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

Existentialism

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Existential Dread: The Struggle And Search For Meaning

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Existential Dread: The Struggle And Search For Meaning

A friend of mine is really struggling with anxiety. It's not your typical anxiety. It's a deep existential anxiety. This person no longer sees the point of living. 

"What's the point? I know people who work at restaurants and have been doing that for years. They hate it," they told me recently. " But it's what works for them. Imagine doing that for the next 40 years. And then dying... you die. What is that for? What did it mean? Nothing, right?"

The truth is I largely agree with this as I told my friend. But it is a pessimistic viewpoint. Life might be meaningless in the grand sense. And yes, most of us do not get to control how we spend our time. And there's just an endless list of injustice in the world from climate change to vast inequality to the American prison system. But it is not the only thing. 

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The World Is Better Than Ever. Why Are We Miserable?

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The World Is Better Than Ever. Why Are We Miserable?

Andrew Sullivan recently published an interesting piece in New York Magazine called, "The World Is Better Than Ever. Why Are We Miserable?" It is a topic I've written extensively about on this blog. 

Sullivan wonders out loud if everything seems to be getting better, as Steven Pinker argues, why does everyone seem so unhappy? Why are drug use, anxiety, depression, loneliness so ubiquitous?  It's a great question. 

Sullivan's answer is

"As we have slowly and surely attained more progress, we have lost something that undergirds all of it: meaning, cohesion, and a different, deeper kind of happiness than the satiation of all our earthly needs. We’ve forgotten the human flourishing that comes from a common idea of virtue, and a concept of virtue that is based on our nature. This is the core of Deneen’s argument, and it rests on a different, classical, pre-liberal understanding of freedom. For most of the Ancients, freedom was freedom from our natural desires and material needs. It rested on a mastery of these deep, natural urges in favor of self-control, restraint, and education into virtue. It placed the community — the polis — ahead of the individual, and indeed could not conceive of the individual apart from the community into which he or she was born. They’d look at our freedom and see licentiousness, chaos, and slavery to desire. They’d predict misery not happiness to be the result."

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The Nostalgia of Unlived Lives: How Regret Shapes Our Existence

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The Nostalgia of Unlived Lives: How Regret Shapes Our Existence

Recently an acquaintance-- let’s call him John-- told me that they had broken up with their girlfriend. The reasons for the break up were familiar to anyone who has ended a relationship; there was a sense that they had drifted apart; the sex had diminished; the good times, which had been so numerous, were replaced by bitterness and fights. I barely batted an eye hearing this all. After all, I had lived it before.

As the night lingered on and the number of empty pint glasses piled up, John opened up a bit further. He felt pangs of regret over his decision. He had imagined many different lives with his ex. Beach trips to Dubrovnik at 80, absurd, nostalgic dreams for children that will never exist, of afternoons spent on dreamed playgrounds on suburban streets, of quiet nights in darkened bedrooms where they make love even after 30 years of marriage.

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The Wound Is The Place Where the Light Enters You

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The Wound Is The Place Where the Light Enters You

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”


― Jalaluddin Rumi

I just wanted to briefly follow up on the Jimmy Santiago Baca poem I posted last week, "What is Broken Is What God Blesses." It's a lovely poem not only for its imagery-- how lovely is the phrase " the addict’s arm seamed with needle marks/ is a thread line of a blanket/frayed and bare from keeping the man warm"-- but for its theme of suffering.

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The Gods Will Not Save You: Reflections on Meaning and Existence

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The Gods Will Not Save You: Reflections on Meaning and Existence

“It’s Baltimore, gentlemen. The Gods will not save you.” - Commissioner Ervin Burrell, The Wire

A few years ago, I had to commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx for my job as a social worker at The Legal Aid Society. It was a hellish commute. What should have been a 50 minute to an hour commute, ended up being 75 minutes or longer on most days. (Anyone who lives in New York City can attest to the awfulness of the MTA.)

The only upside to the commute was that I read a lot of books and listened to a lot of interesting podcasts during that time. One morning I was listening to a Zen Buddhist podcast on WZEN. To be honest, I was barely listening. I was tired and a bit hungover. The day had not started yet, and I already wanted it to end.