My name is Josh. I am Buddhist pastor, teacher of Dartmouth, New York for the last going on now

17 years.

And I guess before I jump right in,

I'll just note that if you'd like to or care

to support my work, you are invited to, if it's financially available, don't feel pressured at all, but if you would like to support the work of a Buddhist pastor who does everything entirely by donations, then the Venmo is

DarmaPunks with an X NYC and on the DarmaPunks with an X NYC.com website

there's a pay bell button so that's about it that's my pitch for self sustenance and

tonight's theme which is the impulse to self-sabotage, self-annialate, self-destruct.

So from the very foundations of Buddhism, the first noble truth, the Buddha teaches that in life there is old age, sickness, death, and separation from the love, sorrow, lamentation, grief, despair.

So the Buddha doesn't say that that's all life is,

but he wants to remind us that old age sickness deaths are not personal.

They happen to everyone and that they're inevitable.

So the attempt to skirt it, avoid these experiences will always lead to

disappointment. As one friend recently put it in life, pain is the only thing you get free refills of.

So for most of us, when we experience even a flash of discomfort, a feeling of anxiety, a sense of

dorsal dive as kind of depression, a fleeting sense of dread. We immediately crave a way out, we crave something that will push painful emotions, painful feelings in the body away.

That's one of the Buddha's,

probably the most fundamental teaching,

that when we experience what the Buddha calls Duka or a painful experience, the next thing that happens is

craving. We crave something that will get rid of our pain and that craving in Buddhism is called Tannha no need to know that but that's the original

poly term so the Buddha said there's three different kinds of craving.

There's three ways we try to escape the inevitable pain, sorrows, separations, losses of life.

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