Hello and welcome to the secular Buddhism podcast, a podcast that presents Buddhist

teachings, concepts, and ideas from a secular perspective. You don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist.

You can use what you learn to simply be a better whatever you already are.

I am your host Noah Rocheta and let's jump in to today's topic.

I want to start this podcast episode by sharing what I consider to be a funny story.

This happened about eight years ago. It was a time that I was so

frustrated and so upset that I physically tore my shirt open out of anger and

frustration.

So let me give you a little context to what was going on here.

At the time we had Jonah who was our German foreign exchange student living with us and it was the end of his year abroad

and he came out to California with me to watch a paragliding trip that I was going to do. I had already been flying. I was still very much a novice and I went out with my

instructor to learn how to do a certain type of flying called Ridge Soaring.

Now with Ridge Soaring, you ride the wind in a very similar way to writing the wave of water. So imagine surfing. The way surfing works, if you can

picture this, you have the board that's riding the wave and it's the very shape of the

wave that lets you surf and if you go too far out in front of the wave you sink

if you get pushed back you'll also go over the wave on the backside and you'll sink.

So the wind works the same way.

The wind will flow over a ridge and the ridge is shaped like the wave. So as the wind flows over it, you can soar inside of that space right along the ridge.

And this was new to me so I went out there with all the excitement and

enthusiasm to learn this new style of peragliding and it turns out it's quite difficult. Now if you've ever been if you've ever

flown a kite you may recall how on a very windy day you can feel that tension in the in the line of the kite and it

feels like the kite wants to kind of pull you over you have to hold it really strong.

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