Article

Change

Death & life

Mental Health

Psychology

29 November 2024

4 min read

Letting go and welcoming in

Your new life will cost you your old one. It's OK.

Mica Gray

Mica Gray is a wellbeing practitioner working in adult mental health. She is training to be a counselling psychologist.

A family with a mother holding a small child, look up and to the left.

Eduardo Fernando on Unsplash.

Last week my family laid my great-grandmother to rest. A few hours afterwards, we celebrated my cousin's birthday.

It felt strange to go from a place of death to a place of life in the space of a day. One minute I was throwing flowers into the open grave of a woman whose earthly life has come to an end and the next I was in a restaurant handing flowers to a girl whose life as a woman is just beginning. The contrast was a bit surreal, but much of life is like that; beginnings and endings flowing into each other. The transition between the two events was made easier by the fact that the funeral did not really feel like one. In alignment with my great-grandmother’s spiritual beliefs, the ceremony was very simple. It was over in less than four hours and featured a short reading of spiritual texts and quiet, reverent reflection. There were no solemn looks, no songs of lament, no dirt shoveling, no loud wailing or aunties and uncles dancing to Beres Hammond at the reception. Instead, there was just the quiet nod of acknowledgement that her spirit has journeyed on.

Though I missed the eulogies and shared tears that usually detail funeral services, I appreciated the simplicity of the ceremony. I appreciated the way death was described as a transition of the spirit into a new kind of life, the way it was treated as something so normal. Which in fact it is. Death is happening around us every day yet as a society it is something that we struggle with - whether it’s the death of a loved one, a career, a relationship or a part of ourselves. Our attempts to curate eternity with anti-aging procedures and technological permanence betray how deeply uncomfortable we are with the inevitability of endings in our modern world.

And to be honest, of course we are. The loss of loved ones shakes entire worlds. Job losses throw our lives into instability and leave us feeling unsafe. The loss of youth and power challenges long held ideas of identity and invites existential anguish. Divorce carries with it its own special grief. The pain of these experiences makes it hard for us to embrace when things are ending in our lives and make it hard for us to let go, even when we need to.

And we do often need to.

What fears, habits, thoughts or behaviours need to be given to the earth? What cycles or patterns do we need to bury and mourn so that we can usher in new and better ways of being?

Lately I’ve been thinking about the saying ‘your new life will cost you your old one’ and how true that is in many areas of our lives. In my own life, I recently started a new role at work that has cost me the comfort of my old one. I have had to give old versions of myself to the ground and shed skin so that I can continue to grow into the space of it. This new year of doctoral study has cost me Saturdays spent lazing around with friends, new relationships have cost me old patterns of behaviour and new depth in old relationships have cost me pride and ego.

At each point of transition, I have been asked to leave something behind to experience something new and it seems like so many of us at the moment are being asked to do the same. People are moving houses, leaving jobs, leaving seats of power, churches, ending relationships, wrestling with friendships, forming new ones and experiencing ego-deaths.

Like my cousin, some people are exchanging adolescence for adulthood. Others, like my great-grandmother, are exchanging their earthly bodies for their spiritual ones.

In this moment individually, politically and spiritually - it seems like we’re collectively being asked the question: what are we needing to let go of? and then what do we need to welcome in? What fears, habits, thoughts or behaviours need to be given to the earth? What cycles or patterns do we need to bury and mourn so that we can usher in new and better ways of being?

When life asks us questions like this it can feel overwhelming or intimidating to confront, but it is always necessary. I have found that when you do not allow yourself to grow out of old skin you will suffocate within it. The times of transition that we find ourselves in ask us to trust that something greater is unfolding. They ask us not to resist change but to flow with it. Not to forsake the present or the future by holding on to what has gone to the grave, but to be open to what is next.

As strange as it was last week to celebrate a birthday after a funeral, it was a reminder that though endings are painful we can embrace them because they usher in new beginnings. It was a reminder that funeral clothes can be exchanged for dancing shoes and that mourning can be exchanged for joy.

Overall, the day was a reminder that if we make room for it, life can follow death, both in this earthly life, and into the next.

Selah.

This article was first published on Substack. Follow Mica there.

Article

Creed

Mental Health

13 March 2024

4 min read

Have our worries changed over time?

A pep talk to teachers reveals whether our fears are age-old or not.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

In an egg box sit two eggs with faces drawn on them with marker pen. One looks worried, the other looks on.

‘You’re not going to mention the psalms!’ my colleague said. ‘Are you?’

She was doing alarmed eyes at me, the sort which show white all round. I could see why really. We were on our way to give a talk at a big secondary school in Birmingham – multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith. The sort where praying had been banned as divisive, and the wearing of crosses discouraged. Hijabs too, for that matter. Not the kind of place where you chat lightly about a part of the Christian bible, on the whole, unless you’re trying to be provocative.

I did mean to mention them though. ‘I can’t think of another example,’ I said. ‘And anyway, it’s too late now – I sent the slides through last night.’ Deep breaths.

Just to explain a little, as counsellors, my colleague and I had set up a programme of talks and workshops for schools in the area, aimed at improving mental health in the aftermath of the pandemic. We’d seen all the warnings about the ‘tsunami of mental health issues’ threatening to deluge the country and decided to take action. Recognising that we couldn’t get to every individual child who might need help, we’d focused our efforts on the adults in the schools. Steady the grown-ups and you steady the children, was our thinking. The young take their wellbeing largely from the pattern set by their elders, even in this age of smart phones and social media, and the levels of despondency were very high among teachers and school staff in our experience. Lots of people burning out and leaving the profession. Not a steadying influence then. Hence our topic for today: ‘How to feel better in difficult times’.

I was nervous as I stood in front of the large hall full of people. Several hundred of them, all ages and stages. Some looking attentive, many expressionless, a few sleepy. I could see my colleague at the end of a row near the front. She had one hand up to the side of her face and was making herself small. Great, I thought. Very reassuring. But too late now, so on we go…

I introduced myself. I introduced my colleague. I introduced our work. And then I mentioned the thing that needed no introduction. It was already familiar, a regular inhabitant – present here in the room, but also everywhere else we went: our homes, our classrooms, our friends’ houses, the streets, the supermarkets. Fear. Horrid fear, drifting through the air like smoke. I gave them some awful statistics I’d found, about the rates of anxiety and depression. About the levels of self-harm, about the fact that suicide is now the second biggest killer of children between 10 and 15. I let these sink in a bit.

Then I asked, ‘So what are we afraid of, exactly?’

It is accepted practice in all mental health disciplines to try to identify the causes of fear and face squarely up to them as that’s the only real way to defuse their power, I said. I was going to read them a list of potential causes – and while I was doing so, I’d like them to try and guess where the list had come from. Call out your guesses please.

‘Getting old,’ I started. ‘Drinking too much. Tyrants swooping on other people’s countries. Teaching our children to be better than we are…’

‘Twitter!’ someone called out.

‘Cutting down the forests. Loss of friends. Waking up sweating in the night. Other people saying awful stuff about us…’

‘This Morning!’ came another voice.

‘Feeling very alone. No sign of things getting better. Envying the rich. Death. Food being short…’

‘The news this lunch time!’

‘Plagues and pestilences. Being in despair. Cruel words. The evils of the class system. Not having work. Feeling low. Feeling weak…’

‘It’s got to be The Daily Mail,’ someone else shouted. Laughter.

I looked up. ‘Good guesses,’ I said. ‘All of them, thank you. Only they’re a bit out of date. By about four millennia, give or take!’

Surprise fizzed through the room.

I had wanted to find out what people used to worry about, I explained. To see how that differed from our current worries. I hadn’t known where to look though, until I suddenly remembered the psalms. ‘Some of you might be familiar with the psalms,’ I said, ‘but for those of you who aren’t, they are 150 ancient songs full of moaning.’ They varied in age, but the oldest were thought to have been written the best part of 4,000 years ago – making them older than the pyramids. I’d taken twenty of these songs out of the middle of the book – Psalms 60-80 – and listed the things they were moaning about… as just demonstrated.

A lot of the sleepy faces were looking more alert now.

Since this ancient list is more or less identical to our own, we can draw two conclusions, I said. Both very good news. The first is that, clearly, these are the things we worry about – if we’re human. People from a totally different culture/ period in history/ part of the world/ ethnicity/ stage of economic development/ political system/ level of education and so on and on, worrying about the same things as us? Doesn’t it show that… er, it’s normal? For living, breathing, average, sentient human beings like us?

And secondly it proves, surely, that we’re designed to survive this kind of worrying. We’re wired to cope. Our brains are built for it. Because – ta da! – here we all are, FORTY CENTURIES later, still moaning about exactly the same stuff!

I looked at my colleague again. Not only were both her hands now down in her lap, but like a lot of the rest of the room, she was smiling.

‘If we can clear fear out of the way, it’s much easier to get on with sorting out problems,’ I finished. ‘So now, shall we talk about where we can get started?’