Barefoot Magazine
By Seikan Cech
This is the extended transcript of Charlotte Young’s interview with Seikan Cech. The shortened version (indicated in blue) is in our Winter issue.
Please can you explain about your work and what it is that you do.
You mean with the Melbourne Zen Hospice (MZH)? Well, the organisation is in its infancy now, you might say like a baby or toddler. It may have been nice to stop everything else and just be able to devote myself full-time to raising MZH, but this hasn’t been possible. So currently I also work part-time as a therapist and group leader for the Gawler Foundation, which is mostly work with cancer patients and as such very important and rewarding. And I also do some work with, well, people at different crossroads or in situations that require change—drug dependence, chronic anxiety or depression, ways of coping with chronic pain. So I suppose I am involved in different things, but you could also say that it’s actually one thing. Presently I’m able to use about half of my time for MZH, and over the next few years, I look forward to being able to just do MZH work. It’s a gradual process of transition. So what is it that MZH does? Well, we’re an organisation working with people who are dying, and this also includes their carers and families. Perhaps more accurately, our approach is less about working with the dying and more about just being with them, which necessarily means also just being with ourselves. The realm of death and dying is often most appropriately one of being, rather than doing, but it’s easy to forget this because we’re so used to “fixing” things.
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