The Grace in Dying by Kathleen D. Singh

Author:Kathleen D. Singh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

The Psychospiritual Stages of Dying

All religions begin with the cry “Help!”

William James

This very earth is the Lotus Land of Purity; And this body is the body of Buddha.

Hakuin

Dying is 180 degrees from birthing. Any mother in the world can tell you with what travail life comes into form. For life to leave form requires equal travail. We were not designed to leave the body easily. A vast array of survival instincts and mechanisms are in place to protect the game of individuality. It is hard work to die.

It is hard work for every interrelated, interpenetrating facet of our being: physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. The developmental task placed before us in dying is the task of finding the courage to be in the face of a lonely death. The challenge of the dying process is the challenge of living while dying, rather than dying while living.

In the 1960s, in a Chicago hospital, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross began the first contemporary examination of the psychological process of dying. She began this examination by going to the bedsides of those who were dying, those who—once the medical staff realized that there was nothing more their expertise could do for these people—were isolated in their dying by our culture’s great fear of and lack of familiarity with death. Quite simply, Kübler-Ross asked the dying to describe their experience. Then she listened. She noticed common states of mind and common feeling states through which those who were confronting death reported themselves to pass. From the sensitive and empathetic interviews she conducted, Kübler-Ross generalized a five-stage theory of dying that has, in the last thirty years, become quite well known. It has been called “the scenario of loss.” The five stages give an overview of human reaction to the reality of physical death as well as to all of life’s “little deaths,” which arise with any and all change. In fact, Kübler-Ross said of death and dying, “If one is interested in human behavior, in the adaptations and defenses that human beings have to use in order to cope with . . . stresses, this is the place to learn about it.”1

Kübler-Ross’s five stages of dying, which roll trippingly off the tongue of anyone in America familiar with the contemporary Western view of mental health, are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I will turn in a bit to discuss these stages in greater depth. It is important to note here, however, that each of the mental and emotional reactions of Kübler-Ross’s five-stage theory of dying is a reaction of the mental ego forced to confront the death of the body in which it presumes itself to reside. Because these stages have only to do with the mental ego, I will be suggesting here the necessity of revisioning the stages of dying. Evidence accumulated from increased interaction with people who are dying now suggests that the stages of dying involve psychospiritual transformations deep into transpersonal levels; in fact, perhaps, all the way to Unity Consciousness. Kübler-Ross herself was transformed by her participation with the powerful catalyst of death.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.