Welcome. I'm Josh. This is Darmapunx, Tuesday night gathering.

September 1st, Labor Day, we'll be doing our annual retreat at Garrison Institute.

The info is now, I believe, on the Garrison website.

I haven't yet actually put the sign up info on our website. I'll do that shortly. So for those of you that would like to sign up, we will be having in Philadelphia, I believe, a day long retreat on June 15th,

Germantown Unitarian Center.

Find out all the information on

DarmaPunks with an ex-nyc.com.

Yeah, so if you'd like to support my work as a Buddhist pastor and counselor, everything I do entirely supported just by donations.

So the donations are Darmapunks with an ex-NYc,

and Venmo, or you can go on the website for PayPal or the Patreon. With that I'm going to be

talking tonight on appreciation why it's so difficult to have gratitude as a regular practice in our life,

how important it is, and then some of the Buddhist practices that allow us to

essentially sustain that state of mind which is so so very beneficial. I guess I'll just start by

noting that if you are over 30 years of age then you have something to be very grateful for because much of human history

people died from violence, illness, malnutrition, well before they reach 30 and if you're like me and you've actually

bypassed a half a century a while ago and you're still going then you really really have achieved

something quite extraordinary in terms of human history if you're in

relatively good health, then you have a resource

that's not available to millions upon millions of people, people who have chronic, debilitating,

degenerative illnesses and severe health threats, if you earned more than $14,000 less

year, then you received more than 40 million people in the US who live below the poverty

line.

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