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. Do you remember the magicians who used to spin plates at top poles on stage at the circus?

The trick was to get as many of the plates spinning at the same time

without letting any of them drop. This required constant attention to each plate,

giving it just enough momentum every few seconds to keep it spinning, and then rushing to do the same with another

plate so that it doesn't fall off the pole.

This depicts how most of us live our lives, with multitasking, condone in the workplace,

and perpetuated in society as an asset, while it's actually

a disease that we're suffering from in epidemic proportions, like we're addicted to being busy or something.

As a direct byproduct of a bigger better faster more mentality, we take a simple

life and we complicate it to no end. Our wants become needs and before we know it we believe we can't live without something that we didn't even know existed a year ago.

We are spoiled rotten, over-stimulated, and rightfully exhausted, but it's our own fault.

Some of the plates we try spinning don't even make sense with everything else we've got going on,

so we essentially guarantee that one or more of them will inevitably drop.

And we've been doing this for so long that we don't know any other way to be.

The dream, perhaps for all of us, is to lead a simple and uncomplicated life, and even though

it's difficult to imagine a way out of our current situations if we feel stuck,

there are always options. The trick is to figure out what is standing in our way of deciding to get out

and that something is almost always our own fears and insecurities.

Having faith is embracing the unknown, taking a step forward even when you're not sure where it will lead.

Not because you're a daredevil, but because scary as that step might be, it's not nearly as scary as staying stuck.

We more frequently regret steps that we haven't taken in life than the steps that we have. Besides, how can we grow if we don't have faith

that all of our past experiences were not mistakes, but actually necessary steps to equip us with

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