So again, I want to welcome you here and I also want to welcome those that are listening

and from all over the place, it really does feel like there's this extended field of

us and it's really quite lovely. And maybe begin by saying that the most important

truths are the ones that we're most regularly inclined to forget. And that is that we can't

be happy. We can't really experience well-being unless we feel a sense of love and care for

what's right here in the present moment, including ourselves, said differently. If we're

turned on ourselves or divided against ourselves in any way, in that moment, there's a fragmenting

that takes us from really feeling at home in our lives, at home with other people.

So it's said that the heart of Buddhism is compassion and that the heart of compassion

is compassion for ourselves. It really has to start with the life that's right here. So the

centrality of self-compassion, which is going to be the subject tonight and next week, we're

going to do a two-part series. The centrality of it is something that the Western Buddhist teachers

have been really awakening to over the last few decades that you can't teach about a path

of spiritual freedom and can't leapfrog over to realization and skip the fact that we're so

often at war with ourselves in an immediate way. Have to start where you are and address that.

And Western psychology is now in a very big way emphasizing self-compassion and it's been

quite remarkable in the last couple of years to see what's happened. There's been increasing

amounts of research on what happens when there's poor bonding when we're very young and how that

creates a sense of unworthiness and we don't have compassion for ourselves. And how when we learn

to cultivate self-compassion, it changes our whole experience of anxiety, it affects depression,

and I read from you because I love it when the New York Times highlights these things. This is

the New York Times last month. The research suggests that giving ourselves a break and accepting

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