Hi there. Thanks for joining tonight. It's great to see you. I'm Josh. This is

Darmapunz, New York. Just want to acknowledge that it's for me the time of the year where my allergies completely kick in.

So my voice is a little deeper. I'm prone to sneezing and coughing. In fact, I'm going to get some tissues. Thank you for being with us and

May 21st we'll be doing another one of our gatherings at Senator Yoga and also soon in June we'll be doing something down in Philadelphia, looking forward to that.

And if you'd like to support my work as a Buddhist pastor, the Venmo's DarmaPunks NYC and the

PayPal on darmopunks NYC.com website and there's

also the Patreon button. Thank you for your support all of the counseling and teaching is done entirely by donation only.

Can we give a talk tonight, various theories of addiction and also some insights into recovery, kind of an overview.

It's going to be a lot to take in.

Hopefully you'll find at least a couple of insights worth entertaining.

DarmaPunks itself started primarily as a recovery focused Buddhist

Buddhist organization or movement at the meetings pretty much everyone was in

recovery. So an overview of addiction and recovery.

Well, active addiction is primarily

a psychological disorder involving

a whole bunch of complex interactions between brain circuits, genetics, and individuals life experiences in one's environment and it leads to a disorder that has clear characteristics.

intimate connections begin to dwindle. The individual becomes increasingly isolated and gravitates towards

regulating emotions and alleviating pain through substances or behaviors rather than connecting with others.

Another characteristic of addiction is needing ever greater amounts to achieve the same relief that one got at the beginning from a far less amount.

Continuing to use, despite negative consequences, people feel physically sick when they start to abstain from the substance. And so very often part of addiction is this feedback loop where people

consume just to avoid the discomfort of being without a substance.

What I'm next going to do is going to sort of describe various different theoretical models of what causes addiction.

...