STOP GOING TO THE HARDWARE STORE ... for orange juice.

you Hi there. Thanks for joining. Welcome. Let's say we have our Labor Day weekend retreat that will be... happening on Labor Day weekend, which I think is right up until September 1st or something around that time. It's at Garrison. So our retreats are a really fun way to, if you've not gone on a Buddhist retreat, we make it really easy. We've always been curious about... Going on a retreat, I thought, oh, I won't be able to do all that practice. Well, ours is definitely a retreat that's...

kind of tailor-made for people who are just getting their feet wet and also good for people who've done retreats before. They're just... They're tailor-made for both. So August 5th is the next time we'll be in person at Grand Street Healing. There's the Daily Pause Morning Meditation at 8am with Kathy. That's a great resource, Monday through Fridays. And my teaching is entirely supported by...

those who get something from the talks or from the counseling. So if you are someone who finds something of value in these... talks, no matter how small the donation, it's always helpful in helping me pay the rent and continue to do what I do. So the way to contribute is either through Venmo Dharma Punks with an X NYC or on the website Dharma Punks with an X NYC dot com. There's a PayPal button and a Patreon. Thanks for considering.

Keeping me afloat, I don't keep anything I do behind a paywall so that it's available to all. Tonight's talk, stop going to the hardware store for orange juice. one of the sayings. And I'm not going to really... I'll start off with a famous Buddhist teaching. The story goes that a monk is meditating peacefully. In a rowboat on a lake, and suddenly in the midst of this monk's very relaxing practice, another boat crashes into his boat, and he gets angry.

and starts to confront the other boatmen. How dare they? But when he opens his eyes, he discovers that the other boat is completely empty, and it simply drifted. due to currents into his boat but the boat was under no one's control and the encouragement in this analogy meant to impart is that other beings other people are essentially empty boats, in that they're acting out of unconscious patterns, that they don't intend to do it to us, they're just doing...

what they do, much like all other animals in the animal kingdom, act at the behest of pre-conscious emotional priming. And so... We tend to impart onto others, and sometimes onto dogs and pets, this idea that they're choosing to act. It's intentional, their actions. And the teaching is meant to detach from this idea and see other people's actions as automatic.

The Buddha also says throughout the Pali canon, Maja Manakaya says, it's not easy to change anyone, for almost everyone is stuck in their ways. And in the Mahjama Nikaya 95, the Buddha says, people act in ways that are familiar, not in ways that are skillful or liberating. Why is behavioral change...

so hard to initiate in ourselves or in anyone else? Why do conversations, logic, even the most heartfelt please fail to change or even moderate the behaviors of those we associate with, those we care about, those in our lives, we can spend years pleading. with loved ones to address their spending, their substance use, their dishonesty, to smaller issues such as lateness, interrupting, leaving the toilet seat up, and yet nothing.

changes. I have a joke with Kathy that in the course of being together for 24 years, I've made the request for her not to use the sink like a garbage receptacle. Kathy asks that I clean the counters after I slice anything. And in 24 years, nothing has changed in the slightest. Now, sometimes people might even want to change. But old behavioral routines essentially over time become compulsory. It might seem like other people are disregarding our requests, but...

All we're doing is erroneously attributing their actions to conscious intentions or choices or decisions, when in fact, the vast, vast, vast majority of behavior is... automatic, guided by regions of the brain that aren't conscious. A core psychological principle is called the fundamental attribution error. They really should have come up with a much catchier title for it because it's such an important concept and it's so universal.

The idea is that we tend to assume that people intended to act the way they do. For example, he chose to leave the toilet seat up or... she chose to yell while driving the car rather than understanding that almost all behavior is due to underlying neurobiological patterns entirely outside of conscious control. If someone, for example, cuts us off in traffic, we tend to immediately assume they're an unsafe, uncaring driver.

We don't consider that they might be under stress and not sauce or that they might be rushing to a hospital due to a sick child. But at the same time, we know that... Internally, most of our behaviors are very often driven by circumstances. If we almost have a car crash by cutting in front of someone, we might... explain, oh I didn't see them, I was tired, I didn't mean to, I was under a lot of tension. So we acknowledge and forgive ourselves for actions that we don't acknowledge.

And other people are due to factors beyond their conscious control. In essence, like Leslie Greenberg, the great psychologist, writes in his book, we don't act in accordance with how we... think we act in accordance with how we feel. Neurological circuits produce action routines 10 seconds before we become consciously aware of them. Already,

the muscles, the behavior has been initiated well before we become aware. Originally, Benjamin Lippet in the, I think it was the... 1980s said it was a half second, but over time they found more and more evidence potential and activation in the basal ganglia happens much earlier.

Automatic behaviors are not moral choices. They're not failings. They're how the brain actually wires for efficiency. Over years of repetition, especially those behaviors we learned in our early years when the subcortical regions of our brain are being formed. neural links that prime our behaviors are linked and they're what's called myelinated. A myelinated neural connection is extremely fast. It's so difficult to override.

a myelinated circuit because it's activated, it's fast, it's powerful. The frontal lobe really doesn't have a choice very much when they're activated. MIT's and Graybill wrote a paper on habits and the evaluative brain. I think that was the title. By adult life, behaviors, she noted, are ingrained, initiated, and performed automatically regardless of the outcome. They're driven by a region of the brain, the striatum, that's...

very pre-conscious. And there's a reason why almost all of our behaviors are automatic. We are not... thinking and acting. We're just doing what we do. We chew maybe with our mouths open or... cough without covering our mouths or whatever irritating little behaviors we do, conscious attention was removed early on to make these

behaviors run smoothly, the more you become consciously aware of a behavior, the more awkward and the less smoothly the behavior comes. There's nothing more... dangerous than to try to narrate how you're riding a bike while you're riding a bike or Try to, I don't play golf, but I understand that when people become consciously aware of their golf swing, then it ruins it. People who play tennis say their serve, if they become conscious of it, no longer works at all. Overtime behavior that is...

smooth and by the basal ganglia in the brain is purposely not conscious. And these are not just things like swinging a... golf club or riding a bike, they're pretty much the way we turn, the way we act under stress, the way we respond, the amount of attention we provide to others when we're tired and so forth, or automatic behaviors are intensified when we're frustrated.

or when we're experiencing any stress because in those times during interpersonal tension The brain defaults to familiar neural patterns that conserve energy and maintain a sense of control. Even though many of the automatic responses are not skillful, they're even maladaptive, like shutting down or lashing out or... turning to substances or smoking or binge shopping or binge eating, they're initiated by very, very fast responses.

In the Buddha's, the Buddha noted this in the Paticca Samuppada, That behavior doesn't arrive from deliberate thought, but through unconscious stressful feelings known as dukkha vedana. which conditions us to alleviate the stress by consuming pleasure. Sometimes the underlying physical change is pleasurable as well, but most of the time, it's dukkha vedana. We start to feel tense or stressed due to other people's attention.

judgment, criticism, things are not going our way, not getting what we want, all the first noble truth events. And so we act in accordance with those stressful feelings. As I noted, Greenberg notes that emotion is the primary driving for behavior, not thinking. Alan Shore, Anil Seth, Robert Sapolsky, all the giants say that... We do what we do well before we know that we're doing it. So this idea that people think and act is something that our culture...

tries to embed in us, our jurisprudence and legal system teaches it. But in fact, it's largely based on a mis... conception. In fact, Sapolsky, the giant in behavioral psychology, argues that there's absolutely no free will whatsoever. Now, some psychologists say, well, there's a little bit of free will, but it's only when we're not under stress, when we're not being confronted or we're not tense. And then we have just maybe enough.

frontal lobe inhibition that we can stop a really bad behavior that was benjamin labet's um idea that we don't have free will but we have free want. But right now, in neuroscience and psychology the debate is really not anymore that people think than act it's pretty much that people almost invariably act and then they come up with reasons why they acted and only in a very few very special circumstances can we override our impulses, but definitely not when we're under any stress or tension.

And this is even more so when you consider that some of our most exasperating habits started off early on in life as coping strategies, survival tactics that helped us feel safe in our... in stressful periods in childhood. My dad, throughout his life, was profoundly cheap, even though... my sister and my consternation, my parents, through their hard work and industry, especially my mom's, but they wound up living financially.

They were very comfortable. They weren't rich, but they were comfortable for sure. But my dad never changed his, he would still want to eat in the most inedible, horrible. restaurants simply because they would have some sandwich for three or four dollars. He also hoarded old electrical radios and car radios and stuff long after they became

useful because in his childhood, you just weren't allowed to throw anything out, even if it was broken and no longer useful. And you certainly didn't spend money. He grew up in the shadow of the Depression, so he couldn't. Um, Escape that. And certainly from growing up with my father, I found in my life that when I'm confronted with anger, I can go kind of hyperlogical.

as a way just to intellectualize and compartmentalize the anger that i start to feel when i'm confronted so that's something that no matter how much attention i go to it and i try at times to be empathetic when i'm Confronted in certain situations, I just can't do the kind of emotional relaxing and meeting the other person and mirroring their affect. A child of emotionally unpredictable parents learns to scan through danger all the time to avoid conflict. And this hyper...

Vigilance is adaptive in their childhood, but they'll carry it into their adult life. And by the time they're adults, they won't be able to deal with any difficult conversation. They'll self-soothe. With substances, whenever they feel overwhelmed socially, they'll become busy, they won't be able to talk, or they'll seek addictive distractions. Children who felt... unseen and neglected and developed over performing and people pleasing compliance, a drive for approval, which

help them survive their childhood, but over time becomes like a kind of prison. They'll say yes to almost everything, even when they...

They can't possibly do it, leaving other people frustrated and disappointed. They'll chronically over-apologize to try to manage other people's... reactions and when asked to engage in an honest dialogue to about their behavior, they'll spiral into shame and assume that they've ruined everything and then become just so wrapped up in self-pity that the conversation will not be.

possible, and so on and so forth. So in adult life, these childhood strategies become very rigid emotional armoring. These defensiveness or these behaviors are not from stubbornness. They're insulation. from a fear of rejection, attack, engulfment, emotional abuse, and trying to get someone to change these behaviors will be only creating more stress which will only further ingrain the behavior i'll say that again the more you try to get someone to change

their maladaptive behaviors, the more stress you create in your interactions, and then the more they will revert to the very behaviors you're trying to address. Alcoholics. notably drink far more persistently directly after they've been confronted by a loved one. Sometimes they'll try. to white knuckle it and then they'll break down under stress and they'll wind up going on binges that are far worse than before they were confronted so accountability isn't

Something that's resisted because it's inconvenient, it simply instilled behaviors. These behaviors weren't built for comfort, but for survival. And asking someone to disarm their coping mechanisms is going to dismantle the very self structure that keeps them upright.

So what are the tools? What are the way we deal with it? Well, the first, I know everybody hates to hear this, is acceptance. Once we recognize that people are not acting from choice that they're like in the buddhist saying empty rowboats just acting from the way they were programmed in their childhood it's not from malice it's from conditioning And if they're not ignoring our requests, it's easier for us. Because the...

The existentialist said about Sisyphus, the moment Sisyphus accepts that the rock is not going to stay at the top of the hill, he is suffering. diminishes. It's the expectation, the belief that somehow we can by pleading or demanding change someone. that doesn't lead to any change is the expectation that they will change is what causes so much of the suffering. When we accept that in reality, by the time people are adults, they do.

They act in the very way they've always acted before we ever met them. And it has nothing to do with us being in their life that suddenly made them act in a certain way. If you're anxious and you're in... a relationship with somebody who's avoidant, they didn't become emotionally avoidant because you showed up. It's simply that's how they were programmed in the first two years of their life. So we have to stop believing that this time they'll change if we explain it better.

if we confront them more, if we make ultimatums, all of this only makes other people's maladaptive behaviors more flagrant. Each time we try to change someone, we leave ourselves open to be re-wounded. We're reopening memories of hoping for healing from the very same place in the past. We were disappointed. When we've tried for years to get a sibling to talk about old childhood wounds, every time we bring up the subject and they accuse us of being dramatic.

We're only going to be re-wounded and they're only going to become more defensive. When we continue inviting a parent or an old friend to express some kind of acknowledgement of our efforts. And all they do is respond with silence. All we're doing is ingraining that response the more we confront it. Acceptance. where we just finally conclude, I'm not in control of this. This isn't something I can fix. I don't need to keep on reaching into the fire to prove that it's hot.

This simple act, the realization that people are not doing things to us, they're just doing what they've been programmed to do, makes life so... so much more easy to survive.

So for this reason, it's worthwhile taking a lot of time before attaching to anyone or committing to someone before you decide to, you know, start a company with someone or get married or... take a long road trip or share an apartment with someone, I would basically suggest you really want to spend a lot of time seeing what they're like under stress.

what they're like under adverse conditions before you make any commitment because you will it once you make the commitment if you don't see all the suite of behaviors and you're caught off guard by the fact that Suddenly you find someone who, when they're exhausted and tired, starts... critiquing everyone around them or starts lashing out, it's too late. It's too late. And then this is also important.

From acceptance comes action, which is boundaries. A boundary isn't by any means revenge. It's not even a confrontation. It's how we... Understanding that this person is not going to change, discern which conversations we try always to evolve into blame or anger or shutdown. Which situations always lead to... disappointing maladaptive actions and simply not going into those situations rather than going back into the situation and trying to get

people to change. A great boundary with someone who's been unskillful your life while you're alone with them is to say, okay, I'll happily meet you. Dad, mom, sis, brother, friend, whatever. I'll meet you at a restaurant. Or I'll meet you outdoors in a park. around where the people sit by a lake. Social settings tend to change people's behaviors because in social dynamics, people revert to socially compliant.

pro-tribal behaviors so they'll act differently it'll be automatic how they act they won't decide oh Now that I'm in public, I'm going to act differently. It's automatic. But people, if you change the situations in the context, they'll act in a different way. So we stop seeking apologies. We stop seeking clarification, acknowledgement from people who cannot. It's been shown. Offer them.

We end our part of the conversation the moment things turn manipulative. We know which topics we can't raise because in the past they've led to disappointment, feelings that were not understood. We decline invitation to situations where we feel belittled or ignored. And that's fundamental. to being and maintaining the relationships. Relationships are not curtailed by boundaries. Relationships are kept

healthy through boundaries. It simply means that we don't go into the very situations that cause toxic interactions. And finally, even after we set boundaries, the last part of the equation is to stop litigating the stories in our minds. Stop ruminating. Stop the rehearsing imaginary comebacks. Rumination is not just emotional self-harm dressed up as problem-solving. It's just self-harm. The Buddha said that rumination is like holding a burning hot coal waiting to throw it at someone.

All that's happening is we're burning our own skin. It agitates us. It doesn't clarify. And generally, no matter how much you rehearse a response, or replay the events in your mind when you're actually with the person none of the things you've rehearsed will come out because your behaviors will be just as automatic as their behaviors and you'll go back to the exact same

routines and then the exact same responses or whatever that led to the initial problems. So we have to return again to acceptance. I'm not going to change. They're not going to change. At the very least, the only thing I can change is stop. the speech utterances to demand that they're going to demand that they change and also going into the very situations that lead to the disappointment. So...

So we can't change other people, but we can slowly change how much we suffer. So that's tonight's talk.

And I'm going to do a meditation now where we'll first try to get calm and then we'll imagine a situation where in the past... We've tried to regulate or change how another person acts, and then we'll practice self-soothing, and then we'll do a couple of reflections on this topic. So I hope tonight's... talk was in some way of benefit or interesting to you. And now what I invite you to do is close your eyes and go off screen.

You can find a really comfortable seated position. dropping the shoulders, inclining the exhalations to be very long. Don't focus on your in-breath, focus more. Attention on your exhalations. The longer the out-breath, the more we begin to engage the parasympathetic nervous system, which is kind of like the brakes. to the brain's and the body's nervous system. And when your nervous system slows, goes into a rest and digest, then you become less reactive. You feel more peaceful.

It's not immediate, but the more you just incline the exhalations to be complete, unhurried, longer than the inhalations. Really softening the belly. Nobody's looking right now, so just allow your belly to completely be released. Scanning the face for any tension. And if you feel any tension, first tighten that area. So if you feel tension in your jaw.

clench your jaw first and then release it. Or if you feel tension around the eyes, really squinch the eye muscles and then release. Or if you feel tension and... The forehead, squinch it, and then relax.

And it's good to stay present rather than get lost in fun. So the way we stay... rather than getting lost in thought, is by paying attention to an ongoing sensation. that's actually occurring in the present moment. So that can be sounds around you, body sensations, your breathing. It could be the lights flickering behind closed eyelids.

Just find any sensation that's actually happening, not something created by your mind. If it is something created by your mind, let it just be a very simple image, like a candle flickering. But just keep your attention on the object, as it's called, or the anchor. that keeps you present and from drifting off into thought. It's okay to have thoughts in the background or along for the ride, but... When we're lost in thought, some of the most stressful, painful events in life occur.

Wandering thoughts are associated with not only chronic stress, but people are the most unhappy when they're lost in thought. So it's not that... Thinking is bad. It's getting completely disconnected from the world around you and allowing your thoughts to lead you wherever they want is when people are the most miserable in Buddhism and spiritual. Practice is all about not being miserable.

Every time you find yourself lost in thought, the key, of course, is not to create any more stress or tension. You'll just then be more likely to.

get lost in thought again because it's an automatic pattern people have when their eyes are closed or when they're not actively rushing around. We've trained our minds over the... course of time to get lost in thought even though it's a primary source of suffering so every time you find you've drifted away Just bring your attention back without any consternation or criticism or frustration or...

In fact, the best appropriate response is to feel good that you've noted that you're, one, becoming more aware of where your attention is, which is very, very... very beneficial. And you're also ingraining routines in your... an area of your brain that focuses attention you're actually ingraining circuits that bring you back to the present away from repetitive intrusive thoughts so it's a win-win when you realize

You've drifted away. So just feel good. No matter what's going on in your practice, feel good about it. It's always good when we're taking time to just relax. land in our lives, connect with our bodies, disconnect from the overbearing to-do lists.

So bring to mind, if you'd like, a situation in life with someone that is invariably frustrating or disappointing. See if you can picture in your mind the scenario. It should be a situation where you have previously ruminated or struggled with and then just see If you can recreate a scenario and even know the thing that you may have rehearsed that you would say or...

want to tell them. And instead, before you imagine just getting up and leaving the situation, which is by far in a way the more skillful strategy, just find physiological tension in your body. Whether it's in your shoulders or suddenly your belly becomes a little tight or maybe the micro-muscles around your eyes get a little clenched. Just see if you can find the stress that motivates this impulse to change to once again address.

something that has again proved impossible to change. And see if... You can imagine or practice, actually, I should say not imagine, but practice breathing into, softening, relaxing your body. so that the impulse to change them is now replaced with an impulse that's far more skillful. which is to slowly get up, walk away, get some, get to another context, situation, essentially practice in your mind setting a boundary.

And finally, think of someone in your life you've been disappointed with, frustrated with, trying to fix or explain yourself to. And noting all the time spent ruminating, imagining conversations or interactions that we keep replaying. hoping we'll receive from them something different, and just ask, what would it feel like to just accept them exactly as they are? What boundaries, adaptations, without going to cut off or to I'm not going to have them in my life at all, what...

What ways could we engage but put us less into situations that keep reactivating old wounds? Where could we redirect our energy? So at this point, I'm going to initiate the end of today's practice.