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. When I think of judgment, I think of holding onto a story of how we think life "should" be,
or how other people "should" behave, or how we "should" have done things. The word "Should," if you have ever studied NVC, Non-Violent Communication, is quite hostile, and it creates this blueprint that we have in our minds of how life is supposed to turn out, and every time it turns out differently, we judge it as bad, wrong, or somehow subpar to the ideal we have in our heads. And a lot of that applies to people's behavior and how we think they "should" respond to circumstances
in their lives. And I think the greatest lesson I learned was when I was a Holocaust docent, I went to school to learn about World War II so I can turn around and teach high school kids about it, but I think more importantly than meeting with survivors or, perhaps equally as important, was to sit down with what are now members of the KKK, and understand why and what got them to where
they are. Not for the sake of condemning them or telling them they're wrong, or proving them wrong, but to just understand: how did you end up where you are? And when you hear the story of a young boy who struggled so much to fit in as a kid and was bullied in the playground, and had a really terrible, violent, home life and just needed a place to fit in and was so desperate to just not fight internally anymore and just find a place
to call home. And then he's approached by the Brotherhood, as they called themselves and they welcomed him in as one of them. And he finally has this love, this place, that embraces him, which is all he really wants. And you can kind of understand how one day he could be so close to suicide and giving up, because the whole world feels against him, and then being embraced
by this Brotherhood. Why, that sounds so welcoming. And it's interesting for these groups to almost always need to have an enemy figure because it creates cohesion within the group, it gives everybody in the group something to be against. And so immediately I stepped away from judgment and thinking that these people are less than me, and actually being able to relate their childhood with my childhood, and just realized that we've made just different choices that have led us
to where we are. And so letting go of judgment is this beautiful heart-opening exercise that I've had to deal with in my own life. When I was in high school, it was my last year of high school, I found out that my girlfriend was pregnant and it wasn't because we were being careless, she was epileptic and the pills she was taking for epilepsy were Tegretol, which canceled out the birth control pills, and the doctors
didn't know it at the time, and condoms don't always work. And we learned the very important lesson, albeit too late, that if you're not ready to do the deed then... or... if you're not ready for the consequences, you're not ready to do the deed. So she was in this really interesting situation because she was very pro-life up to that moment. And then she found herself pregnant with the medical decision
to make that she can't keep the child and stay on the Tegretol pills. So it was this really interesting situation where it was a very difficult decision to make, and it was only made more difficult by the people outside the clinic who were calling her a murderer as if the day wasn't hard enough already. And so I think it's important for us to not make any judgments about a situation we haven't even been in ourselves yet, and definitely
not make any judgments about somebody else's situation. Because everyone is battling their own demons that we know absolutely nothing about. 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. 🙏