Thanks for stopping by. I'm Josh. Welcome to Darma Punk's New York. I hope you are doing well today.

And I thank you for your stomping by. We'll be having an in-person gathering Sunday, July 10th, 2 to 5, and that will be at center yoga in Manhattan on 23rd Street. So hope to see you.

If you'd like to join the registration is at on our website darmapunk NYC.com.

So please sign up if you can. Of course if you don't know until the last moment we can probably get everyone in and then

on September 1st through the 5th our retreat, which will be at Garrison Institute.

If you'd like to attend, that will be with, by the way, Jessica More and Kathy Cherry and

myself. You could sign up at Garrison Institute or on our website and if you would

like to support my work everything I do is offered entirely without any charge.

My Benmo's Darma Punk's NYC, the PayPal button is on the website,

darma punks NYC.com, as well as on the podcast site.

So thanks for that.

So given the decisions of the Supreme Court on Thursday evening they gutted a lot of gun control legislation, especially here in New York.

And then Friday came the hammer blow of overturning Roe v. Wade.

And for so many of us, myself included, this was a really painful turn of events.

So I thought I'd give a talk on maintaining a positive engagement with the world despite setbacks. I hope if tonight's talk isn't of any particular value to you that you'll keep coming

back next week but hopefully it will resonate with some. Endemic to our species is negativity bias, a universal

tendency to focus and dwell on threats, bad outcomes, bad feelings, while giving little weight to positive experiences.

You see, this of course was over the course of our ancestral development a survival benefit that we would

remember the one time that we stuck our hand into an area where we previously got berries and

instead got bit by a snake or nearly bit by a snake. We remember that one event over all

the positive times we collected berries or weren't bit by a snake.

The amygdala and survival and process of the midbrain to deeply engrain in this little as a half a second negative experiences and to make them instantly recallable whereas positive experiences get one-fifth at times the neural wiring,

...