The Seasons of the Soul
A book review of The Grace in Living by Kathleen Dowling Singh
Kathleen Dowling Singh describes our spiritual development, or evolution, as being divided into four quarters, which could be likened to the four seasons seen in nature. We may begin this spiritual development journey at any stage of life; childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age or nearing death.
Kathleen invites readers to join her in entering into an awakened relationship with our lives by exploring our own spiritual biography. Her thoughtful reflections guide us through the process, step-by-step, of recognizing the ever-presence of grace in our lives and learning to trust it.
Watch “Seasons of the Soul” music video
The advantage of writing our spiritual biography now, rather than waiting until we are on our death bed doing a final life review, is that we have time to make mid-course corrections today which are unavailable to us on our last day. By taking the time to reflect, meditate and pray about our life course and then write about it, we can finally own some of the painful things we may have ignored or sealed off into isolated rooms and tried to forget.
Each spiritual (or wisdom) tradition offers some milestones to mark both our spiritual and physical development along the road of life. For example, in Christianity offers five special ceremonies; birth/christening, conversion/confirmation, water baptism, marriage vows and ordination.
Judaism celebrates eight major life transitions; birth, circumcision, schooling; bar and bat mitzvah and confirmation; engagement, betrothal, and marriage; and aging, dying and remembering.
Buddhism has four milestones: birth, becoming a monk or nun, marriage and death. Hinduism observes four major seasons of life: Brahmacharya (student, ages 1–25), Grihastha (householder/career, 25–50), Vanaprastha (retired/soul seeking, 50–75) and Sannyasa (renunciate/mystic, 75+).
It is interesting to see the similarities all spiritual traditions share. Regardless of which faith tradition you may embrace, discerning the season of your soul-life can be helpful in making progress toward maturity, salvation or enlightenment.
Kathleen describes each of these four spiritual stages as having a different duration for each person, with the second stage often taking the most time and work. She has done the universe a great favor by explaining the value of writing your own spiritual awakening biography, which gracefully reveals your movement from “ego” self toward “being” beyond the self. These four stages are:
1: From tasting spiritual awakening… to hungering for spiritual growth.
2: From seeking spiritual growth… to the end of seeking.
3: From spiritual healing… to spiritual maturity.
4: Ripening, enlightenment, servanthood.
Two important questions she says need to be asked at each of the four stages spiritual development: 1) — What is prompting you to turn toward awakening, being and liberation? 2) What inclines you to fall back into the limitation’s of self and survival mode?
In this time of spiritual growth and awakening, it is helpful to have a framework that can orient our practice and our progress. Kathleen is not the only wise spiritual leader who envisions spiritual development as fourfold.
A few years ago, philosopher and bestselling author Ken Wilbur introduced his new developmental frame into the Integral lexicon called, “Wake up, Grow up, Clean up, Show up”. This simple frame has gone viral and many (both teachers and students alike) have benefited from its use.
This fourfold life calling is consistent with Jesus majestic prayer for His followers found in John 17. Jesus prays to His Father that his followers would 1) awaken to the love of God by coming out of the world’s way of thinking, then 2) grow and be healed by walking in the Spirit of God, 3) put on the mind of Christ, cleansing from the world’s selfish thinking pattern, then 4) find their place of service by going back into the world to demonstrate the truth of the Kingdom of God with deep compassion and humility. Any real awakening process always begins internally and then manifests itself externally.
Here are the characteristics of each of the four stages or quarters of spiritual growth and ripening Kathleen describes, followed by her thoughtful prompting questions to help get you started.
1) The first quarter of spiritual growth moves us from Tasting spiritual awakening… to Hungering for spiritual growth.
Waking Up. The first-quarter often begins with short glimpses beyond our small self.
Reaching for the beyond often arises when we cry out for help. The first quarter ends when the longing becomes too strong to remain silent any longer. Spiritual desire becomes a priority in our life.
The first quarter is spent developing healthy identity, ego and self and learning to survive. However, we later discover our ego mistakenly sees itself as separate from others and from the sacred.
It is this very sense of incompletion that is at the heart of our yearning for the soul to be heard. We seek ways to let go of our known way of being, allowing grace to move us to higher ground.
The path leading to this first quarter of spirituality may begin as a child being awestruck by nature, being affected in mind, body and/or soul. It may be a sense of connection when we take moments to pause during normal events, glimpses of unbounded love also give us a heightened compassion toward others and our self.
This moving from tasting to hungering could be initiated by music, which some referred to as the original language of the heart/soul.
It could be a result of sickness, or a feeling of being both tiny and vast. It is an inner compulsion to seek truth.
It may begin with a childhood memory of playing in the ocean, feeling like at some point you might be just a drop of water dissolved into the ocean.
It may come while reading a book, or hearing somebody speak and your soul asks: “What is real?…I know there’s something more than what I see right now.”
2) In the second quarter, we move from Seeking spiritual growth… to the End of seeking.
Growing Up. The second quarter begins when we actually seek a path out of self and of suffering.
There’s a longing to escape the purposelessness and alienation that we’ve come to experience in life. It may begin with teachers, book or groups that resonate with our longing to discern the truth.
Exploring our spiritual biography, we discern that (“central casting”/ God / the Universe) has sent us many teachers along the way in the form of mentors, friends, difficult people, serious sorrow or depressions. We become seekers, yet we still deeply believe in our self and ego.
The second quarter could span months, years or decades in our life and can be painful, but healing is essential to growth in the second quarter. At some point we feel insufficient in the self’s survival mode.
The second quarter is marked by expanded attention beyond mere survival and requires letting go of anything the self thinks it can achieve on it’s own spiritually.
“Liberation follows intention aligned with grace.” Surrender is a tumble into undefendedness.
The second quarter ends when we see through the illusion of seeking the fantasy of forever seeking/searching. It begins intermittently, then grows steadily.
Surrendering is frightening to the ego self because the self has no footing beyond it-self.
In “being” the attraction to self dissolves, we begin to trust the grace working within us. We begin to trust our inner direction and realize that we are as the book of John says “grafted into the vine”.
The outcome of emerging from the second quarter is that we begin to genuinely care for one another.
3) In the third quarter, we move from spiritual Healing… into spiritual Maturity.
Cleaning Up. The third quarter is marked by a growing detachment from ego growth. Individuality is grasped, but not elevated above other expressions of the sacred.
The ego’s operating system of survival mode remains available to function in daily life, but we trust it only to help us navigate the world and our interactions. We begin to operate, be driven by divine love.
Self is no longer seen as our soul, or even our primary operating system, nor as a reliable refuge.
In “being” mode, we come to know the awakened state of Grace and how to put Grace into action.
We learn to “allow,” which becomes a familiar response. We’re all going to face some suffering as we age, but our response allows us to graciously embrace it.
We have a clear-eyed discernment about what serves us and what no longer serves us. Decisions are made with increasing wisdom. As both the self and the seeker diminishes presence arises.
4) In the fourth quarter we move into Ripening, Enlightenment, Servanthood.
Opening Up. In the ripening stage, we literally become nobody special, as Ram Dass puts it. We begin to experience greater dimensions of love, compassion, joy and liberation. We deeply appreciate our commonality and our individuality comes out to play.
Trust permeates us, the call of the self is heard mindfully, but is much less seductive.
As we ripen we come to fruition. We become illuminated and inclusive, not separated. We begin to see the unity of matter/spirit of self/other. We know our self as embodied Grace.
Kathleen has created a wonderful list of approximately 60 prompting questions to help us begin to write our spiritual biography and to complete a spiritual timeline. I suggest reviewing them and checking off those which resonate with you. Then start writing!
First quarter questions…
-What were your deepest moments of understanding or vastness?
-What were your conceptions of yourself?
-What are your ideas about the sacred?
-What was the nature of your relationship with others?
-What were the moments you felt wounded?
-What conclusions did you come to about yourself and the world?
-What were your challenges?
-What gave you strength?
-What beneficial qualities did you develop?
-What negative beliefs about yourself did you develop?
-What did you learn from spiritual mentors or the teachers of goodness you might’ve had?
-What rules for living did you come to hold?
-Which of these did you keep, which discard?
-What are the legacy’s from your family?
-What are the moments when you saw a shift in how you saw yourself and the sacred?
-When did spiritual hunger begin to awaken in you?
Second-quarter questions…
-What turned you towards spirit?
-What turned you back toward a separate sense of self?
-When did you first reach out to find a spiritual path?
-What instigated the path of active searching?
-What teachers or teachings resonated with you?
-What shift occurred in you in response?
-What were your thoughts about your goal?
-What healing did you find necessary in order to continue your spiritual path?
-How did you tend to the healing needed?
-What shift has occurred in your sense of self since this healing has occurred?
-What inner obstructions did you bring to the journey and what is the changing nature of your relationship with them?
-What challenges were you facing in your life during this time?
-What church challenges have faced you in your practices?
-What was has changed in your emotional reactivity?
-What were your practices during the second quarter and what was your experience of them?
-What was changing ideas about your practices?
-What was the nature of your efforts your striving?
-What were your shifts in the understanding of the spiritual path?
-What was your spiritual goal initially? How is that shifted?
-Were there disappointments about goals and outcomes?
-What did you learn from these disappointments?
-How was your practice shifted over time?
-What do you consider the benefits of the different practices that you engaged in?
-What has been the shift in relationships with family and loved ones?
-Were there moments of spiritual crisis?
-What were your deepest moments of understanding?
-What have been the shift in propensity to love and can passion?
-What turning point allowed you to surrender?
-What growing distractions and seductions have you noticed?
-When did you begin to assume responsibility for your own spiritual path and begin to give authority do your own direct experience?
-What has been the changing nature of your spiritual confidence?
-What was the moment when you felt the most presence of spirit?
-What is rearranged in you and on an energetic level?
-At what point or points did you come to hold yourself accountable for your realizations and understanding them to be embodied?
-What changing relationship with faith and confidence trust and grace?
-What are your most grateful moments?
Third quarter questions…
-What inclined you to move deeply into awakening?
-What drew you back into the separate sense of self?
-What healing was necessary?
-How have you reduce the distance between your realizations and embodiment in every day life?
-What has been the changing nature of your practice?
-What shifts in your understanding of the spiritual path… of the awakening of self?
Fourth-quarter questions…
-What inclined you to move deeply into being?
-What can pull you back to reactivity of the separate self?
-Have you had times that you felt this is it enlightenment?
-What did you learn? What is your practice now?
-What do you offer the world? What are you grateful for?
I highly recommend this book regardless of your spiritual path, along with her two other classics, The Grace in Aging and The Grace in Dying. This book also offers spiritual awakening accounts from other renowned teachers, including Rodney Smith, Cynthia Bourgeault, and Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, as well as other long-time practitioners. These first-person accounts offer rare glimpses into early spiritual yearnings, struggles, and realizations and serve as encouragement and inspiration for us to rediscover our own spiritual journey.
