The Grace in Aging Quotes

“Like the medieval cartographers of Europe, who felt one would fall into endless space at the edges of the oceans of their maps, we fear the presumed nothingness of no-self. Fortunately, there have been many spiritual circumnavigators who have returned to tell the tale of the beauty beyond self.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“Love one another." If we took those simple words to heart, we'd already be the Buddhas Jesus wanted us to be.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“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.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“The small man            builds cages for everyone he knows,            while the sage,            . . . . . . .            keeps dropping keys all night long            for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.            —HAFIZ”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“Because whenever you start the spiritual journey, the whole of humanity, and perhaps creation, goes along and shares the journey with you.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“To ripen into an elder, into a being that is more than simply elderly and more than only self, is a deliberate, thoughtful, sustained choice that arises from the intention to see things as they are. There”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“Ego is like a street urchin, born of fear and wanting and left to its own devices....”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“With a wispier sense of self and growing courage and longing, we remain surrendered. This movement allows us to ripen every positive potentiality, our buddhaseed, our Christ consciousness, in transcendence. Here, as Martin Laird, a contemporary Christian contemplative, puts it, is “not the loss of identity but its flowering.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“Surrender Laying down the self, like the hero who is too tired, too weakened, too bored, or too disenchanted with it to keep carrying it around, we cede the victory. Seeing through the self, the hero recognizes it as illusory, mere imputation, and lays it down.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“ones, whether that loss be through their death or their dementia. Without strong mindfulness, we can almost drown in the chaotic turbulence of reactivity.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“We are so caught and small and deluded in the minds of self-cherishing and self-grasping. We can define self-cherishing as the secretly harbored belief all egos have that my happiness is more important than anyone else’s.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“heart. Ego is not present in this deepest of intimacies; it cannot enter the sanctum sanctorum.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“Zero is the still point where form and formless meet in perfect balance. This is the awakened state. To live at the zero point is to live liberated.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“The laying down of the self, the letting go of attachment to self, is our biggest challenge.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“All wisdom traditions recognize the necessity of freeing our attention from self-reference. A predominant aspect of almost all”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“TO CHOOSE a spiritual path is to adopt a view of the process of awakening. That view 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.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“In the same way, if we choose to use these older years to awaken, a map of the territory is essential to expand what we hold as possible, to point out the way. So far, most of us have only navigated form. With our attention virtually trapped in form, we’ve missed an entire half of the universe—the formless, always already here.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“you did not think possible and see what shimmers within the storm. —JAN RICHARDSON”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“Contemplation of our death provides the urgency that keeps us aware that this moment right now, this opportunity to enter the timeless present, is passing. We begin to imprint the truth of impermanence at a deep level with a breath-by-breath acknowledgment. Impermanence does not occur only in reference to decades or years or weeks or days. Impermanence is the nature of every arising moment. Each precious moment matters. It has never arisen before. It will never return again.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“WE CAN INTEND to use these last years with skill and meaning, seizing the essence of this precious human life. Mindful of impermanence, the breath-by-breath arising and abiding and falling of each moment, we can remain in remembrance of our longing to exist in wisdom and love and compassion. We can remain in our intention to ripen into the spiritual maturity that is our birthright to cultivate. There is no more noble way to spend these years than to become an elder, to bear witness to the world as placeholders for peace, love, wisdom, and fearlessness.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“If we were to take to heart the fact of our fleeting and precarious existence, would we really continue all of our worldly striving and consuming? Would we really be upset about the same things today that upset us yesterday? How many of our grudges and disappointments would still seem important? Would we continue to have unhealed relationships? Would we still leave the words of gratitude and of forgiveness and of love unspoken? How would we greet each wondrous being that engages in connection with us? How would we live each day differently?”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“To contemplate dying each day brings forth a view with more wisdom. It reorients us and keeps us moving in the right direction, toward deeper wisdom and into greater love. To contemplate dying each day calls forth an instant reordering of priorities.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“is wise to come to know our own depths, to plumb and explore them, to allow our hearts to break open, to allow our minds to investigate that which they would rather deny, to allow ourselves to contemplate impermanence, to take death in—our own and the deaths of all of those we love.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“Most of us do not yet know our own essential nature. Maybe we can feel the pain of limitation and the unease of contraction and the longing for liberation beyond self, but we cling to what’s familiar. We are like a chick, afraid to break through the ever-so-thin shell of the already outgrown and painfully confining egg.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“urgency to want to let go of all of the stress and confusion, the suffering large and small, of living on the surface.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“Deepened awareness and recognition of our impermanence, quite simply, can provide the urgency”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“aging. It’s primarily our fear of the end of “me” that keeps us attempting to overlook the reality of our own advancing years and our declining physical body.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“TO AWAKEN, we want to look at where we resist looking. In addition to fear of the loss of independence and relevance, fear of appearance deemed conventionally unattractive,”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“We can choose to bear witness to the grace in aging. Doing so, we can reveal the profound and noble value of the wise use of this time. The attainments of minds of peace, compassion, and sanity, the fruits of committing our last years to awakening, have very little to do with the cultural standards of success at midlife.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“We have become very used to dismissing the importance of the last years of our lives, because they do not measure up to the criteria of midlife. The old are measured by midlife values.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older