Anthony Tshering
A Guide To Spirituality: Being versus Doing

I read a wonderful piece in Tricycle magazine today about what a spiritual life looks like. The timing for me to read it was perfect. It’s something I’ve been trying to make sense of recently.

We are very much a doing world. Even the language of therapy is often about doing. Everyone seems to come in and say to me, “I need to work on myself,” or “I need to work on my relationships.” The sentiment is understandable. We are a self-improvement culture. Our lives are viewed linearly, our lives a constant striving for self-improvement with a beginning, middle, and end. There is much usefulness in seeing the world this way. It is goal-orientated and results-focused first and foremost. It has helped create the world around us, including the computer I type on now or the smartphone I use to answer my emails and check social media. A lot of us internalize this productive voice and hear it in the daily chatter of our thinking self and assume this is who we are.

A Guide To Spirituality: Being versus Doing
Meaning, Spirituality
Anthony Tshering
Reflections on God, Death, Meaning and ...

“Do you pray?” I once asked a patient.

“No, I’ve never been able to for some reason” she paused. “Do you?”

“No,” I said. “Because I don’t know if anyone is listening.”

It has always struck me as inconceivable that someone is listening to prayer. How can people be sure of some divine force in their lives? Even such Christian luminaries such as Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa experienced their doubts about God. I am no different. God does not speak to me in tongues or voices. All I hear are silent ellipses where I sense holiness in the mundane, the awe-inspiring in the ordinary. God has always seemed like an inelegant, hollow solution to the problem of meaning and death.

Reflections on God, Death, Meaning and Spirituality
Anthony Tshering
Everything's Amazing And Nobody's Happy: The ...

Everything's amazing and nobody's happy- Louis C.K.

“To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.” 
― Ernest Becker

A few years ago, a patient of mine wondered out loud why he was unhappy. After all he was a successful lawyer, involved in a loving relationship with a partner, lived in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Brooklyn and had a group of close friends whom he saw socially. So what was wrong? "Something just doesn't feel right. I have the gnawing feeling that something should be different," he said. 

Everything's Amazing And Nobody's Happy: The First Step Toward Emotional Change

Death

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Visiting Home

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I'm currently at San Jose Airport now to head to Seattle and Vancouver for a few days. This year, I went to visit my parents as I do every year around the holidays. I don't get to see them much anymore. Living in New York makes it impossible to visit except for maybe twice a year. 

This year felt especially hard for me. Watching my parents get old is especially tough. My father, in particular, has turned into an old man. He lives with pain and constant arthritis. He walks slowly. His hand shakes. His hearing is going. His eyesight is poor. It can feel heartbreaking to watch.

We had a conversation last night that was especially poignant, I thought. He talked about knowing he will die soon and about passing on his legacy to my brother and I. He talked about some of the connections he had made in recent years that have sustained him. But he admitted that he accepted his death but that it scared him. How could it not? He wanted nothing more than for me to get married before he left the earth. 

And then this morning, my mom seemed heartbroken by the prospect of me leaving and only visiting for a few days. Again, it was hard for me to watch as she nearly teared up.  I seem to live with a lot of guilt. Or maybe it's a lot of empathy. I can feel the deepness of a person's pain acutely. And it made me wish for a brief second that I lived in California still, that I had not chosen the "selfish" path and moved away to find my own life. 

I don't know what to do with these feelings besides accepting them as they are. Life is often sad. People get older. I'll get older and older. It's just the way things are. It's not easy or particularly fair. But that doesn't stop it from happening.