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 remember crying in my room as a kid after my parents beat me. I would sit there with tears in my eyes, waiting for them to come back and comfort me.
And after a student at school would bully me, the teacher would tell him to apologize to me I think it developed an illogical pattern of expecting whoever broke something, to come back and fix it. But we can't sit around waiting for the person who caused the hurt to also be the one to console us. I mean, I've seen people wait for decades for an apology that will never come, holding on to their pain and resentment like it's precious. The wound may not be our fault
but healing from it, is most certainly our responsibility. So I say, take that power back and move forward. Now people say offensive things to me all the time, and I just choose not to be offended. You see, if we don't give away our power in the first place,
then we don't need to later fight just to get it back. Choosing to get angry, frustrated, hurt, or upset, is a far more detrimental choice than we think; it's a complete waste of our power, which is why we often feel powerless to do anything about it. And then, to add insult to injury, we expect the very people who were careless to do the mending. I mean, it's like getting upset with a puppy for being a puppy and peeing on the floor, and then expecting the puppy to also clean it up.
We decide how long we're going to let what hurt us haunt us. As soon as I realized how unreasonable I was being, a sense of humor with it all helped me create a new pattern without beating myself up about how I used to handle situations in my life. And if I slip from time to time, and momentarily blame someone else for how I'm choosing to feel, I just laugh it off.
If other people upset me, the problem isn't other people, it's me. And that's good news because I can do something about me; I can't change anybody else. So, even if the wound itself is not your fault, healing from it is your responsibility. Your Response-Ability: the ability to choose your response. 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. 🙏🏼