Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Years ago I volunteered as a bereavement counsellor, and I remember vividly the moment in training where it finally clicked: my job was not to take away people’s grief, but to help them feel it. You see, you may not need counselling or therapy if you are truly grieving; but you may well need it if you aren’t. Grief is a horror, and it’s supposed to be. Where grief has got stuck, or when it has still not even begun – that is when you might need a protected space, and time, and a good, receptive listener with whom you can find it in yourself to truly suffer the pain of your loss.

As a psychodynamic psychotherapist, I have learned that the capacity to feel loss and grief constitutes nothing less than the foundation of all mental health, from infancy through to old age. Whatever life stage we are in, the inability to experience loss and to mourn it means we remain fixed where we are, unable to develop, desperately trying to hold on to whoever or whatever it is that is gone. It might be a person, a relationship or a dream that has died, but if we scroll or drug or literally run away from our feelings, the result is the same: we’re trapped. Without loss, without grief, there can be no growth.’ (from the Guardian)

The First Noble Truth comes to mind, and also the fact that it was helpful for me to leave England, where feelings can often be classified as awkwardd or unnecessary.