Savona – Years ago, reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, I learned a fundamental lesson for me – and not only for me: it is only by facing the fear of death and mourning that we have the possibility of starting to live. I’m doing my best to continue my journey while always keeping this in mind. In recent months, an encounter has renewed this teaching for me and remembered through his presence how alive and aware we can be by working to manage our fears.
Wide smile, big, bright eyes: I know the protagonist of today’s interview through a photo. Telling me about her and her work is Angelo Cattaneo, who casually tells me that her current life and work partner is a Grief Counselor, that is supports people close to death and their families during the mourning period and after his death. I examine Silvia Mecca’s photo and decide to meet her.
It took a couple of months due to both our commitments, but in the end we found ourselves around a table in a restaurant in Val Pennavaire to get to know each other. I was immediately intrigued by her: a person who deals with death and through his smile and joyful vitality it expresses something completely different from what one would expect from Western cultural canons. So today I want to tell you his story and his journey, so that it can also be an inspiration and support for you.
SILVIA: ECONOMIST AND OTHER, BUT WHAT?
Silvia starts talking to me about herself by telling me about her childhood, lived in Lodi, in Lombardy and her degree in Business Economics. In 2006 she joined ISPA – Istituto Sperimentale di Psicodinamica Applicata®, where she works as an employee, but she has the opportunity to delve deeper into topics that are of great interest to her. «As soon as I was welcomed by Dede Riva, the founder of the institute – she explains to me – I immediately felt at home thanks to her smile and her extraordinary and rare elegance».
The topic of death is still a great taboo and scares many people
Through a brochure in the office, Silvia then learned about the Libera Accademia Progetto course and decided to enroll, attracted by something she had not yet fully understood: «The course – she tells me – promised to help you find your life’s task with 1400 hours of training and meditation. I decided to sign up in a totally irrational way because I had a job, but a very precarious one.” During the training months Silvia is supported by various professionals who accompany her in contacting her inner resources and to make them emerge and flourish.
AN INNATE SENSITIVITY
Silvia tells me how since she was a child she had a particular interest and sensitivity, which they had sparked big questions, to which she had been unable to find answers. «I heard about the possibility of communicating through non-verbal means, but if this were true, I asked myself, how is it possible that we often fail to understand each other even when we speak or write in an apparently explicit way?».
“Furthermore Since childhood I have carried with me a memory of a greater essence of Love from which we all come and I wonder why others have no memory of it. Coming to the conclusion that perhaps I am also here to remind other people who have lost the memory of it.” In fact, Silvia believes that we all come from a loving ONE and we will return there.
During the Libera Accademia Progetto course, Silvia thus understands that in life he would have liked to explore the theme of mourning. She began a long journey of studies and experiences which also led her to first live in Ireland as a volunteer at the Lama Otru Rimpoche center and to visit the Scottish Kagyu Samye Ling monastery, known as the largest Buddhist center in Europe.
Subsequently Silvia spends a year at Plum Village in France, the monastic practice center, living in close contact with its founder Thích Nhất Hạnh, Buddhist monk and spiritual guide of Vietnamese origin known and recognized internationally. These experiences have marked – as she herself tells me – her vision of life, giving even greater strength and meaning to the work she has started to support mourning.
CONFERENCES, COUNSELING AND MORE
«In recent years – says Silvia – getting to know many people closely, I have realized that most of them are emotionally blocked from the possibility of fully realizing their lives and often the cause is a fragment of soul lost somewhere in her time line: it could be a missed opportunity, the death of a loved one that completely changed her life, a crossroads at which she would have liked to turn left rather than right.”
And so he chose to help people process the unmanaged grief that caused subsequent blocks. «Because mourning is not just the death of someone, but it is also detachment from someone or something to which we are tied like a house, but also the unexpected loss of a job or the end of a relationship”, he adds.
From the studies conducted, several seminars were born that Silvia has taken around Italy in recent years, including “Changes and rites of passage”, which she taught for about ten years. It’s about two days with a theoretical part and some practical aspects of mourning, through tools in particular linked to meditation and guided experiences to transform painful memories.
Today Silvia, after a second degree in psychology, combines her teaching knowledge with that learned in the many researches, travels and experiences on the processing of mourning and detachment, proposing personal and group accompaniments to associations, companies and law enforcement agencies, teaching and remembering how to start living, starting from letting go of the blocks we carry with us from our past. You can follow Silvia in her many events and courses in the new headquarters in Albenga and beyond, through her social pages (Facebook or Instagram).
