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.
“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.
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.
I'm out of commission today because of dental surgery, so I don't have the strength or energy to write too much today. So instead I wanted to share this lovely poem I read recently by Jimmy Santiago Baca with you all. My next blog will be about the themes discussed in the poem on Tuesday. Enjoy!
The lover’s footprint in the sand the ten-year-old kid’s bare feet
I haven’t discussed it much on this blog, but fitness has become a bigger part of my life in the last two years or so. And like every fitness neophyte, I did set after set after set of bicep curls in the hopes of getting “ripped.” Turns out, I had no idea what I was doing. (Not surprising for me.)
Now two years later, after reading more and more about fitness, I’ve come to realize something: bicep curls are dumb. If you have a desire to have arms bigger than your head then the bicep curl is a great exercise for you. It’s almost strictly a vanity exercise. The bicep just isn’t that big or important a muscle in the end.
Recently I came upon this interesting bible verse,
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters-yes, even their own life-such a person cannot be my disciple.”- Luke 14:26
I’m not a bible scholar or even a Christian, but I find this bible verse fascinating. Is Jesus telling us to hate everyone we care about, including ourselves? Somehow, I doubt that’s true. My sense is that this is a metaphor. Jesus is discussing the notion of sacrifice for a greater good (in this case, to follow him and give up their old lives.)
The notion of sacrifice is a strange one in today’s world in that no one seems to want to do it. Capitalism, in particular, encourages us “to get mine.” As one of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Noah Levine, said in a recent podcast, “Greed, Hatred, and Delusion are the norm. It’s compassion that’s in scarcity.”
“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.
I just read this wonderful medium piece about self-care that I wanted to share.
I think there’s an assumption that self-care means checking out and disconnecting from the stresses in our life. My own tendency, as I’ve written elsewhere, is to grab a drink or watch a lot of TV to get my mind off things. Other people might go on a trip or a spa for the day and relax.
But I’m not sure any of those coping methods have ever made me feel better. What it does is push away all the feelings I want to ignore-- all that anxiety, stress and rejection that’s underneath, always percolating in my unconscious-- so I feel numb to any of it.
Recently I’ve been in one of my better creative periods in quite a long time. I have been reading more, as well as writing every day and planning a future podcast. When I noticed how productive I had been, I wasn’t quite sure how it happened.
You see, I was in a rut for awhile. No new projects were being planned. Books were started and unfinished. I was enjoying a few too many beers and not enough time at the gym. I wouldn’t quite call it depression. I had just grown complacent.
I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.
In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.”
It seems obvious that having more positive experiences than negative ones in a romantic relationship is necessary for it to survive. But is there a way to actually quantify this? Relationship psychologist, John Gottman, believes he has found the answer. Using a mathematical model, he discovered:
"The magic ratio is 5:1. In other words, as long as there are five times as many positive interactions between partners as there are negative, the relationship is likely to be stable. It is based on this ratio that Dr. Gottman is able to predict divorce! Very unhappy couples tend to have more negative than positive interactions. The bottom line: even though some level of negativity is necessary for a stable relationship, positivity is what nourishes your love. On Wednesday, we will investigate further into Dr. John Gottman’s “Magic Ratio” that has received national attention.
This is not to say that a relationship with conflict is a bad one. Every relationship has disagreement. But learning how to turn your disagreements into positives where neither party is feeling overly criticized and understood is key.
And when you're not disagreement, it's important to keep the relationship healthy by finding ways to interact with each other in new and interesting ways. That can be hard with levels of anxiety so high in today's society. But to keep any relationship strong takes more work and self-reflection than social media world would have us believe.
Anthony Tshering is a psychotherapist in the New York City area. Please contact him at (347) 927-4856 or atsheringlcsw@gmail.com if you'd like to set up a consultation appointment for therapy.
“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
"The average American throws away 65 pounds of clothing per year." -Huffington Post
Early in Matthew Crawford’s “The World Beyond Your Head” the author walks through an airport. Maybe for the first time, he notices the bombardment of advertising everywhere. There are the billboards and TVs. The signs of restaurants, the ads in his Forbes Magazine, the ads on the podcast he’s listening to or in front of the bathroom stalls. Even the backs of chairs have deals to the local hotels and clothing stores. Each is expertly designed to get his attention, designed by professionals who know just the right colors and sounds and fonts and pictures to get you to notice what they’re selling.
I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.
— Henry David Thoreau
Lately I have been thinking and reading about living a minimalist life. My ideas aren't fully fleshed out yet, and I am not fully sure how to implement them into my own life yet. But the thoughts are brewing. My mind has felt cluttered lately, a cup filled to the brim and spilling out with concerns that often feel meaningless and unnecessary to living an essential life.
I often wonder how we all got here. I don't have any comprehensive or perfect answers. But I do know this: in session after session with depressed patients, the word "should" is uttered often. I should be skinnier, or have a better job, or a better apartment or I should have six-pack abs like Zac Efron or should have dresses like the one Michelle Obama wore at her convention speech.
