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 treat everything in my life like an experiment. I find that it gives me this tremendous flexibility and fluidity to not be attached to an end result or a goal. I just go into it saying let's try this for a while, let's just experiment with it and see
how it works. Some of these experiments have lasted 15 years, and some of them only last six months, and it's important to just kind of re-evaluate as we go along and say, Okay this made sense five years ago or a year ago or last month, but does it still make sense today? And so it's just an experiment, it's nothing to be taken
too seriously. We tend to think that decisions like who to date or where to live are a huge monumental decisions that are gonna completely redefine our life and take us on a whole... every decision you make is gonna steer you in a new direction, but you can always make a new decision the next day. Right now you can decide that tomorrow you're gonna wake up in a new city, and lead a new life or have
a different job. We have so much power when we let go of fear, which is what's normally holding us back of any decision being so "permanent." Nothing is permanent. And anything can change in the drop of a dime, not only by itself, but we have some control over that and we can decide one moment to say, "Let's experiment with this." I've in my life treated everything that way, and it's given me the freedom to say, You know what? Moving to this city
a few years ago made sense, but now, because of my life... Like, I moved to Seattle and Seattle is great, it's still my favorite city in the whole world, but at one point I wanted to play beach volleyball every day. Now, I don't know if you know Seattle, but it rains about eleven months out of the year, and so you only have a month, maybe two, where you can actually go and play beach volleyball. You wait all year long for that
short period of time to be able to do that. So when I got really deep into volleyball, I said, Okay, Seattle is great, but it no longer serves the kind of life I want to lead. So I moved to Hawaii, which does serve that life because it's always sunny, and it's always beautiful. And I did play beach volleyball every day. It was great. But then life changed again and I wasn't clinging to Hawaii like "This is where I'm
"gonna live for the rest of my life." This is just where I was at the time, and then when I was called to go somewhere else, I went somewhere else. And this has proven true, this flexibility, this fluidity in one thing really lends itself to everything else that we do. When I took the monastic vows, I was in full monastic robes for two years
and that really made sense while living in the monastery. We all had the same haircut, we all had the same robes, we really visually saw what we believed: that we're all one, we're all connected, there's no difference between any of us. Literally, you walk up to the meditation hall and you don't know who it is in front of you because from the back
we all looked exactly the same. But when I left the monastery, and I was still in robes and at the airport or whatnot, people started treating me as if I was different from them, and I was responsible for that: I wore robes that communicated not, "Oh, I am a peaceful, "loving, oneness-believing person," is I'm somehow different from you, and people treated me as different. And I knew the robes had to go when a lady
on the bus offered me her seat one day. I was like, "Okay this is definitely not what I want." And it was my own teachers who said, "Why wear the robes?" "Why can't you just be the guy in town with the bright eyes?" And my ability to let go of the robes, to just embrace wearing jeans and a T-shirt, was possible because I wasn't attached to the robes, I wasn't so married to them, so to speak. I was able to just treat it as an experiment. It was something that I tried
and I continued doing it as long as it worked. And the moment it didn't, I was able to let it go. And we can apply that to relationships, we can definitely apply that to jobs, and we can apply that to dietary restrictions, you know, you try something for a while and if it works, great! If you find out later it doesn't work, that's fine.
Making a new decision doesn't make you a bad person. I often quote a lot of the inspirational people in my life and yet time and time again, you know, if I quote the Dalai Lama someone somewhere in the audience says, "Oh, I don't have any respect for any man who eats meat." As if the fact that the Dalai Lama eats meat negates all
the wonderful stuff that he does in the world. That, to me, communicates that the person saying that is the one clinging to this idea of THIS is the right way for everyone to be, and if I'm gonna believe anything anyone says, then they have to live up to my standards, which are constantly changing.
So treating everything as an experiment in our own lives really opens our heart to understand when a close friend of ours, a family member, is doing something that we're inclined to tell them not to do, whether it be marry someone they want, and just kind of take a step back and go: they're experimenting, this is what
they're trying for a while and they'll do it until it doesn't work. And my job as a friend is to love them through it, to be understanding and supportive and whether they're marrying someone I don't approve of or not, when they get divorced, my job is again to be there, to be loving, and supportive, because that's the the kind of person we want to be, and that's the kind of person we're experimenting being.
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. 🙏