Hi there. Thanks for joining. I am Josh and this is Darmapunks, New York. It's great to connect over the beginning of the holiday season. So very few notes. Every Monday through Friday at 8 a.m., Kathy has her daily

pause meditation. It's a great resource for starting the day in a peaceful way. As usual, everything I do is supported entirely by donation.

I do not charge for anything I do, which is in the 2,500-year-old tradition of the Dharma, the Buddha said that you give it away for free and

you live off the donations of the people who get something from spreading ideas, spiritual

content to others. So if you would like to support my work, if you get anything from

his talks, a donation of any amount is really helpful. And Venmo, it's Dharma Punks with an X, NYC.

And on the website, the same name, there is a PayPal and a Patreon. So anything that feels right for your budget,

it's really helpful to keep these talks going. And with that, I thought I would give a themed talk about the holidays and how they can,

while they can, of course, be times that are connected and warm,

they can also be times where we reacquaint ourselves with feelings of disconnection, loneliness, loss.

And it's kind of a, I give variations of this talk before Thanksgiving quite frequently,

because I think that it's a beneficial talk for many of us who needs support during the holiday seasons.

So I'll just start. Sometimes the holidays feel less like a celebration and more, I'd say, like a time of year where we

pretend to enjoy ourselves, while surrounded by myriad ads, movies, TV, shows, social media

feeds that bombard us with contrived images of happy families and

matching pajamas, total necks if they're not wearing pajamas, opening gifts, singing how it's a time for happiness and joy.

Whenever I hear happiness and joy, I think of Renan Stimpy, a cartoon show that had a song

called Happy Happy Joy Joy.

But if we're spending the holidays alone, navigating family conflicts or grieving loss,

or we experience seasonal affective disorder, sad, or we just feel, in general,

that everybody else is gathering about us, the contrast from our lived experience versus the images

that we're bombarded with can be kind of brutal. Almost two-thirds, a recent survey showed,

...