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

relationships

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The Search For Connection

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The Search For Connection

Lately, the common theme in all my sessions is connection. Or more accurately the lack of it in people's lives. It strikes me as salient how many people do not feel seen or heard or valued in their lives. Or do not have anything to connect to that is bigger themselves. 

This strikes me as a problem of modernism. As we get older, we tend to see our friends less as the responsibilities of adulthood-- work and money and family-- take hold. The sense of community in youth or even in college is gone. And the connections we used to get from our partners can start to wane as well as we get busier and busier. And then suddenly, loneliness starts to creep in. And with loneliness, depression, and despair.  People are far more unhappy that you would think. And no one seems to be the real adult we imagine we should be. 

And it's not as if many people get that connection from their work either. Among the people I see in therapy, I'd say about 80% are indifferent to their work or outright hate it. A lot of us, it seems, are just going through the motions to get a paycheck. 

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Want to Stay Married? Embrace Change

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Want to Stay Married? Embrace Change

This morning I was rereading a wonderful New York Times piece from April called, "To Stay Married, Embrace Change." As a Buddhist, It's a particularly resonate read for me. It reminds me of something Roshi Shunryu Suzuki said when asked to reduce Buddhism down to one phrase, 

"Everything Changes."

As the article points out, to have a successful marriage, we need to realize that we will change but so will our partner. 

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Do We Overcomplicate Romantic Relationships? Kindness as a Key to a Happy Partnership

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Do We Overcomplicate Romantic Relationships? Kindness as a Key to a Happy Partnership

What makes for a happy relationship? Everyone has a different answer for that questions. Some of you will say “things in common.” Others will say “sexual chemistry” or “attraction.” Others, if they were being honest, will say things like the “class,” “race” or “religion.” But there is a problem with that list: those are all cultural markers of identity. They say little about what a person is actually like.

So if I asked you, what character traits make for a happy relationship? Again, everyone would have a different answer to that question. Some of you will say “sense of humor.” Others will say “honesty.” Most of you will say, “kind.” But what does that actually mean? What does kindness actually look like in a relationship?

5:1, The Magic Ratio for a Happy Relationship

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.