The beauty that we thinking resided in the curve of a muscle pales in comparison to the beauty of our possess essential nature.

I work with nation who are dying. I sit with them, listen to them, breathe with them, meditate with them. When you do that day in and day not at home your heart becomes an album of powerful, loving memories, like an AIDS quilt I have many pictures in my mind of beautiful gay men dying. I have images of men whose formerly beautifully healthy bodies, weakened and beaten through disease, lie captured in hospital beds. frequently by the bedside table, I have seen the photographs they have of their former selve And in the way that less than two feet apart, I papal court the two faces: the handsome image of the flashing smile and sparkling judgments in the frame and the gaunt and worn and tired face, remarkably real, on the pillow.

a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of suffering lies between the brace faces--as well as all the transformations that suffering can forge. The faces in the beds have traveled the lengthy and painful road from tragedy to grace, from the life lived in the world of appearances, at the surface, to the greater and more keen depth of being at the center Their lover frequently appear to make the journey with them and be fond of the face in the bed with a power and a completenes far beyond what could have been imagined forward the day the handsome photograph was taken.

As I am with these beautiful gay men dying, I think repeatedly of the first one who shared with me the AIDS community's name for its have a title to pandemic. In a whisper he told me the concealed understanding: He called his disease Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self

At an point--after the years of delicate and meticulous care of the carcass after the sadly wrenching period of gradual decline into the awful and dramatic fall of the close stage of the disease--everyone looks to pass an invisible border of great depth in his own interior, from the time of sickness into the time of dying. With this passage, direction changes. Knowing one's self to be in succession the trajectory of dying, a person's not new priorities are turned upside down.

united of these men who I grew to have affection for told me that, more than in any other rite of passage in his life, [i]or[/i] part of to the other this harsh passage of AIDS he had be due [i]or[/i] owing to know himself. He said that he had in some way always treated his life as however it were a dress rehearsal nevertheless that "dying is very real." It was, he shared with me [i]or[/i] part of to the other new eyes that he saw his avow real beauty, his own real value, the silence of meaning we miss to such a degree often in life, and the raw power of love

As any human being put in motions closer to the moment of death itself, attachment to the surface--to the world of appearance, to the world of form--simply begins to dissolve. What begins to capture the attention is far more inward, more saturated with stillest part more subtly filled with grace.

After decades of attraction to the beauty at the periphery of life, attention uses to the beauty found and nothing else at the center. Longing becomes for the beautiful, the authentic and the good. There is vivid intensity of being at this exigency ms our awareness moves more and more very much into love.

All the images we've held thus solidly and so dearly in our minds of who we think we are begin to thin and to dissolve. And as they thin and dissolve, we become a bit more translucent. The light shining in and by the and of us begins to intensify.

The beauty that we meditation resided in the curve of a muscle or the slant of a cheek pales in comparison to the beauty of our acknowledge essential nature radiating out powerfully, despite the frail carcass from the depths of our mind Sacred dimensions begin to disclose themselves, not just to the dying someone but also to those who be in love with him.

Minds destitute of contents hearts open, and we all actuate a bit more deeply into the soul's avow landscape, the very center of being, into grace. With the transformations in dying, we not sole redefine beauty, we redefine self With the transformations in dying, we redefine living.

Dowling Singh is a hospice worker and transpersonal psychologist. She is also the author of The Grace in Dying.

...

Home