“The Grace In Dying” by Kathleen Dowling Singh is a novel that combines the views of transpersonal psychology, personal experiences, alongside her Buddhist practices and believes on death, that so many people choose to ignore due to its overpowering fear. With these she is able to produce a novel where she differentiates and explains the faint stages of transformation in the transpersonal, spiritual, psychological, philosophical, energetic and physiological experiences of a person going through a near death experience.
The book offers a very orthodox Buddhist image to advocate the experience of death as if it were like, “an empty vase in which the space inside is exactly the same as the space outside. Only the fragile walls of the vase separate
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However, this didn’t make this book less impactful or informative, in fact it made it a lot more straightforward and realistic. I really enjoyed the connections the book had with Buddhist believes of Samsara and especially re-incarnation. My favourite and most poignant part of the novel, had to be the constant reassurance that dying is safe. From the start Singh writes, “Dying is safe. You are safe. Your loved one is safe. That is the message of all the words here.” As a teenager, I’m constantly told to, “Live life to the fullest,” and “life is too short, so make the most out of it,” and that creates a frightening response to any thought of death. We are all humans, and as humans we will do anything to “save” our lives, so thinking about the end of our existence, creates an automatic negative feeling. This book however, really opened the door that I’ve been trying to keep closed for years, the thought of death. During the novel, Singh keeps reminding us that dying is just returning to the place from where we first came from, and the thought of that really changed my whole perspective on this sensitive