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 certain stage – to move elsewhere.
Yet this enlightened, commonsense acceptance of term limits seems not to penetrate the one area where its absence can prove especially lacerating: the romantic sphere. Here, pointlessly and needlessly, we labor under an invisible societal edict dictating that things must last until we expire or else cannot have had a jot of value to begin with....

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 of phrase ‘time heals everything’ to respond to someone who is going through a difficult period. In fact, I am sure you, at some point, has either said it to a loved one in a crisis or being offered it as a relief to your own bad experience.

This is the privilege the shift of time offers us.

The core issue behind the thinking of ‘time heals everything’ is that the wisdom only becomes fruitful or even remotely useful when the time has actually elapsed.

Finally, your eyes have stopped gushing out tears for months on end. Six years later, you can enjoy a tear-free day, but may have visible ruts on your face where continuous water was falling...

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 appalling, crooked, deformed or ‘bad’; that’s simply how some types are. The conclusion may be grim, but it also feels very true and fundamentally unbudgeable.

However, when things feel especially clear cut, we may be goaded to try out an unusual thought experiment, which stands to challenge a great many of our certainties and render the world usefully more complicated: we can try to look at our fellow humans through the eyes of love....

**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 brightly illuminated lectern and microphone at the center of the stage. At different moments of our days and nights, contrasting characters will seek to step up to speak and interpret the world unfolding before our eyes. What unites these characters is that they are, in their diverse ways, very keen to speak and very very unhelpful.

But we need to keep a surprising idea in mind, that we all also have – though we are not quite aware of the fact and therefore rarely do anything to encourage them to come forward – an adult inside us. The adult may be lingering in the wings, they may be in a seat at the very back of the theatre or in some dark winding corridor backstage. But they are there. 

When we can allow them on stage, the adult brings some key virtues to the microphone in our minds. They are, above anything else, resourceful. In the face of trouble, they look for solutions. They know there can be some way through. They don’t despair at the first hurdle. It might be hard right now, but things will work themselves out eventually; they always do. They are practical too: at moments, they will simply but authoritatively tell us to go to bed, not to think about it till morning and to make sure we are eating properly.

The good news is that however unused we are to hearing the adult speak to us on the stage of our minds, they can – with patience – be coaxed into doing so far more regularly than they do right now. We can develop how often, and how loudly, the adult inside delivers its verdicts. And what’s more, encouraging this adult voice requires no particular technical skill or arcane practice. 

We can thereby, with a little practice, come to see that we invariably have a choice about who speaks inside us. Of course the Panicker, the Depressive and the Self-Hater will always be offering their services to make lengthy speeches to us about our failings and our dark prospects. But we have an option to call time on them and request someone else to take to the stage. 

Now the challenge is regularly to check in and ensure that the adult has as much of our airtime as possible. It’s entirely within our remits to shape the running order of who speaks to us and when. The adult is already inside us, now we need to give them the stage – and ensure we listen to the wisdom they, and therefore we, already well know about how to lead the rest of our lives."

 If you like what you listen, please FOLLOW the podcast, RATE it on the App, SHARE it with as many peeps as possible & do leave behind a voice message feedback.

You may contact Raj @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you for listening, hear you on the next episode!

***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 have not been educated in this byway of emotional maturity, the boundaries are either non-existent or else get thrown up in a jerky and destructive manner. As the technical language has it, we are either too compliant or too rigid. 

Invariably, those who can’t lay down boundaries have not, in their early lives, had their own boundaries respected. Someone didn’t allow them to say when they were unhappy with a genuinely difficult situation; someone didn’t give much of a damn about their hurt feelings or distinctive hopes. Someone insinuated that being good meant falling in line, always, immediately. No one modelled the skill of winning, graceful objection.

Yet the alternative to lacking all boundaries is not violent defensiveness. We should not let boundary-building be undermined by its most zealous practitioners; there is always a means to make a sound case without reaching for a weapon.

It takes a little self-confidence and courage to be able to notice just how bad we may be at the art of boundary-laying. We may have spent a large chunk of our lives already in an essentially passive  relationship to everyday infringements by people close to us. But we aren’t a piece of helpless flotsam on the river of others’ wishes; we have agency, direction and – as it were – a rudder. The price to pay for affection isn’t compliance."

If you like what you listen, please do leave behind a voice message feedback, FOLLOW the podcast and SHARE it with as many peeps as possible.

You may contact Raj @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thanks a lot, hear you on the next episode!

**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 people to which we are committed and where nominally we belong, but our particular ‘home’ may not for that matter live up to our yearning for respite and nurture, security and growth.

Confusingly, even very imperfect homes can feel better than the wilderness and desolation beyond, which is why we often stay around far longer than we should. But it is, in the long term, impossible to still the insistent voice inside us.

Maybe we’re an adolescent and we realise that the family we were born into cannot respect who we’ve grown up to be. Or we’re in a group of friends that have ceased to see the world as we do. Or perhaps we are in a relationship and have slowly despaired that our partner will ever appreciate certain ideas that matter profoundly to us.

It shouldn’t surprise us that so many of us don’t fit our homes; we never consciously chose them. We inherited them or stumbled into them, we fell into them by accident when we were too young to understand ourselves and others 

There are moments when we may need to keep moving until the place we live in is – at last – able actively to honour what home should always have been."

If you like what you listen, please do leave behind a voice message feedback, FOLLOW the podcast and SHARE it with as many peeps as possible.

You may contact Raj @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!

"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 not able to simply get up and go, we are too emotionally or practically invested to give up, something roots us to the spot...

One thing is likely already to be evident to us: even if people can change, they certainly don’t change easily. Maybe they flare up every time we raise an issue and accuse us of being cruel or dogmatic; maybe they break down late at night and admit they have a problem but by morning..

We might ask a prior question: is it even OK to want someone to change? The implication from those who generate trouble for us is, most often, an indignant ‘no’. ‘Love me for who I am’ is their mantra. But considered more imaginatively, only a perfect human would ever deny that they might need to grow a little in order more richly to deserve the love of another...

Why might change be so hard? In other words, the unchanging person doesn’t only lack knowledge, they are vigorously committed to not acquiring it. And they resist it because they are fleeing from something extraordinarily painful in their past that they were originally too weak or helpless to face...

very importantly, we might not stick around as long as we often do. We should at this juncture perhaps ask ourselves a question that may feel at once unfair and rather tough: given how clear the evidence is of a lack of change in a certain person, and hence of a lack of realistic hope that our needs are going to be met any time soon, why are we still here? What broken part of us can’t leave a lack of fulfilment alone?

We may need to rebuild our minds in order – with time – to change into people who don’t wonder for too long if, and when, people might change."

If you like what you listen, please do leave behind a voice message feedback, FOLLOW the podcast and SHARE it with as many peeps as possible.

You may contact Raj @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!

"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 variables. Our mental telescopes only permit us to see so far. We must learn to sleep on the pillow of doubt.

We don’t need to believe in a divine creator or indeed relinquish every sensible attempt to forward-plan our diets to see the wisdom of the point. For all the astonishing powers of our minds, there is a critical role for knowing how to switch them off in the face of uncertainty. 

We hear no end of reminders as to the benefits of intellectual work. We need also, along the way, to rediscover the occasional art of knowing when and how to stop thinking."

If you like what you listen, please do leave behind a voice message feedback, FOLLOW the podcast and SHARE it with as many peeps as possible.

You may contact Raj @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you for listening, hear you on the next episode!

"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 to generate the momentum required to induce us to finish any task, this mind pretends that once the work is done, it will finally be content, it will accept reality as it is. It will cease its restless, persecutory questions, it won’t throw up random unease or guilty suppositions. It will be on our side...

Once hard work ends, there is nothing to stop our melancholy minds from leading us to the edge of an abyss we had been able to resist so long as our heads were down. We start to feel that no achievement will ever in fact be enough, that nothing we do can last or make a difference, that little is as good as it should be...

We should be kinder on ourselves. Rather than putting ourselves through the infinitely demanding process of idling, we should be self-compassionate enough to keep setting ourselves one slightly irrelevant but well camouflaged challenge after another...

Our work exists to protect us from a brutal sense of despair and angst. We should make sure we never stop having tasks to do – and never make that most reckless of all moves, ‘retire’ or embark on that next most reckless step, taking a long holiday."

If you like what you listen, please do leave behind a voice message feedback, FOLLOW the podcast and SHARE it with as many peeps as possible.

You may contact Raj @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!