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.

Today we're going to discuss the labels that we each wear, sometimes throughout our entire lives, and often as an excuse for being the way we are.

I've heard someone justify their anger one time because they're Italian or their constant fear because they're from New York.

Those make good jokes, but they leave us stuck if we take them too seriously.

When I was a kid, I simply identified as a boy,

and I'm pretty sure that was the only label I wore at the time.

But when my family and I moved from Israel to San Francisco during my first year of high school

additional labels were either thrust upon me or became more apparent than ever before.

Jewish, Israeli, foreign, short, minority, ESL student, weird, and so on.

I never thought of myself as those things, but other people sure

did, and each label felt like a stamp. Later in life, I was labeled according to my job title,

tax bracket, dating habits, dietary restrictions, and spiritual seeking.

Labels became so essential in fact that I foolishly started wearing a few of them with pride and even a sense of achievement. I thought

I was finding myself but each label actually distorted and restricted who I

truly was. At one point I started studying world religions and psychology, but did finding value in the

teachings of Christ make me a Christian? Did taking the monastic vows make me a Buddhist?

At first I thought each label was helping me understand who I was, but the truth is that I am all of those things and not one of them defines me.

Each label was actually limiting who I was, not helping me.

You see, labels segregate us into a subgroup of a subgroup of a subgroup that keeps getting

smaller and smaller until we lose sight of the big picture, that we are lose sight of the big picture,

that we are all the same.

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