Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is the first

episode of 2023. This is episode number 176. I am your host Noah Rochetta. And today,

I want you to think for a moment about some of the people that you know best. Perhaps

these are people close family members or close friends. And think about them for a moment.

And then ask yourself, have you ever noticed if any of them have a natural inclination

or a natural tendency to behave in a particular way? And if so, what is that natural tendency?

And then focus on yourself. How about you? Do you have certain propensities that you're

familiar with? Today, I want to share my thoughts around the topic of propensities and how mindfulness

as a practice plays a crucial role in both helping us to notice our own propensities and

also to have a more skillful relationship with our propensities once we've identified them.

As always, you keep in mind that you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to

be a Buddhist. You can just use what you learn to simply be a better whatever you already

are. Now, real quick, before jumping into the topic of propensities, I want to give a quick

year end review and starting of the year report. Last year was a great year towards the end

of the year. I dropped off a little with the podcast episodes, especially in December.

And the main reason is because I attempted to record three or four of them. And for some

reason, halfway through, there was an audio glitch that would happen. My microphone would

start producing a very skittish sound, almost scratchy. I know it happened in one or two

of the podcast episodes in the past. One of them, many of you detected it and then I had

to correct it. But in November, I did a podcast interview on another podcast where someone

was interviewing me. And about 15 minutes of that podcast episode ended up being useless

audio because of this weird glitch. And for whatever reason, it was getting worse towards

...