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.

Buddhism invites us to contemplate who we are, not what we are. Unfortunately, we spend our

entire lives obsessively curating an outward projection of what we are based on ethnicity, race, gender, age, career, diagnosis, addiction, religion, or anything else that can be labeled.

We essentially construct an identity instead of building character.

As a result, our brains have been rewired to no longer see other people for who they are either,

reducing everyone to mere labels such as homeless, rich, conservative, liberal, Christian,

criminal, bisexual, white, black, queer, poor, Muslim, autistic, introvert, extrovert,

and everything in between. But a doctor from an Ivy League school or a parent of three kids

or a perfectionist with anxiety is not who we are. And I think we have lost sight of that.

And although it's tempting to blame social media for amplifying the

performative aspect of identity expression while muting the importance of character development,

social media didn't create division and discord, it only brought it to light. The intoxicating power

of being your own public relations manager is exhilarating so

people wear a mask and pretend to be who they are not and then they try to live up to the

image they have projected or the one that is projected onto them creating an

internal conflict that gets increasingly more difficult to keep from boiling over. It's up to us to look beyond

the label of Granny Smith or Honeycrisp and just see an apple, period. We can avoid falling into the

ego trap by focusing on who we are, not what we are. But to do that, we need to implement a couple of

spiritual practices into our daily lives. The first practice we need to implement, don't try

to fix others, because you can't. Just by eliminating that one habit, you successfully sidestep

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