The Tao of Aging

by Evy Cugelman

I often hear people talk about “the good old days” and how health care was supposedly so much better then. My experience has been very different.

I graduated with my RN in 1971. Six months later, I quit.

I found the lack of genuine care in hospitals heartbreaking. I was actually scolded for sitting with my patients and taking the time to talk with them. Efficiency mattered more than human connection. Although I left my emergency room position, I continued working as a private duty nurse in hospitals and was repeatedly distressed by how often patients were ignored, dismissed, or treated without compassion.

At the time, I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t yet understand the bigger picture.

Fortunately, curiosity—and perhaps a healthy rebellious streak—led me to explore different ways of understanding health, healing, and the human experience.

A Lesson About Life and Death

In 1974, I attended a two-week meditation course taught by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. During the course, I confessed to Lama Yeshe that I was terrified of having a patient die while I was on duty.

In response, he gave a profound teaching on birth and death.

When I returned to work, my next nine patients died with me at their side.

Rather than reinforcing my fear, those experiences transformed it. I began to understand the extraordinary depth of the dying process and realized what an immense privilege it is to accompany someone with deep compassion as they enter life’s most personal and mysterious journey.

Those experiences also awakened a deeper understanding: we are not simply physical bodies. We are mind, body, emotions, and spirit.

Yet none of this had been acknowledged during my nursing education or in the health care settings where I worked.

How can we truly provide comprehensive health care if we focus only on symptoms while ignoring the whole person?

Looking Beyond the Symptoms

My career in gerontology began in 1976. Although I worked in what was considered a progressive seniors’ community, treatment still focused almost exclusively on managing symptoms.

Many of our residents were Holocaust survivors carrying unimaginable trauma. They lived with anxiety, grief, survivor’s guilt, and emotional wounds that shaped every aspect of their health. Yet their care generally consisted of medication or psychiatric referrals. Rarely did anyone ask how their life experiences continued to influence their physical and emotional well-being.

People would often come into my office saying, “Nurse, I need a pill.”

That was the culture. Find the magic pill.

Throughout our lives, remarkable people appear as teachers. Two women, in particular, have stayed with me for decades.

Both had endured horrific torture during the Holocaust and had lost their entire families.

One woke every morning filled with gratitude simply because she had been given another chance to live.

The other lived in constant fear that she had cancer. She frequently came to my office convinced she had found another tumor.

It took me years to understand her.

Eventually, I realized she wasn’t searching for cancer. She was living with profound survivor’s guilt. She had survived while everyone she loved had died. That unresolved trauma influenced her health, her personality, and her beliefs every single day.

When Trauma Speaks

In the 1990s, while managing a county-wide dementia program, another extraordinary woman became one of my greatest teachers.

Every afternoon at exactly the same time, she would have a bowel movement and scream in agony. Every medical investigation came back normal.

Because I had already begun to appreciate the lifelong effects of trauma, I asked her husband whether she had ever experienced a significant loss.

He shared a story that changed everything.

Thirty years earlier, she had delivered healthy twins. Three weeks later, she passed a calcified fetus from an undiagnosed triplet pregnancy.

She believed she was going to have a bowel movement, but instead she delivered that calcified fetus.

Her husband never allowed her to talk about it because, in his words, “it wasn’t real.”

She carried that silent grief for three decades.

As Alzheimer’s disease progressed, that unresolved trauma resurfaced.

The conventional medical response was to prescribe antipsychotic medication.

Instead, I began using Validation Therapy, developed by Naomi Feil.

Within a week, something remarkable happened.

The buried grief emerged. She cried. She shared her story. She was finally able to mourn the child she had never been allowed to grieve.

Sometimes healing begins simply because someone is finally willing to listen.

Discovering the Healing Power of Presence

Around the same time, I began studying Therapeutic Touch with Dr. Dolores Krieger and Dora Kunz.

Therapeutic Touch is an energy-based healing modality. Research has demonstrated relaxation responses within minutes and positive effects on healing in a variety of conditions. Yet what most profoundly influenced me was not the research itself.

It was the philosophy.

Therapeutic Touch is grounded in compassion, intentionality, spiritual connection, and the practitioner’s ability to be fully present with another human being.

It reinforced everything I had been learning throughout my career.

Healing is far more than treating disease.

Finding My Tribe

All of these experiences confirmed that I simply did not fit comfortably within the traditional medical model.

Dr. Dolores Krieger once told me that I was “a warrior on the Rainbow Healing Path.”

Those words stayed with me.

The question became: How do we change a system that cannot see its own limitations or is influenced by multinational corporations?

That conversation inevitably leads to social, political, and economic realities—but that is a discussion for another day.

What mattered was finding an organization whose philosophy aligned with my own understanding of healing.

One of the greatest lessons I learned from Lama Yeshe and from Therapeutic Touch was the power of intention.

See it. Know it. Trust it. Don’t allow fear and endless “what ifs” to dominate your thinking.

When we set a clear intention and ask for guidance, we must also remain open to the signs that quietly lead us forward.

For me, that path led to Colorado and eventually to Piñon Management, led by Jeff Jerebker, one of the founders of The Tao of Aging.

At last, I found my tribe.

I found people who shared my passion for honoring the whole person—mind, body, emotions, and spirit—and who were deeply committed to supporting not only elders but also everyone who walks beside them on the journey of care.

Looking back over my career, I realize that my greatest teachers were never textbooks or policies. They were the patients who entrusted me with their stories.

They taught me that healing begins when we are willing to truly see another human being unconditionally.

Evy Cugelman

Educator, consultant, and activist in gerontology