The Grace in Aging
I first heard of Kathleen Dowling Singh through my husband’s cousin, a hospice chaplain whose work I admire and who suggested I read Singh’s book The Grace In Dying, which I did in fact read about a year ago, and which inspired me to purchase the other two in that series: The Grace In Living, and The Grace In Aging. Singh was a dharma practitioner, psychotherapist, in-demand speaker, and teacher. She did a lot of work in the death and dying field, and died herself in 2017, about a month shy of 71, surrounded by loving family in Venice, Florida. According to one obituary, her four grown children said that Singh would want people to know she was an ordinary person who died an ordinary death. (I’ll talk more about Singh’s perspective on ordinariness later in the program.) I could not find her cause of death anywhere online, but I seem to recall learning somewhere along the way that it was cancer.
Before diving into other ideas explored in The Grace In Aging, I’ll just say this of my own aging, as I am publishing this blog post two days before my fortieth birthday: I am so grateful. I do not find it hard to believe that I am forty years old. I am not at all bummed or freaked out about it. People in later decades of life might think, “Yeah, you shouldn’t be. Forty isn’t old. Fifty,” they might say, “is when you really start to notice your age.” In other words, that’s when things get difficult. You just wait. And of course I could not argue with them even if I desired to. I can only speak to my own experience of aging, and say that I am already feeling it, that forty is old in some ways, and that’s okay. I see my age in the lines of my face that didn’t used to be there, and in the ways my eyelids don’t defy gravity so well anymore, and in the very many white hairs on my head, which have mostly colonized my temples, which I admit is why I always wear my hair down. I see my age in my belly, which, despite my maintaining the same exercise routine and overall diet since my early thirties, isn’t as flat as it once was. I feel my age in the way my back will cinch up for seemingly no reason—I reached for something! Ouch! Or I started to bend over! And sometimes it’s like I’m feeling all forty of my years at the same time, my exhaustion is that thorough.
But feeling my age is actually, more often than not, a good thing. I feel it in my decreased concern for what others think of me, and in my resulting willingness to put myself out there more, as I do on this radio show—a show that didn’t exist, for good reason, until I was 39 and a quarter years old. I feel my age in how much more patient I’ve become—though certain scenarios still find me with a lot of room for improvement in that regard. I feel it in my deepened capacity to sit with uncomfortable emotions and to give others the space to sit with theirs. I do not want to be a child again, or a teenager, or in my twenties, or any other age than the age I am right now (although I do sometimes wish I were much older or lived in an earlier time so I wouldn’t have to witness what seems to be the world ending). I think anyone who complains about growing older maybe doesn’t deserve to grow older. One hundred years ago, the average human life span was 53 years. Now it’s 79 years. And I’d bet that the average human’s disdain for aging has increased right along with the number of years they can expect to live.
I heard a terrible song today, in the doctor’s office of all places. I’d just been told that it was time for me start thinking about scheduling my first mammogram, and then this cheesy tune with a “never grow up” refrain started playing, sung from the perspective of a mother—maybe an aunt—to a child, telling them to “stay this little” and “stay this simple” forever. I just googled it and learned that it’s a Taylor Swift song. For shame, Tay-Tay! “I won't let nobody hurt you,” she sings. “Won't let no one break your heart. And no one will desert you. Just try to never grow up. Never grow up.” Ugh. That song epitomizes our culture’s unhealthy idealization of youth and childhood, and to the child for whom it was written I would say, “No! Please! Do grow up! Accept the fact that life will hurt you and break your heart into a million pieces and that you will essentially be all alone, and trust that you can handle it and don’t need anyone else to protect you from it!” As Kathleen Dowling Singh says in The Grace In Aging, “It would be the most profound and ungrateful ignorance, to remain childish in an aging vessel.” Telling someone to never grown up is akin to telling them to resist what is, what must be, and is therefore an invitation to major suffering, if not insanity.
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Speaking of invitations, the first official part of The Grace In Aging is called “An Invitation,” wherein Singh is basically inviting the reader to wake up. Though the book is largely addressed to people age 60 and older, it offers a perspective on spiritual practice that an adult of any age could find beneficial. Indeed, a recurrent thought I had while reading was, “It would be a shame to wait until one was 60 to start implementing these practices.” As Singh says, “Our small little ego will not save us from the predictable sufferings of aging and death. It has no strategies, no power. It offers no refuge.” The spiritual practices she explores in the text are ways for us to transcend the ego and access a “vaster awareness,” an awareness in which the processes of our bodies, emotions, and thoughts take place, processes that most of us identify with for the majority of our lives. And by “identify,” I mean “mistake for our actual selves.” But Singh describes these sensory, emotional, and cognitive processes as “impersonal.” They have nothing to do with us, with our essence. In a broad sense, spirituality is the state or practice of disidentifying with such processes, or at least changing how we relate to them. How do we relate to pain, sickness, loss, and disappointment? All things that we will inevitably experience more and more of, the older we get?
In order to change our ways of relating to our own experience, we must practice looking at our own minds. Singh is refreshingly unequivocal in her assertion that a regular, formal meditation practice is essential if we wish to transcend our conditioned ways of relating to experience. She says that there is no other way for our minds to become “unbound,” and that only we can give this to ourselves. No one else, no matter how wise or enlightened they might be, can give it to us. And though cases of spontaneous awakening have apparently occurred—I’m reminded of Eckhart Tolle’s park bench revelation, which he describes in the The Power of Now—Singh says they are incredibly rare and shouldn’t be counted on. She says that walking a spiritual path “is simply a matter of showing up.” We look unflinchingly, with unwavering compassion, at everything that is actually happening around us and within us in every moment, in every “unfolding of now.” Formal meditation is the most effective, time-honored way to practice such showing up.
But it definitely isn’t easy. Singh says that beginning practitioners of meditation should keep in mind that spiritual transformation occurs in three stages: chaos, surrender, and transcendence. For many people, chaos is the normal state of mind, and so “to avoid being disheartened when we first begin a mindfulness or contemplation practice, we should know that this chaos is what we will find.” In shining the light of awareness on it, we might at first—and maybe for a while—feel like we’re getting crazier. But we are simply seeing things as they really are, as they have been for a very long time. The more we look at ourselves—or rather, what Singh calls our “selfing”—we are able to see through it, to recognize it as illusion, as story, as merely a collection of conditioned resistances. Singh says that “selfing is resistance.” Setting the self aside constitutes the phase of surrender. The freedom of transcendence follows, which Singh describes as “liberation from attention’s entanglement in self, the universe of only form, bound by concept.”
What we call our self, Singh says, is merely a “reaction mechanism,” and for many people it isn’t until the moments leading up to death that they experience this to be so. For others, the shocks of the aging process are intense enough to bring on this realization. I myself would like to be more prepared for those shocks, and not so in thrall to what Singh calls “our most deeply-ingrained habit pattern”: “ceaseless self-reference.” This self-reference is what prevents us from experiencing the awakened state that is always already right here, right now. As Singh so brilliantly points out, “The self doesn’t get liberated. The self is what awareness gets liberated from.”
But in order to be free of the self, we must first provide the self with what Singh calls “special conditions.” She outlines eleven of these conditions, or circumstances, in The Grace In Aging, and her explications of them are what comprise the bulk of the book.
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The primary premise of The Grace In Aging is that you need to choose a spiritual path and stick with it, if you are to “awaken as you grow older” (which is the subtitle of the book). In making such a choice, we “adopt a view of the process of awakening…that allows the path to be spoken of in a way that our conceptual mind, the mind in which we all begin to walk a spiritual path, can grasp.” It’s an inherently practical choice, and Singh says that regardless of the path you choose (she herself was partial to Buddhism), you will find that remarkably similar “special conditions” show up there. They are: opening to mortality, withdrawal, silence, solitude, forgiveness, humility, the practice of presence, commitment, life review and resolution, opening the heart, and opening the mind. When it is our time to die, Singh says—and assuming we have the time and wherewithal to process that dying, as those with a terminal diagnosis sometimes do—these special conditions occur without our choosing them. But it kind and wise to put them in place long before we’re on our death bed.
Special Condition One, Opening to Our Own Mortality, essentially entails meditating on death. In her explication of this practice, Singh makes the following fascinating observation:
“The sense of self believes it owns, is the possessor of, sensations, thoughts, feelings, and patterns. Just the reverse is so. Sensations, thoughts, feelings, and patterns give rise to the illusory sense of self. When they cease, so too does the sense of self.” I’d say that’s definitely something worth meditating on! She also suggests that we remind ourselves, every time we sit to meditate on mortality, that it might be the last time we ever get to do it.
Special Condition Two, Withdrawal, is what Singh also calls Liberation from Habits. People in the later decades of their lives typically experience a natural lessening of activity. Singh says that the “overwhelming busy-ness” that characterized our earlier decades isn’t there anymore. And to that I say, “Why should it ever have been there?” Why should “overwhelming busy-ness” be the norm? But it is, I guess, one of our habits. The kind of habits Singh largely refers to, though, when it comes to the special condition of withdrawal, are habits of thought, which “hook” us out of the present moment and into our story. In Buddhism, the eight worldly concerns of loss and gain, pleasure and pain, fame and shame, and praise and blame, offer a good starting place for looking at such habits. Tracking our habituated reactions to these worldly concerns—without which no newscast would be complete—we see that they were “created by a child without enough information…with undeveloped capacity to see and to judge and to understand.” Singh says that the ego is largely a collection of defenses that we constructed in childhood in order to avoid feeling pain, fear, worthlessness, and other discomforts. In getting on ever more intimate terms with the habits of the self, which ironically enough happens when we stop indulging those habits and instead withdraw into awareness of them, we eventually see that the self itself—or selfing—is a habit, too. We see, as Singh says, that the activity and habits of the mind are not problematic. Problems arise when we believe that we are creating that activity, that we both own it and are victims of it.
Special Condition Three, Silence, or Liberation from Illusions, is one of my favorites. For years now I have fantasized about taking a vow of silence, but I can never find the right (ahem, perfect) time to do it. Singh suggests practicing noble silence—or total abstinence from speaking—for a part of each day, or just one afternoon each week, which feels much more do-able than going an entire day or multiple days—unless of course I went on an actual silent retreat and had no practical need for speech. Practicing noble silence helps direct our attention more inward and keeps us on the spiritual path. Outer silence begets inner silence, with enough time and repetition. At first, of course, we will see that the self-referential monologue in our head is constantly running. We will also see that the more we allow this monologue to continue on unabated, the more we sustain our illusion of self, and therefore the more suffering we have.
The other type of silence Singh explores is essential silence, which is the practice of speaking only when it’s appropriate and necessary. She says we should practice essential silence all day, every day. Imagine how different the world would be if everyone did that! Given that social media posts are a kind of speech or way of talking, I think most if not all of those would cease if everyone asked themselves before posting, “Is this appropriate and necessary? Do I need however many dozens or hundreds or thousands of people to know my thoughts and feelings on this particular subject, at this particular moment?” To practice essential silence is to conserve one’s energy by not engaging in what Singh says is “one of ego’s most familiar and habituated drugs of choice: mindless speaking.”
Solitude is the fourth Special Condition, and it’s another of my favorites. Also called Liberation from Attachment; Release Into Sufficiency, solitude requires that we experience aloneness on a regular basis. As opposed to loneliness, which Singh describes as “an experience of the pain of our own conceived separateness” and “an experience of deficiency [in which] we think and feel that we are not sufficiently cared for or cared about, supported, or in connection,” aloneness is simply the condition of connecting with our own inner support. By removing ourselves from all the people, places and activities on which we have habitually projected our happiness—believing that our happiness comes from those external sources—“the patterned ways in which we ordinarily react to the arisings in our lives…have an opportunity to simply sputter out of fuel.” While the practice of silence works with our capacity to hear, the practice of solitude works with our capacity to see, in that we are not seeing other people. This external detachment from others is typically a necessary step toward a more internal detachment. And such detachment is a prerequisite to really loving others.
This sounds paradoxical. But it goes all the way back to my very first blog post, in which I explored Anthony de Mello’s book Awareness. De Mello says that love makes no demands, and if we are relying on someone else to make us happy—if we are overly attached to them—then we will inevitably, if unconsciously, make demands on them. We will need them to act a certain way, and any aberrations from such behavior will cause us great anxiety. So love actually increases as attachment decreases, because love is “no longer obstructed by the self-referential quality of attachment.” Singh defines love as “the mind that wishes another to be happy, the mind of deeply grateful appreciation,” and she says that in detachment, love “blossoms unimpeded.”
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I’ve made my way up to the fifth Special Condition that Singh discusses in The Grace In Aging: Forgiveness, or Liberation from Aversion; Freedom from Anger and Judgment. Singh says that our reluctance to forgive, to essentially relinquish anger and judgment, is one of the biggest obstructions to peace, not only on an individual, internal level, but also in the realms of family, politics, and international relations. I’m sure she’d agree with the old adage—which I just discovered is commonly attributed to the Buddha—that holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. We might think that the other person suffers more than we do by not receiving our forgiveness. And in some cases, maybe they do. But anger is a kind of pain, and by clinging to it, we engage in self-harm. Which isn’t to say that anger doesn’t have a place; of course it does. Anger can be an effective catalyst, encouraging us to take a much-needed action. But when no such necessary action is taken or is no longer appropriate to the situation, and the anger just collects inside us, never expressed, in the literal sense of that word, it is poison.
If you read my blog about the book and documentary film, How to Cook Your Life, you might recall what Zen priest and chef Edward Espe Brown had to say about anger. He said a lot of people just have anger inside of them that really has nothing to do with the present-moment situation of their lives. It’s old. He compared it to having a piece of excrement on your nose, and so you everywhere you go you think, “This stinks.” And the solution, then, is to wash your face. Change yourself, in other words; don’t expect the world around you to change. Singh, being Buddhist herself, echoes this notion when she says, “Anger is always about a past moment, even if the moment was a nanosecond ago. Anger is always about a story…the fiction of ‘wronged’ me.” We must release our grip on that story if we are to get any sort of grip on real peace. Singh says that there must be a willingness to want peace in the first place, which many people say they want, but their actions prove otherwise. Singh asks, “Are we waiting for our family or our neighbors or our government to declare it?” Again, that would be expecting the world to change, which would be foolish. I agree with Singh that the current iteration of the world is “the very exposition of what unpeaceful minds create.” So if we don’t want to contribute to that kind of world, we must cultivate peace within ourselves. And in many cases, that means practicing forgiveness.
But I want to return to the notion that anger is always old, always about a past moment. Always? I’m thinking about the war in Ukraine, and about the man who’s ultimately waging it, calling all the shots—the literal shots, in this case. I don’t even want to say his name. And I don’t want to talk about him too much because that would give him more energy. But the anger that I feel about that war is so visceral, and it makes me so unbelievably sad and disgusted, and it’s happening right now. Granted, it has happened before. I experienced similar emotions as a child during the Gulf War. I am quite frankly in utter disbelief—practically dumbfounded—that human beings are still going to war with each other. Seriously? We have all these technological advancements and we still haven’t figured out how to get along with each other? We still haven’t made it the main curriculum of every school, public and private and in between? My heart pounds in my throat when I think about. It’s so incredibly sad. We still can’t get along with each other.
Anyway: I find it difficult to forgive anyone who starts a war. I just keep trying to embody the question that Ram Dass asks in Becoming Nobody: How do you keep your heart open in hell?
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The next special condition for awakening as you grow older is Humility, or Liberation from Pride and the Illusions of Perfectionism; Release Into Ordinariness. I mentioned at the beginning of the show that Singh’s grown children said their late mother would want people to know she was an ordinary person who died an ordinary death. This was her divine humility at work. In freeing ourselves from pride—which is different, Singh says, “from the healthy joy and fulfillment that we can feel in an accomplishment”—we relinquish arrogance, and any effort to be seen as superior or special. We also let go of the need to be perfect or do things perfectly. Perfectionism actually precludes any productive engagement with a noble practice or spiritual path. “We can’t wake up into awareness beyond self,” Singh says, “when our strongest intention is to perfect the self.” Our society tends to see perfectionism as an admirable trait, but it’s just a burden, and it makes us burdensome to others. Perfectionism says that we’re not allowed to make mistakes, which is the same as saying we’re not allowed to be human. But alas, we are human, and resisting that reality results in suffering. Such resistance is suffering.
In establishing the special condition of humility, we cease all stressful posturing that attempts to hide or deny our humanness. We accept that we are ordinary, thereby liberating ourselves from the pressure to be extraordinary. The beautiful irony of enlightenment is that “only beings who know themselves to be ordinary can attain it.”
Presence, the seventh special condition, is also called Liberation from Frivolity and Other Inessentials. As someone who’s always been attracted to minimalism and simplicity, this is another of my favorites. In true presence, we can appreciate the sheer miraculousness of being. Embodying this appreciation, the things, people, and circumstances we’ve seen as necessities are revealed for the extras that they are, the cherries on top of a cake already loaded with icing. In seeing that everything that exists is a marvel just for existing, we can, to quote Singh, “live it with deepened joy and gratitude, echoing and resounding with the words of the Psalm: ‘I thank you for the wonder of my being.’” That’s my new favorite prayer, by the way, and what I hope to be saying over and over again in my final moments, whenever they may come: “I thank you for the wonder of my being.”
As I’ve said before, I know it’s useless to imagine how much better the world would be if everyone just did X,Y, or Z. But I can’t help myself. Imagine how much better the world would be if everyone’s attention were always given to that kind of gratitude! Where attention goes, energy flows. Or as Singh says in The Grace In Aging, “Where we place attention literally creates the world in which we live and our experience of existence.” And any time our attention is not aligned with here and now, our world becomes problematic, our experience of existence stressful, if not painful.
With so much conflict and unravelling and ramping up of self-reinforcing feedback loops happening in the world right now, it is all too easy to give our attention to the future and to what might happen to us. The terrifying what-ifs are endless. It takes work—intentional effort and discipline—to train our attention elsewhere. Every moment, without exception, asks this of us: wake up. To quote Singh, “We’re always only a thought away from here and now, and from its great majesty.” Which doesn’t mean that there’s a certain thought we can think that will connect us with that majesty. It means that the absence of thought, or the ability to not identify with thought, is the key to such connection. In a recent dharma talk he gave, Edward Espe Brown defined joy as the experience of your attention becoming one with the object of your attention. There’s no more I-thou separation. There only is. And that is bliss.
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So far I’ve discussed the conditions of opening to mortality, withdrawal, silence, solitude, forgiveness, humility, and the practice of presence. Next up is Commitment, or Liberation from Deception. This condition strikes me as more of continuation or deepening of the practice of presence than as a discreet thing all its own. It is “the committed, deliberate, sustained application of our attention with intention.” In this practice, our sincerity, wisdom, and concentration deepen. The sustained training of attention allows us to give our full attention to others who need it. For people in the later decades of life, this often means tending to loved ones who are dying. Having done extensive work in the hospice field, Singh asserts that “the gift of attention is the most underused of human resources… It’s one of the most precious things we have to offer each other.”
The ninth Special Condition is called Life Review and Resolution, or Liberation from Our Story; Release Into Freedom. In this section of the book Singh reemphasizes that, for every human, “the sense of self first arose as a wound, the painful amputation that cut us off into separation.” That sense of self was then reinforced again and again by our stringing together of memories—moments of pride and moments of shame and various moments in between—all feelings, remembered. We create stories out of ambitions unfulfilled, out of the discrepancy between what we’d hoped to be and what we actually are. Singh quotes American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist, and scholar of comparative religion, Thomas Merton, who wrote, “Finally I am coming to the conclusion / that my highest ambition is to be what I already am…” In order to embrace what we already are, we release all that we are not but have been led to believe otherwise. As Saint Francis said, if we can face the death of ego—what he calls “the first death”—then “the second death, the death of the temporarily appearing body, can do no harm.”
And finally, Singh addresses the last two special conditions in one section of the book. These conditions are Opening the Heart and Opening the Mind. In opening the heart, we release everything that has kept it closed for so many years. In opening the mind, we, paradoxically enough, release a lot of “knowing,” or what Saint Augustine called “learned ignorance.” Singh says all we really “know” is how to “navigate the appearance of a world agreed to in our consensus.” She excerpts the following lines from a Rumi poem: “Do you think I know what I am doing? / That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself? / As much as a pen knows what it’s writing, / or the ball can guess where it’s going next.” This reminds me of the concept of beginner’s mind, and how Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.” As children we naturally possess beginner’s mind, which the necessary development of ego buries. But it never goes away, and so as adults, if our intention is true and our attention well-trained, we can uncover it again, thus completing the circle of life before death does it for us.
In one’s final years, as Singh says, “we can bring light into our benighted culture, so far lost down grasping’s long detour, and bring healing to our precious planet, so harmed by the ignorance of the unawakened state.”
I hope you enjoyed learning about Kathleen Dowling Singh’s perspective on aging, which essentially says that we can make the process easier on ourselves by establishing a regular spiritual practice. But even if we’re not in our final decades, why should we continue to identify with ego? It’s just good sense to start that work right now.
Happy birthday to me, and happy birthday to you, too, since every day—every breath—is a chance to be born anew, or as Thomas Merton says, to become what you already are.
