Grief is a raw, existential, threatening experience which will encounter all of us during our lives.

I'm Susan Hollins, an Accredited Psychotherapist, author, writer and podcaster with a special interest in the many ways grief enters and changes our lives, through death certainly, but also through relationships, identity, ageing, belonging, change, and the losses we may struggle to name.

In my podcast, I reflect on loss and grief through the lenses of psychotherapy, spirituality, religion, psychic awareness and experience, and alternative spiritualities. I'm curious about what happens when we allow these different ways of understanding and interpreting human experience to sit alongside one another and to relate to one another, rather than keeping them entirely separate.

Central to my work is the recognition that grief can be a raw, gut-wrenching and existential experience. Profound loss can tear through the fabric of our life, upending what was familiar, leaving us without the bearings and moorings by which we knew and could navigate our world. We enter a wild and unfamiliar place which I term the Underworld: a place where much of what we've known and relied upon no longer holds, and where we're confronted by questions such as, “Who am I now … without … ?” and “This is meaningless. How can I make meaning from this terribleness?”

Some episodes are conversations with invited guests who bring their own particular understanding and approach to the table. In other episodes I reflect upon an aspect of grief which has caught my attention. For grief is unmistakably existential, challenging our understanding of love and loss, meaning and mystery, the life of the psyche and how we may learn to live with what cannot be undone.

This is a podcast for anyone who is grieving new or older losses; for people who want to think more deeply and widely about loss and grief, not as something to be overcome but as one of the great human experiences through which we may learn so much about ourselves. It's also a podcast for anyone curious about the broader and sometimes stranger territories within grief, including the parts of it which don't fit neatly into conventional conversations about it.