Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye. I am often asked if I'm always happy, and I think it's important to distinguish between being happy and being in a good mood. At this very moment, I'm actually in a pretty
bad mood. And at first, I thought this is the worst time to record an episode, but I've always been really committed to being vulnerable with you, honest, and completely transparent in my books, and online, so why should the podcast be any different? I refuse to put on a facade that everything is always wonderful in Timberland, but I can be honest with you about how I choose to deal with things when they're not ideal. Today, I had a falling out with one of my distributors, and it turned ugly,
at least by my standards. After that relationship fell apart, I instinctively wanted to fall back into old patterns of adding insult to injury with guilty pleasures like pizza, and fried food, and YouTube. It's a very interesting pattern. I used to always get a stomach ache from eating ice cream, for example, so I made it a rule to only eat ice cream if my stomach
was already hurting. I figured I might as well; it already hurts. Now I know to avoid what gives me a stomach ache in the first place, and I have even found non-dairy ice cream that doesn't upset my stomach, so the problem was solved. But the option to make things worse when they're already bad still calls out to me. Don't ask me why. I don't know. It's just this whole "adding insult to injury" thing that just seems to somehow makes sense. I don't know.
The beauty of mindfulness, however, is that it adds a gap between impulse and action. So the moment I hung up the phone with the distributor, they shall not be named, my mind raced with all the binge-eating and watching that I can do, and sulk, and milk this bad attitude as long as possible. When the mind is racing like that, when meditation is the last thing you want to do, that's exactly when meditation is very helpful.
It reminds me, at least, that I have options. I need to let go of some steam, yes, but there are healthy ways to do it, and there are unhealthy ways to do it. That gap is where I can navigate my life towards who I want to be, and away from who I've been. I hope that makes sense. I decided to go for a leisurely swim, for example, and on the way there, more options presented themselves: I could listen to Alanis Morissette
in full volume, which would only add fuel to the fire. And again, when the fire is burning, that's all you wanna do is just keep it burning. But then I thought, you know, let's tune-in to see what this week's Moth Radio Podcast episode is all about. The stories on the Moth often make me cry, and today was no exception.
I realized that we all do what we do when we need to escape, and whether that be drugs, sex, alcohol, I think reading is a really good way to escape, or listening to audiobooks, somebody else's story, because it takes you out of your world into somebody else's, and that gave me a clearer perspective of my own. It helped me enjoy my swim a whole lot more after that, and I felt 80% better by the time I was heading back home.
Traffic, however, was really backed up. Not just heavy-Friday-commute kind of heavy, but a holiday weekend. Then I realized it was because of a multi-car accident up ahead, and again, it snapped me right back into reality. The decision to end the business relationship earlier today wasn't ideal, but neither was the relationship. And when I looked at it that way, I felt liberated, free, unburdened.
Nothing has changed except my attitude. And then, like magic, I was back to not only being happy, but being in a good mood as well. It's very empowering to remind myself when I'm angry, for example, that I'm CHOOSING to be angry. Because then I can ask myself, "Why are you choosing this? This sucks!" And so it helps me to contemplate alternative ways to feel about the situation, anything but that. I guess we can be happy or crappy, it's our choice. What do you choose?
Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Faithfully Religionless and Buddhist Boot Camp. For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com, where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project, watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list. We hope you have enjoyed this episode, and invite you to subscribe for more thought-provoking discussions. Thank you for being a Soldier of Peace in the Army of Love. 🙏