Alumni Spotlight: Shrestha Singh
Shrestha Singh is a writer, gardener, mom (to one human and one dog), and psychotherapist in the Chicago area. She aims to integrate transformative justice and decolonizing healing into her life and her practice. Before getting her social work degree and becoming a psychotherapist, she earned a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School, trained in spiritual accompaniment with Still Harbor, and worked as a university chaplain in the Boston area.
You can find her at shresthasingh.com and @guessitsshres on Instagram.
What resources have informed your spirituality and caregiving practice?
bell hooks' all about love, the mystic poets Kabir and Hafiz, Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, Naomi Shihab Nye's poems.
All of these speak to the deep longings of the human heart. To what it means to love. About love as a political force that breaks down hierarchies and subverts power. Love as justice, as the end of violence and occupation. Love as a devotion so pure that it cannot be contained by the systems of power and supremacy that try to constrain and diminish us.
These writers speak to the way love is liberation from our chains, from all that is bondage to our bodies, souls, and spirits in this world.
How do you understand the connection between spiritual care and collective liberation?
Reading the work of Archbishop Desmond Tutu introduced me to the African concept of ubuntu, a principle that shaped the rebuilding of South Africa post-apartheid. Ubuntu is the understanding that we are persons through other persons.
Our humanity is intertwined, and in order to hold another's humanity close to your heart, you have to be in touch with your own.
In my work as a psychotherapist, I see this over and over with my patients; when we have cut ourselves off from parts of ourselves -- perhaps our own grief, our own self-compassion, our own neediness (often because someone else who was cut off from these parts of themselves taught us to do so early in life), we cut ourselves off from these parts of other people too. We cut ourselves off from what it means to be human, to have a heart that can hurt and skin that can bleed.
The simple fact is that if we cannot honor this vulnerability in ourselves, then we cannot honor it in others.
So, to me, the work of spiritual care is getting in touch with our own humanness, our own softness, that inherent divinity inside of us, not only for ourselves but also so that we can begin to get in touch with it in others.
In doing so, we learn to take others' yearning for the fullness of life -- for freedom and thriving -- as personally as our own. We yoke ourselves to each other and shoulder the weight of our struggles for liberation together.
What rituals or practices help ground your spiritual care work?
As a new mom, I find myself with very little free time on my hands. I no longer find myself praying at my altar or pulling tarot cards over a slow morning coffee or meditating without interruption. But I have found two things in this busy season to be inviting of the spiritual and sacred: walks and naps.
When I go outside with my baby and the dog, we look up at the trees and the sky together. We notice the branches on the ground. I search for the first hints of spring in winter. We talk to squirrels and the neighborhood cats. To my son, everything is brand new, a marvel. He helps me pay attention to the world in a new way. I find myself jolted out of my hectic and fearful imaginings on these walks, and I say a prayer with my cold winter breath instead, grateful for this existence, for the messy questions and joys and griefs that I can hold all at once.
Coming back to myself in this way allows me to open myself to others and journey alongside them in their own wonderings/wanderings as well.
And the naps! The naps I take these days are usually accidental -- waking throughout the night with the baby makes me fall asleep wherever and whenever during the day. But I have found the liminal space between sleep and wakefulness to be quite raw and sacred. In those moments, whatever feeling I have been working hard to repress comes to the surface. Sometimes, in that moment before I fully wake, the answer to a question I have been holding becomes clear to me, like a singular icicle shot through by sunlight. It's like a deep wisdom speaking to me now that I am finally still.
What is currently nourishing and sustaining your spirit?
I have a close circle of friends who spiritually accompany me, perhaps without totally knowing it!
We meet virtually each month to chat for an hour about whatever it is that is on our hearts, and we hold space for one another with radical love and compassion and humor and care. It's a sacred space to me. These women of mine are my teachers -- the wells of wisdom I draw upon to quench my doubts, loneliness, and fears, and to re-align myself with the singing of my soul.