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. If your happiness depends on something you can lose, you will spend your entire life
afraid of losing it. But if your happiness depends on who you are, then everything and everyone in your life can come or go as they naturally would anyway, and not only would you no longer live in fear of losing anything, you would never feel like you've lost everything when you do.
The important question to answer therefore is: Who are you? And can you answer that question without describing aspects of your life that can be lost at any moment, like a job title, relationship status, your wealth, health, youth, et cetera? We spend so much time sculpting the outward expression of who we are; our bios, but what if all of those things were somehow taken from us? Family members, photographs, all records of educational achievements, your credit score, citizenship,
home, and even our names... What would be left? THAT'S who you are; that's your essence, and it's constantly growing and evolving. This is why I think we must get to know WHO we are instead of WHAT we are. Every single life experience is an opportunity for us to define who we are in relation to what is happening. Not to judge "it" as good or bad, but to decide right there and then who WE want to be in that moment. Who am I? Well, you've heard me say that I am not what has happened in my life
nor what I have done, I am who I choose to become today. As difficult as it may sound to leave identities behind after having them for so long, it's much more difficult to carry them with us if they no longer serve their purpose or even work against us. An identity crisis is exactly that: we find ourselves no longer fitting into the mold in which we were raised, for example. This can manifest as gender identity, sexual identity,
and even political identity. Some hardcore Republicans are struggling to quiet the internal conflict of continuing to identify as Republicans while not being okay with the current administration, for example, and some diehard Democrats are equally torn when they feel pulled too far to the left. A similar internal conflict occurs in many Christians when their churches aren't Christ-like, and in many of us when our behavior clashes with who we wish to be.
Sometimes, who we truly are clashes with who we thought we were. That's why the solution is for us to be at peace with ourselves about who we are without labels. Then, life is significantly less complicated. We simply accept each moment as an invitation for our real selves to show up.
Can you imagine if we didn't worry about social constructs, and instead, just paused, looked at a situation, and asked ourselves: Who do I want to be in relation to what is happening, regardless of who others expect me to be, who I've been up until this moment, how this may look, or how foreign and scary it feels outside of my comfort zone? We might just see who we really are, perhaps for the first time. We wouldn't live in fear of losing anything because nobody can take that
away from us. If your happiness depends on something you can lose, you will spend your entire life afraid of losing it. That's why my happiness depends on who I am. Who are you? I waited a couple of weeks before recording this month's blog entry as a podcast episode so I can include insight offered by others during our Buddhist Boot Camp monthly discussions. It turns out many of us figure out who we are by systematically ruling out who we are not.
A real-life "I was lost but now I'm found" realization. We catch ourselves acting in a way that no longer feels aligned with the kind of person we wish to be, so we work on changing our behavior, like a system upgrade in which some of the bugs are worked out, instead of keeping the same perspective yet expecting to somehow see the world differently. This action of continually filing down our rough edges, smoothing over our sharp corners and pacing ourselves with intention, is how our true
nature reveals itself. So, are we the so-called better person we are trying to become or the person we are now? Some say, "Neither. We are the ones observing the progression "from one to the other." Enlightenment is when a wave realizes it is the ocean. 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. 🙏🏼