Ideal Love. Ideal Loss.

Those of you who have visited the centre will have met Haideé.

Haideé was the matriarch of the centre. Our lead healing dog. She was as kind and gentle as she was empathetic. You would find her trotting, with her long, scruffy golden hair bouncing, by a guest’s side when they ventured on a walk, or nestling her head on the lap of anyone who cried or seemed lonely. And when we were in the shala, she would patiently lie by the kitchen door for us to exit, and when we did, she would greet us with a warmth and excitement that was both welcoming and uplifting.

She walked with a seemingly intentional mildness that added to the special energy that we have here. A little leap, a lick, a head push, chasing the monkeys, a loving stare. All was done with presence, compassion and love. Haideé was, indeed, Vala House in canine form.

Sadly, she died recently. It was sudden, and it has left us all a little shocked and empty. Her love was filling us all just the other day, and now we only hear her footsteps in our imaginations. She is gone, and she has left a silence that no mantra chanting can fill.

Haideé was a constant in my life over the past 12 years; one of a clan of three of the most incredible companions I could have wished for. A pack that has kept me sane and warm on even the most tumultuous and cold days. She alone taught me true love. She healed, gave, and saw me with a purity that was truly humbling. She cried with me, smiled with me, accepted me, and I was so lucky to witness her constant, gracious giving and receiving.

I don’t know where she is now. If she is now. But I do know the teachings that prepare us for moments such as these. Teachings that sometimes feel woefully inadequate. Or that, through my own ignorance, I simply struggle to truly embrace.

This struggle is something I was fully aware of before the passing of Haideé. In fact, when we talk about aparigraha (non-possessiveness) or vairāgya (non-attachment) in our YTT philosophy lessons, I always mention Haideé, and all the centre’s other furry companions. I tell students that I have largely been able to detach from the material. My possessions certainly don’t own me. But when it comes to detaching from love, which I have in abundance for the three dogs, I recognise my failings. The loss of someone we love is a particular kind of pain. Especially when we are so closely attached.

When death hits us like this, it is difficult not to get philosophical, and I think philosophy is, indeed, a great cure for melancholy. This reminds me of a book that I read years ago, when I was immersed in Western philosophy, titled Plato, Not Prozac! Its author, Lou Marinoff, argues that some problems can be approached philosophically rather than treated primarily as psychological disorders. That many of life’s problems are not necessarily illnesses requiring medication, but philosophical dilemmas that can be worked through by examining our beliefs, values and assumptions. Drawing on thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics, Marinoff presents “philosophical counselling” as a practical way of gaining perspective, making decisions and finding meaning by thinking more clearly about the problems we face.

At the time, I thought this was quite radical. The idea that we already had the solutions and they were in the words of the great thinkers that came before us, not only made sense… it aligned perfectly with where I wanted to be. At the time, of course, I didn’t realise that Marinoff was about 3,000 years too late on being original.

When I later encountered the philosophical teachings of the Vedic tradition, I began to recognise something remarkably similar, though Prozac was, of course, not a thing then. When I started studying yoga and the Vedas, I soon realised that this was, indeed, “philosophical counselling”, but it wasn’t so purely theoretical, and theory and practice started to merge.

Many of our problems, yoga has taught me, are not problems that can simply be medicated away, and their roots can often be traced back to spiritual, psychological or emotional starvation for which there may be a behavioural or contemplative response. This is clearly not a radical idea. It’s not even controversial, and yet, we tend to turn our attention away from ourselves in search of external fixes to deep, internal issues. We turn to Prozac, instead of Plato… or the Vedas.

But there is a danger here. One that I have fallen into, and I have watched students fall into it too. Eastern philosophy is extraordinarily good at giving us the vocabulary of freedom. It is equally good at giving us the vocabulary of avoidance, and the two sound almost identical.

An entire concept has been born from it: spiritual bypassing. A term coined by psychotherapist John Welwood in the 1980s. It is something of which I have become acutely aware, as I too sometimes use spiritual ideas and practices to step around unfinished emotional business, unmet needs, and psychological work that I would rather not do. But it is not always avoidance. There is a deep-seated sincerity in the belief that there is a spiritual solution to psychological problems. That if I concentrate hard enough on the breath, on this moment, then all else will magically fade away.

However, unless we live in an enlightened state, the deep philosophy of spirituality is just an Om short of a shanti. It is incomplete, and the unenlightened amongst us need to overlay the spiritual with the psychological. This is one of the beautiful paradoxes of yoga: we have to do this deep work to truly uncover Ātman, only to discover that the Ātman we were seeking was never a private possession at all – it was Brahman, and it was never anywhere but here.

So, yes, I know the sentences.

It was only the body. She was never truly separate from me. All form is impermanent. Attachment is the root of suffering.

I can hear myself, and others, sing-songing our way through them in a meditation. Every one of them is true. And every one of them, when we are still seeking, is also a lie. Not because the words are false, but because I am not yet the person who has earned them. And that too is a suffering.

Patañjali gives us a useful framework for thinking about this: the movement from ordinary detachment to the much deeper vairāgya. He describes two kinds of vairāgya. The first is the mastery we develop over our craving for what we have seen and heard. But the higher detachment, paravairāgya, he says, arises from puruṣa-khyāti. From the seeing itself. From the recognition of puruṣa, the unchanging seer, distinct from the changing field of experience. And it is this that brings us back to philosophy.

But in the separation of these two types of vairāgya, Patañjali is subtly showing us that we cannot manufacture detachment, even on the psychological level. This would simply be suppression with make-up. This is not philosophy tied around the already heavy neck of the unenlightened. It is practical advice that pushes us to deal with the suffering created by our identification with the self before detaching from the non-reality in which it finds itself.

Patañjali recognises how difficult this is. We have a remarkable will to live, abhiniveśa. But not just in a biological sense. We cling to the continuity of our identities. This exists, says Patañjali, even in the “wise”. Yes, even the wise struggle to take off the clothes of the continuous ego. Practice, then, is not necessarily the destruction of abhiniveśa in one heroic act, but the gradual attenuation of the kleśas in which it is included.

Vedānta adds some further clarification: Yes, we are all one. Yes, this oneness is pure consciousness, but the world in which you are reading this still exists. The Advaita tradition describes this as vyāvahārika, the transactional – the world of dead dogs, lost love, vet bills and council bureaucracy. But there is also the pāramārthika, the absolute, in which nothing was ever born and therefore nothing has died. The distinction allows us to hold both levels without using one to erase the other. The seductive error, the one I have to watch in myself, is to reach up into the absolute and use it to cancel the relative. To say there is no death while standing in a veterinary clinic where something has plainly died.

So the psychological is not a lower rung on the spiritual ladder. It is even something the wise need to attend to. It is not the thing we tolerate until the real, spiritual work can begin. Grief has its own intelligence and its own timetable and it will not be argued with; it can only be accompanied. The freedom the texts describe lies on the far side of feeling, not instead of it. We cannot be released from what we never allowed ourselves to hold.

Spirituality without psychology becomes a bypass, a beautiful architecture built over an unexamined basement. Psychology without spirituality becomes a closed loop, endless self-analysis with no horizon to walk towards. Each one, on its own, is only half a life. Both have to be honoured, and honoured at the same time, which is far harder than choosing one.

Which brings me back to Haideé.

I miss her. I truly do.

Her presence and her loss are difficult to explain here, with clunky words and inadequate language. And perhaps one day I will experience something closer to the detachment the texts describe. But I don’t think that means the spiritual will supersede the psychological. Perhaps the point is that they were never meant to be separated.

Until then, I choose to grieve.

I choose to process through suffering and know that by doing so, my connection to life deepens. My understanding of what it means to truly lose someone, or something, is enhanced, and in this, I can actually, truly see the beauty.

Even in her death, Haideé is showing me the way.