Hello, thanks for listening to this Darma podcast. I hope you consider that in accordance

with the Buddhist tradition all of my work as a teacher is offered without charge and

supported entirely by donations only. If you'd like to support this work, you'll find a paypal button on darmapunk NYC.com.

So I've been the guiding teacher of a large Buddhist community in New York since 2005.

Besides teaching twice a week, I do a lot of one-on-one most of my work is one-on-one

Counseling as well as writing for various publications, especially Tricycle magazine,

which is a Buddhist magazine.

And my background is, I grew up in a family where both Buddhism and was practiced by my father who was also in recovery and wound up being a Buddhist practitioner

because he was a pretty devout atheist and so being a Zen Buddhist was the only solution he could come up with that would meet at that point there was an exceptional emphasis in recovery to join some religious lineage. My mom was deeply heavily into Freudian psychology and the

bookshels were lined with mostly with her books some of my

dad's Buddhist books. So growing up as a kid, a team, I never really, there never really was a clear delineation between what the

was psychology. I just read them all as part of the same endeavor to address human suffering.

And to this day I tend to approach the core Buddhist teachings as if they are the

records of the first great psychologist.

And so I don't, I'm not a religious Buddhist, I'm a secular Buddhist who tries to integrate both clinical psychology and neuropsych psychology into looking for the intersections with practices of early Buddhism.

So there you go to end indeed today's topic is addressing the core

underlying factors producing both addiction and compulsive behaviors.

The goal will be to first understand what creates, or what creates the causes and conditions that result in addictive behaviors.

And I'm not just talking about substance abuse I'm talking about

any process behavior as well food binge eating, compulsive, social media, dependence, gambling, love addiction and so forth.

So I'm going to try to not narrowly focus on the type of addiction.

I'm going to try to make this as inclusive as I possibly can.

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