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The big questions the big questions of life. I grew up in a family. My dad was a Buddhist. My mom was both heavily into Freudian psychoanalysis and she had a great love of existentialism.

I was imbued in these different philosophies in my family system and so much so that by the time I was a third grade when I was eight years old

I remember I got in a lot of trouble for lecturing another child about

atheism and my mom had to I was actually suspended from school,

from getting angry at another kid who was, I guess,

a true believer, and I was lecturing this other child when I was eight.

It was a philosophy that was deeply prevalent in the dinner table. So tonight I'm going to talk about

existential psychology and some of the insights of it and then compared a little bit with insights of the Buddha and then we'll do a meditation

that will tie in thematically with the talk.

Find a comfortable seat and here we go.

Traditional psychological modalities generally focus on locating suffering and distress as within each

individual's unique psyche or self, our personal history of traumas, our early life experiences, our

repressed drives, our individual, you know, experiences.

And they're predisposed to focusing

on our specific pathologies.

In traditional psychological practice, there's an emphasis on diagnosis, which essentially marks distress as an individual's issue.

...