Buddhist practice for the predictive brain.
Dharmapunx NYC carries the feel of a Tuesday night class: reflective, practical, and built around a sustained teaching talk. Josh moves between Buddhist practice, cognitive science, anxiety, grief, memory, and relationships, usually ending with meditation or contemplation.
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Dharmapunx NYC works like a teaching session held close to real life. It is not hurried. Josh tends to begin with the work being supported by donation and the subject for the night, then builds a long argument from there. The show’s center is Buddhist practice, but its vocabulary regularly crosses into cognitive science, affective neuroscience, attachment, memory, prediction, and therapy. The movement is usually from theory to embodiment. An idea about the brain becomes a tight chest at a social gathering. A teaching about impermanence becomes a warning against using spirituality to avoid grief, anger, or loneliness. The show is wary of bypassing pain. It is equally wary of being ruled by pain. Across episodes, emotions are treated as messages that need attention, context, and skillful response, not as embarrassing interruptions to be silenced. Anxiety is framed as a protective prediction system that can only change when life supplies new evidence. Memory is described as something more active than a stored recording. Grief, disillusionment, attachment, craving for relief, and consumer habits become examples of how the nervous system searches for safety and relief. The talks can be dense. They remain grounded. Josh often brings abstract claims back to relationships, work, community, bodies, habits, and the uneasy moments where people decide whether to avoid life or step back into it. Meditation is not presented as escape. It becomes a place to notice sensations, test emotional impulses, visualize safer choices, and let the body register new information. The show also gives unusual weight to community, in-person connection, and reliable care as spiritual necessities. Its seriousness is warm rather than remote. There is room for fatigue, illness, repetition, and the spoken texture of a live class. Dharmapunx NYC is for listeners who want Buddhist teaching that can sit with neuroscience without losing its ethical and emotional purpose.
Made for: For listeners drawn to meditation, Buddhism, therapy language, and neuroscience, especially those trying to understand anxiety, grief, attachment, emotional habits, and avoidance. It suits people who prefer patient teaching over fast conversation.
What sets it apart: Dharmapunx NYC stands out by treating Dharma, brain science, and everyday behavior as one continuous field of practice. The talks press ideas into lived examples, then often carry them into meditation rather than leaving them as theory.
Exploring the intersections of contemporary psychology, attachment theory, neuropsychology with core buddhist dharma insights and practices.
Based on 4 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Josh connects Buddhist practice with emotional awareness, translating talks on attachment, anxiety, and avoidance into guided exercises for everyday life.
Josh builds each Dharmapunx NYC talk around a practical problem: deciding when emotions deserve trust, loosening anxious predictions, recognizing attachment, or catching spiritual practice when it becomes emotional avoidance.
This is the show that asks your anxious brain to bring receipts before it predicts disaster.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A careful case against using meditation to move around anger, grief, and the body.
This episode treats spiritual bypass as a polished way of wrapping anger, loneliness, and grief so they never have to be felt. The central thread is practical and steady: sadness carries information, meditation should not be used to suppress pain, and real change starts with…
A calm case for letting experience revise the mind.
The talk frames anxiety as a mind that forecasts threat before experience can answer back. It treats the body as something that can brace, tighten, or settle ahead of events, and shows how older emotional reactions can rise again in the present.
A grounded case for intuition as fast experience, with a simple way to test an impulse before acting.
This DharmaPunks New York episode gives emotions a serious role in decision-making, treating them less as interruptions to reason than as signals that may deserve attention.
A grounded DharmaPunks talk links attachment, compulsive relief, community, and bodily safety practice.
Attachment anchors this DharmaPunks talk as a question of need: the wish to bond can turn painful when relief is chased through alcohol, weed, binge eating, retail therapy, compulsive dating, binge-watching, or online virtue.
Careful conversations on drugs, treatment, and recovery.
Long conversations with people who think in systems.
Psychedelics, treated with care and context.
Behavioural science with a commercial pulse.
Sharper tools for harder medical work.
Dharmapunx NYC’s episode argues that emotional wounds are updated through embodied experiences rather than insight alone, using communal rituals such as drumming, chanting, pilgrimage, and symbolic burial.
The host opens by saying he has been sick for the last two days and is still working through congestion.
This episode explores how early therapy, influenced by Freud, posits that past experiences continue to shape adult challenges like anxiety and depression.
Josh opens with thanks and settles into a conversation about the overprotective brain.
This episode explores the latest scientific theories on how emotions are constructed by the brain, contrasting classical views with modern insights from cognitive science and neuroscience, and discusses practical methods to influence moods.
This episode explores how the brain processes sensory information through electrical signals and guesses at their meaning, leading to behaviors like consuming sweets or watching TV to reduce discomfort and anxiety, connecting this to broader disillusionment with consumer culture, work, and society.
This episode explores the four stages of grief, connecting Buddhist teachings with contemporary cognitive science to help listeners manage stress and build a better experience of the world.
This episode explores how past memories, especially traumatic or intrusive ones, influence present responses to uncertainty and discusses Buddhist-inspired methods to shift these effects.
The host frames emotional life as something that belongs in decision-making, not outside it.
The episode begins with attachment as the human drive to connect, and with the long dependence of human babies on caregivers.
This episode explores the differences between empathy and sympathy, discussing when empathy is beneficial in close relationships versus when sympathy is more appropriate for social activism, and offering guidance on developing empathy.
This episode explores how late stage capitalism psychologically impacts individuals by internalizing shame, drawing connections between ancient Buddhist insights and modern sociological perspectives on emotions.
This episode explores how the autonomic nervous system significantly influences our moods and behaviors more than thoughts, offering insights into stress regulation.