Yours Transcendentally, with Raj

It’s isn’t a criterion we are foolish enough apply to any other area of our lives. If we enjoy a book, we don’t expect that we’ll have to keep reading it ad infinitum. If we enjoy a joke, we don’t think we should be made to hear it again and again. We may dearly love a job, but we don’t for that matter believe that we’ll have to stay there till the end. We can adore a house, and still need – at a...

We hear so much about the difficulties caused by those who cannot be intimate, who seem incapable of disclosing anything of what they genuinely feel, it can take time to register the opposite but no less grave problem: those who cannot keep enough of themselves to themselves, those whose hunger for closeness overwhelms their concern for their own safety, those who will, in a poignant bid to hold o...

The proverb ‘Time Heals Everything’ has been very much embraced by society.  The thinking behind it is that over time all wounds gradually become less painful.  Eventually, if the wound is not as severe — or your life has been rather adventurous — you will be able to think about the tragic or traumatic event without a pang of pain . Therefore, it comes as no surprise that many often use this turn...

One of the great intellectual puzzles that daily life forces all of us to consider on a slightly too regular basis is: ‘Why are other people so awful? How come they are so unreliable, aggressive, deceitful, mean, two-faced or cowardly?’ As we search for answers, we tend quite naturally to fall back on a standard, compact and tempting explanation: because they are terrible people. They are appallin...

**2022 New Year's 1st Episode - recorded from Aegina Island, Greece** "It’s natural to think of ourselves as a single person. We have – after all – only one body and answer to only one name. But inside our minds, we are in truth far more like an assemblage of voices or – as we might put it at its starkest – of ‘people.’ We could picture our minds like a theatre, much of it sunk in darkness, with a...

***Recorded live from Berlin, Germany*** "Laying down a boundary involves informing those around us – colleagues, parents, children, lovers – of a given set of objectively reasonable things that we are going to require in order to feel respected and happy, while doing so in a way that conveys confidence, self-possession, warmth and a mixture of kindness and strength. However, because most of us ha...

**Recorded live from Rome, Italy** "One of the most beautiful and evocative of all words is ‘home’. Folded within it are suggestions of safety, understanding, sympathy, warmth and belonging. But, at points, to our dawning horror, we may be forced to take on board a hugely disorienting conclusion: despite our intense hopes, home may not – in fact – be home. We may have a building and a circle of pe...

"We ask, typically and acutely, when we’re in a relationship with someone who is inflicting a great deal of pain on us: someone who is refusing to open their hearts or can never stop lying, someone who is aggressive or detached, someone who is harming themselves or managing to devastate us. We ask too because the one immediately obvious response to frustration isn’t in this case open to us: we’re...

"The temptation, when we are worried, is to direct our determined intelligence to trying fully to anticipate whatever may be coming for us down the line. We try to strip the unknown of its surprises; we seek, quite understandably, to nothing less than control the future. Our minds, however impressive, cannot peer into the future and wrestle it of every last ambiguity. We are subject too many varia...

"For most of our lives, we’re hard at work: we’re up till midnight in the library studying for a degree, we’re learning a trade, building a business, writing a book. We have hardly a moment to ourselves. We don’t even ask whether we are fulfilled, it’s simply obvious that this is the bit that has to hurt. We fall asleep counting the weeks until the end... The mind works in deceptive ways. In order...

**EASTER Special** "As we grow up, we get better at the superficial mechanics of kindness – but not necessarily better at understanding why kindness should matter as it does. The subject remains under some of the strict or sentimental cloud beneath which it was first introduced to us as small children. We simply succumb to its dictates more readily and are a little swifter with the cards... We nee...

"Some of the reason why we are far more fearful, inhibited and sad than we should be is that we are – unbeknownst to ourselves – wandering through our lives with a huge burden of unresolved and unobserved trauma ... A trauma is not merely a terrible event, though it is very much that too. It is a terrible event that has not been adequately processed, understood and unpicked and that has – through...

***Happy International Women's Day*** "Modernity is surely a lonelier place than the world that preceded it. It isn’t ultimately technology (cities, cars or screens) that have made us lonely; it’s an identifiable set of ideas . Being on one’s own doesn’t have to be problematic, demeaning or say anything sinister about one’s character. Yet we have in a variety of ways made this the firm equation. L...

*** BREAK UP DAY Special*** "When people try to account for why couples break up, the emphasis typically falls on the idea of difference:  a disorganized creative type was up against a highly managerial ordered one; one of them liked hill walking, the other hated the outdoors. Someone was gregarious, someone else loathed parties. No wonder – it seems – they had to split... This method of expl...

"So efficient and hushed are our brains in their day to day operations, we are apt to miss what an extraordinary and complicated achievement it is to feel mentally well. A mind in a healthy state is, in the background, continually performing a near-miraculous set of manoeuvres that underpin our moods of clear-sightedness and purpose... To appreciate what mental health might be (and therefore what...

** Valentine's Day special ** "One of the paradoxes of the dating game is that we know that by coming across as enthusiastic at an early stage – if we ring them the next day, if we are open about how attractive we find them, if we suggest meeting them again very soon – we are putting ourselves at a high risk of disgusting the very person we would so like to get to know better... But we can find a...

** Valentine's Day special ** "At any point, millions of love stories are quietly being spun by one person while the object of their adoration goes about their business blithely unconcerned. Someone watches someone else on a train, casts surreptitious glances at a delegate at a conference; carefully notes a fellow shopper’s manner in a grocery store – and the earth spins on undisturbed... Unrequit...

**Valentine's Day special** "Crushes: they happen to some people often and to almost everyone sometimes. Airports, trains, streets, conferences – the dynamics of modern life are forever throwing us into fleeting contact with strangers, from amongst whom we pick out a few examples who seem to us not merely interesting, but more powerfully, the solution to our lives. This phenomenon – the crush – go...

** Valentine's Day special ** One of the most important principles for choosing a lover sensibly is not to feel in any hurry to make a choice. Being satisfied with being single is a precondition of satisfactory coupledom. We cannot choose wisely when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be utterly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to have any chance of forming...

** Valentine's Day special ** "The common-sense explanation for long-term singlehood directs the blame firmly outwards, it isolates the problem to one of mechanics: one is still single because one hasn’t, perhaps on account of having moved to a vast and anonymous new city, been invited to enough parties, or because the constant requirement to fly to the Paris office leaves no time for the right so...

** Valentine's Day special ** "One way to get a sense of why love should matter so much, why it might be considered close to the meaning of life, is to look at the challenges of loneliness. Too often, we leave the topic of loneliness unmentioned: those without anyone to hold feel shame; those with someone (a background degree of) guilt. But the pains of loneliness are an un-embarrassing and univer...

"The modern world treats education with unique seriousness. Never in the history of humanity have so much thought and so many resources been devoted to the development of the minds of the next generation. In all advanced nations, until a human is 21 or so, there is little else to do other than study. In sensible households, homework has the power of a sacrament. An army of teachers and educators,...

Yoda, much ?  Welcome to my first -and as of now only-podcast, “ Yours Transcendentally ” by the one and not only- * drumroll noises *- RAJ ! A bit of irrelevant background info- My name is Rajdeep and I am a native of India, but currently residing in Budapest, Hungary. I’d like to call myself a connoisseur or an aficionado of topics and issues pertaining to the subtle nuances of psychology,...