower level simply because if we push it beyond that, we may ‘retire’ in a different way soon! That’s when for a lot of people, the question comes up: “What to do when we retire?”

Once we retire our focus should shift from economic and family worries to our inner growth. All of us have come with our expiry date – the physical body will support us only to a certain point, and no further. Once we pass a certain age, even though we feel we have taken care of our physical body, some things may happen which are totally beyond our control and the equation could change. We always hope and pray that doesn’t happen, but the possibility exists. Knowing the possibility is there, and doing the right thing so that it doesn't happen to us is the sensible thing to do.

So, this is the time to activate that aspect of our life which we have ignored all these years – that is the spiritual part of us. As our body ages, we start getting aches and pains, but if we focus on the inner, slowly we start losing our body consciousness and awaken our soul consciousness – the pains and aches remain, but we remain unaffected.

As we age, the body keeps sending us signals to take care of ourselves – if we ignore them then we face the consequences. If we listen to the signals and start a corrective course of action, start turning inwards under the guidance of a Satguru, we start becoming aware of the tremendous possibilities that lie within us.

When the time to die comes, we can go with a smile without any sense of loss because it is not a loss. If life happens, death is a natural process. Being afraid of a natural process is unnatural. This fear has come because of a certain sense of ignorance and unawareness. We are not in touch with reality and we have gotten deeply identified with this body. This has happened because we have not explored other dimensions.

Once our inner core starts becoming vibrant - old age doesn’t matter at all. Through meditation we learn that the soul is imperishable, we are not the physical body, and in time we merge with universal consciousness. Once this happens, we realise that the physical body is just a vehicle for the soul to attain supreme soul consciousness.