I'm Josh, this is Darmapunks in New York.

Everything I do is supported entirely by donation,

the counseling and the teaching.

The Venmo is Darmapunks with an ex-NYc.

And on the DarmaPunks NYC.com website,

there's Patreon and other buttons if you'd like to support my work so thanks for that and

tonight going to be talking about how we can best help support other people.

Sometimes in counseling people ask me,

what is the best way when we're confronted with individuals who are suffering, distressed,

going through difficult times, and we're caught in a situation where we don't know what to say, what is the best way to be of support

someone that we care about or other beings that we feel compassion towards. So tonight we're going to explore

this topic. I hope it's a good one. I suppose the best place to start is as usual reminding us that from the moment we're born we use body movement

sounds cries and eventually eye contact and touch to signal to our caregivers to signal our need for connection and

when the parents are able to recognize all these gestures these movements these cries essentially these emotional impulses, they respond by picking us up and holding us, soothing,

they, a mirror with eye contact. They in turn what this does more than even protecting the infant, this signaling by the baby of its needs for connection

and the parent responding, it regulates the baby's

autonomic nervous system, which is literally

determines pretty much everything

about our state of being.

When we are in distress, our autonomic nervous system shifts from

homeostasis up into the kind of like mobilization states sometimes known as fight flight, you know, fear, fight, fawn and freeze.

So we go up into this kind of alert state and when we're in that state it's not particularly healthy.

...