Living in the Light of Death

Via Crucis, Good Friday 2014, Colisseum Roma Italia
photo by Beth Cioffoletti

As St. Augustine taught, we must “die daily” to our small and separate sense of self. Kathleen Dowling Singh offers an invitation to practice dying through meditation. In her words, “We can sit to meditate with the intention to let it all go, inspired to explore what lies beyond self.”

“We sit deliberately, with noble posture and noble attention.

“We breathe. Progressively, we free our awareness from sensations. We free our awareness from the ‘I’ we imputed upon the sensations and the ‘mine’ with which we tried to claim them. We relieve ourselves of all of our mistaken identifications, loosening our attachments to them, letting them go.

“We liberate ourselves from illusions and, cleared of all that congested weight, the burden of being a self, we surrender, entering awareness that is spacious and quiet and uncongested.

“We just die into silence. Die to the past. Die to the future. Die to the breath. Completely let go. The silence reveals itself as refuge, as awareness that can be trusted, tenderly loving and resounding with the majesty and the mystery of the sacred.”


Adapted from “Living in the Light of Death” by Kathleen Dowling Singh,
Oneing, “Ripening,” Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 42-44

[repeat post from Good Friday, 2014]