Welcome. As always before I jump in and start babbling on, I have to put my pitch in to be self-sustaining as an entity.

And just remind you that everything I do is by donation only. There's no charge. As a Buddhist pastor, everything I offer is supported by donations through Venmo at DarmaPunks with an ex-nyc, or the PayPal site on the

DarmaPunks NYC website or the podcast site, and there's a Patreon as well available on the

darma punks NYC.com site. Piece of good news, every New Year's Eve before the pandemic, we would offer an in-person

small event that used to be at Maha Rose, well this year it'll be at Center Yoga.

That will be New Year's Eve.

We're going to have an optional yoga class and I will be a probably starting around 1030 meditation

then a darma talk then an intention setting ceremony and it's my goal to for those who don't live in the New York area if it's at all feasible to stream the event via Zoom if we can get a Wi-Fi signal at the yoga center,

but if you're in New York,

and you'd like a quiet sober New Year's Eve gathering

with some meditation and some of me rambling on about some subject?

Well, you are more than invited to join us.

So tonight I'm actually gonna to be talking about social discomfort and anxiety, the distress of the expectation of interpersonal events,

social discomfort and anxiety

is, for me, a worthwhile topic to address.

Social discomfort and anxiety is an intense, generally recurring state of emotional stress that, as we'll see countless individuals experience in situations where they are subject,

the attention or scrutiny or assessment or evaluation by other people.

Any situation where we feel will be the center of attention can

incite a degree of discomfort or anxiety.

And we'll talk about why this is the case.

Situations where you have to meet people for the first time,

being in a room full of strangers

...