Hello. Thanks for listening to this Darma podcast.

I hope you consider that in accordance with the Buddhist tradition, all of my work is 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

darmopunks NYC.com. My work as a Buddhist pastor generally involves checking in with a lot of people during the week.

During the pre-pandemic it would be about 20 to 24 people. Now I'm doing more like around 30 to 35 people a week and it's a

wonderful way to connect with people and to hear what people are struggling with.

And generally my work is to listen, empathetically, to give people a safe place to express the stuff or the

thoughts or the issues that they're struggling with and then offer tools to

help them work through whatever issues they are facing.

Not to solve or give instruction in terms of what to do, but just to offer people the practices and tools that will help them

through their own work in connection and their own practice

finds a path forward in life.

So tonight what I'm going to do is go over some of the themes that I've

been hearing for the last five or six weeks and hopefully some of you will relate to one at least one or

maybe more of the different topics that I'm going to review and then if you hear something that sounds like

it resonates with you then you can consider the practice that we talk about and some of the tools that I offer.

And then at the end of the talk I'm going to lead us through a meditation where we're going to practice

some of the tools I discuss.

And I'm going to cover a whole bunch of areas. So if you don't, if you can't keep up with all the topics,

it'll of course be on the podcast.

So one of the themes I've been hearing due to staying at home. Many people I've been

...