once in a while after we finish our retreat we save up our money and we go some place just to see what the

lifestyle is like in other countries and then you fly back to the US and you're reminded once again you live in a third world country.

And so tonight is going to be a bit about exploring that and the very often unseen toll it takes on our psyches.

So the Buddha some 2,500 years ago noted that our behaviors and our perceptions of the world are rooted in feelings.

Each situation he noted, every circumstance in our life evokes these immediate embodied non-conscious responses that are essentially

physiological states as well as states of mind that are automatic. So for instance when you're

speaking in public you don't choose maybe to be anxious when you're gathering with a you see a group of friends that you haven't seen for a while you don't

plan or cognize to be happy these responses are automatic and they're evoked by reasons of the brain that have

absolutely no conscious control.

Now some 2,500 years later, emotions and feelings which had been given the short shift in terms of the academic world has become a central theme of cultural criticism and sociology and neuropsychology.

People like Eve Sedgwick, Lauren Berlant, Sarah Med, who are all very important sociologists and philosophers have been at the spirit in the front of a new movement to focus on the role of emotions and how they play in all of our behaviors and the way we perceive

the world.

Emotions and feelings are of course given the fact that we like to believe that we're rational beings and that we are most

We feel most affiliated with our thoughts.

We tend to think that emotions which are evoked

by non-conscious processes are somehow lesser,

less important, less important, less insightful, than our rational minds. But that's not the case. Not

only do they about very strong, important motivations and

agendas. It's our emotions that urine for us to be connected that keep us safe,

that create a sense of overwhelm when we are overwhelmed,

that tell us when we need to withdraw for security for a sense of processing, overwhelming events.

As so many different clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists have noted emotions play a vital role in adaptive behavior.

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