Kathleen Dowling Singh

Kathleen Dowling Singh is a Dharma practitioner and in-demand speaker and teacher. She is the author of The Grace in Dying: How We Are Transformed Spiritually As We Die and The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older. Kathleen lives in Sarasota, FL. ⁽¹⁾

In Her Own Words

From The Grace in Aging (2014):

“The Grace in Aging speaks directly to those who have been stirred in her lifetime by the wish to awaken, to live in more sane, kind, and more peaceful minds, to live in a more deeply sense connection with the sacred… this book is directed at all those who recognize that these older years are all that remain of our time to commit devote to awakening… to move our desire to awaken from a peripheral aspect of our lives to a central place…” (pg. 3)

“Loneliness is an experience of the pain of our own conceived separateness, undernourished by spirit. It is an experience of deficiency. In it, We think and feel that we are not sufficiently cared for or cared about, not sufficiently supported, not sufficiently in connection. We feel not sufficient, period. In loneliness, we feel the absence of the attention of others. We feel a loss of all that we would wish to find in the eyes and company of others—validation, praise, acceptance. For some, I reflection as we perceive it in the eyes of others maybe our only proof that we exist…
… aloneness, outwardly, appears similar to loneliness; the same circumstance of seclusion from others. In the experience of aloneness, though, The solitude is viewed through the lens of gratitude and openness… solitude, excepted and chosen, is rich and transformative. It has a sense of fullness, wholeness, sufficiency. Solitude is a sweet and fulfilling enclosure of aloneness. That sense of sufficiency is profoundly empowering. It enables us to pursue our spiritual aspirations with continuously growing confidence.
” (pg. 134-135)

From The Grace in Dying:

“The language in this book is language that attempts respectfully and gratefully to consolidate the wisdom of many traditions. If there is too much Jesus for you or not enough Jesus; if there is too much Buddha or not enough Buddha; if I have missed the intricacies of the Kabbalah or failed to quote the Koran, please… translate into terms that are meaningful to you.” (pg. x)

“When I first began to work with the dying, I struggled for sometime was fear. I felt a visceral shock in witnessing the ravages of disease. At some point a visual habituation, the fear subsided enough to allow me to participate in the awesome majesty of these ordinary death. Participation is a profound stance. It is not mirror observation, looking from the outside in, imagining and interpreting. It is a” being with” unknowing, and empathic experience from the inside out. It is a dialog. Because participation creates depth and connection, it fosters humility and acceptance and understanding.

Participation has allowed me to witness a singular and ephemeral moment in the human journey, one I have come to call “the Nearing Death Experience.” The Nearing Death Experience is an apparently universal process marked primarily by the dissolution of the body and the separate sense of self and the ascendancy of spirit… a quality of relaxation… a quality of withdrawal… a quality of radiance… a quality of interiority… a quality of silence… the quality of the sacred.
” (pg. 6-9)

“None of this discussion is intended to overlook the fact of the real and often brutal suffering of terminal illness. No one who has neither experienced terminal illness nor witnessed it can imagine what the human body can endure. Nor is the discussion intended to overlook the fact that many people did not appear to experience the transformations of the Nearing Death Experience until very shortly before the moment of death itself, suffering in all of its aspects having dominated until that point. We need to develop clarity and insight into the facilitation of this transformative process… tragedy holds the seeds of grace…” (pg. 109-110)

Publications

• The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older (2014)
• The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort and Spiritual Transformation (1998)
• The Grace in Living: Recognize It, Trust It, Abide in It (2016)
• Unbinding: The Grace Beyond Self (2017)

Featured Media

Sources:
(1) Google.