Thanks for stopping by and this is Josh of Darmapunks New York. Welcome. I hope you're doing well.

I guess mentioned that as a Buddhist pastor the way I survive entirely is by

donations I never charge for any of the counseling that I do in any of the talks that I give it's just up to whatever you feel is appropriate for you with the understanding that if you can't give of course course, no worries.

If you do give anything is just gratefully received.

It's all done anonymously, so I don't know.

But I'm really grateful for the support that allows me to keep doing this.

So the Venmo is DarmaPunks with an X NYC and the rest of the ways of donating to keep these talks going is on the

darmaPunks with an ex-NYc.com website and that's it.

Tonight's talk is on empathy. when it's skillful, when it's not, and how to keep it beneficial and how to develop empathy when we struggle at times with it.

So it's important when giving any talk on empathy to start by reviewing the difference between empathy and sympathy

because they're often blurred and why one of the above empathy and sympathy is beneficial for close relationships,

while the other is best for social activism and helping people's we don't know. So sympathy is

cognitively understanding another person's hardships without actually feeling, experiencing what they're feeling.

We don't actually, when we're sympathetic, share the emotions of someone who's suffering, but we can grasp the difficulty of what they're facing.

Sympathy is primarily local. facing. intellectual response to someone else's suffering.

Skillful sympathy, when we provide ideas or we take actions to address another person's suffering and that's very beneficial,

especially when it's with people we don't know.

Unskillful sympathy is tinged with pity and condescension and a sense of superiority.

The person who walks past an un-housed person and rather dismissively throws a dollar towards

them, but the entire exchange is based on a sense of

disconnected condescension. There's definitely skillful sympathy and it's when we really understand how someone's situation is difficult and we take any kind of measure perhaps to address it.

Empathy is actually, it's not focused on necessarily

...