Hi there. This is Josh. Welcome to Darmapunks, New York. We will be having our Labor Day retreat up at Garrison Institute, and it's going to be beyond the mirror.

And in honor of that retreat, I'm going to be giving a talk tonight on breaking through identity beliefs,

investigating identity beliefs, why that's important. And so if you are interested,

you don't have to have any previous experience and all of the meditations are guided and

there's lots of talks, times to connect, times to go off on your own hike, sit by the river

and really good food in Garrison, which also happens to be really easy to get to from New York.

So that's my sell on it.

Finally, if you get anything from these talks and feel like supporting my work,

I don't ever take advertisements or anything like that.

So if you do feel you're getting something from it,

the Venmo is Dharma Punks with an XNYC, and every donation, no matter how small, is really welcome.

So, and if you don't have Venmo, the Patreon, the PayPal are on the website. The website, by the way, is Dharma Punks with

an XNYC, and if you want to reach us, it's DPXNYC.com at gmail.com. DPX, NYC at gmail.com.

Okay, so without further ado, so some 2,500 years ago, the Buddha stated that the first step of Sotapatana, which is

entering the stream, or seeking any form of liberation, was to challenge our self-beliefs. It's

literally, along with breaking one's old habits and routines that got in the way of spiritual practice,

he listed Sakai Adepti, addressing it, releasing it, investigating it, which is

Sakaiyedity being the stories we tell about ourselves, the beliefs we hold about who we are. At the very foundation

of the Buddhist spiritual program is an insistence on investigating all of the stories we've

harbored and carried around about our sense of self.

This pointed to a fundamental problem with how our minds work.

We tend to lock ourselves into very limiting self-beliefs that cause us so much

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