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I'm trying to figure a way to describe what I'm going to be talking about tonight.

It's essentially, it's about how when we go through important life events,

whether breakups or engagements, moving, losing a job, getting a big opportunity, or any challenging experience,

there's a natural human tendency to try to encapsulate the experience in a kind of a sound bite or a story that we can repeat to ourselves and repeat to other people that give the experience a kind of meaning or

moral, something that we can sort of take away, that we can carry around in our head as a way to make sense of what has happened.

And I'm going to talk about, on the one hand, why we do it, how very often it goes astray, ways we can actually

develop a process for creating a kind of understanding of life's

experiences that will be more accurate and more useful.

So I don't know, that's not very pithy, but we'll work with it.

The Buddha taught that when we experience what he called Dukka or suffering stress

of disappointing a setback there's a to avoid feeling the emotional pain what's called Duke Abatedna

uncomfortable feelings we create views and opinions as a way to essentially keep the distress, the anxiety,

the sadness, the grief, the anger at bay. The story becomes a kind of a false refuge from the

embodied result of important life experiences. You see evolution developed two rather

separate mental processing systems in psychology, it's known as the dual processing theory and we of course know that a large part of the dual processes that we have are due to the fact that we have twin hemispheres in our brain.

We have a bilateral brain and working separately than most of us imagine. The thin neural thread that connects the two

hemispheres, the corpus colossum, has over the course of evolution

actually gotten thinner. We're actually less integrated.

...