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. The Buddhist Boot Camp Discussion Group meets in person and over Zoom once a month to dive deeper into each month's food-for-thought. With the intention to better understand how and why people say one thing and do another, we looked a little closer at this inconsistency.
What I gathered from the discussions was that even if you manage to get a bunch of people together in a room who all share the exact same values, they would still disagree on how to prioritize those values, whether we're talking about women's rights or immigration, health care, gun control, animal cruelty, marriage equality, the environment, abortion, and so on. The following is the first example it took for me to understand this level of flexibility without seeing it as contradictory.
I'm going to use a less triggering example than alcohol consumption from the last episode, since that was apparently too divisive So, let's just imagine two people who truly love good quality dark chocolate. Both Sebastian and Sabrina care about supporting organic, fair-trade, women-owned businesses that make single-origin, dairy-free, dark chocolate in solar-powered facilities whenever they can.
But, since it's difficult, if not impossible, to find a chocolate bar that meets all of their criteria, they each end up buying a different brand of chocolate based on how they individually prioritize their shared values. While neither one of them would ever budge on the dairy free-aspect, Sebastian picked a chocolate bar that is organic but not necessarily made from single-origin cacao, while Sabrina prioritized single-origin and fair-trade over everything else.
Keep in mind that their values are exactly the same, but because they prioritize those values differently, they can't agree on which chocolate bar to get. Imagine this inability to agree on a global scale with much bigger issues, and the world starts to make more sense. Sabrina and Sebastian ended up getting both chocolate bars, and neither one of them is "right" or "wrong." It's not only okay, it's what we all do each and every day.
Whenever we make a decision, we prioritize our values based on some lines that we refuse to cross, and other lines that we still consider as guiding principles, but they are a little more blurry depending on time, place, and circumstance. In the last episode, I explained my inability to process conflicting information, such as why someone like Sabrina, who values organic chocolate, would buy a bar that is not organic.
Now, I get it. But it made no sense to me until this concept of flexibility, which was previously foreign to me, was thoroughly explained. I couldn't understand how someone who is diabetic and claims to care about their health would turn around and eat sugar, for example It didn't occur to me that while they might truly care about their health, they also care about Ice Cream Night with their grandchildren once a week.
So, every Thursday, they prioritize time with their grandchildren over completely eliminating sugar from their diets because life without those nights is not worth living. This may sound simple and obvious to you, but it blew my mind because I've spent my entire life with a strong conviction to prioritize congruency over everything else, and here I was introduced to people with a strong conviction to be flexible.
I was never judging people's choices, mind you, I was genuinely curious how people reconcile their decisions at the end of each day, which in and of itself was an assumption that everyone does this reconciliation on a daily basis. Part of me still struggled to understand how these grandparents, for example, can truly enjoy their ice cream when they know it contributes to their own ailment, and it took me thinking back to a scenario in which I have done a similar thing to truly get it.
I say I care about my health, right? And I thought that meant I could never eat fast food ever again, because if I do and still claim to care about my health, I'd be creating an internal conflict that would be more difficult to digest than the meal itself. But, when my friends and I were driving through the Mojave Desert, the only food choices for lunch were fast food restaurants.
I still refused to eat animals, of course, but I found something on the menu to sustain me until better options become available. Under normal circumstances, I would consider what I ate unhealthy. Does that make me a hypocrite, or does it make me reasonable? It's a rhetorical question, because the other thing I learned during our discussion was that nobody else gets to decide what that makes me.
We can be healthy, dark-chocolate-loving, ice-cream-licking, emergency-fast-food-eating, well-intentioned beings all at the same time. What we prioritize in life has to do with our inherent need for a sense of purpose. Someone mentioned prioritizing their College education in their 20s, but graduation sent them searching for a new sense of purpose. So, they had kids, which gave them a renewed sense of purpose until the children moved out of the house, leaving them looking for a
sense of purpose once again. That's the risk of attaching a purpose to something temporary. They ended up rescuing a couple of dogs, which gave them a reason to get out of bed each morning, but that will only work for so long. So, what if we find purpose driven by something that we decide is not only the most important thing in the world to us, but doesn't have a resolution, expiration, or destination within our lifetime?
That could be God, it could be a commitment to congruence, or as we chant in Zen monasteries every morning, I vow to abandon greed, hatred, and ignorance, which arise endlessly. We simultaneously acknowledge there is no end in sight, yet we vow to tackle it just the same. This sense of purpose requires constant cultivation, making every moment fueled by intention and conviction. And the more consistently we do it, the more automated it becomes, enriching every moment of our lives with purpose.
When we are sick and feel terrible, we are highly motivated to take good care of ourselves, right? We get lots of rest and drink plenty of fluids. But, when we feel fine, we are less motivated to do those things. Do we have to wait until we are sick to take good care of ourselves, or can we regularly care for ourselves in order to reduce how frequently we feel sick? Doing anything with consistency makes it easier to stick to our convictions.
It's much easier to eat healthy and meditate every day if you do it consistently. But, if we see meditation as something that disrupts our day rather than enriching it, then we are less likely to make a habit out of it. Another suggestion someone had to help us with conviction was having an Accountability Buddy; someone who holds you accountable to get your daily exercise, for example.
What I love about the organic nature of our monthly meetings is that they go wherever they need to go, and I always walk away with something. The more neurodivergents understand how neurotypicals see the world, and vice versa, the larger our heart grows and the deeper our compassion and empathy can penetrate. Since my number one priority in life has been a constant commitment to congruence with fierce conviction, I've been hypersensitive to any decision that isn't in line with my values.
This stems from believing that happiness is when what we believe, say, and do are all in harmony, because anything else creates disharmony. The mistake I've been making all these years is thinking everyone prioritizes congruence the way I do, when they might actually prioritize something else, such as flexibility. I typically call these episodes Food-for-Thought, but this one is more like yoga for the brain, stretching me and opening me up to new possibilities.
Almost everyone in the meeting was initially inclined to shy away from what they considered rigidity, but through conversation, everyone found their own hard-line in the sand with certain decisions. If they made a commitment of monogamy to their spouse, for example, it's a line that most agreed they wouldn't cross. Question is: where is your conviction the strongest? On what issues? And where do you draw the line?
I love you regardless of what you drink, eat, or do, because even if we share the exact same values and convictions, you have your priorities, I have mine, and the wheels of the bus go round and round. Namaste. 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. 🙏🏼