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.

When I think of judgment, I think of holding on to a story of how we think life should be or how other people should behave or how we should have done things. And the word should, if you've ever studied NVC, nonviolent communication, the word should is quite hostile and it creates this blueprint

that we have in our minds of how life is supposed to turn out and every time it turns out differently

we judge it as bad wrong or somehow subpar to the ideal we have in our heads and a lot of that applies to people's

behavior and how we think they should respond to circumstances in their lives And I think the greatest lesson I learned

was when I was a Holocaust docent,

I went to school to learn about World War II

so I can turn around and teach high school kids about it.

But I think more importantly than meeting with survivors or

perhaps equally as important was to sit down with what are now members of the

K K K K and understand why what got them to where they are not for the sake of condemning them or telling them

the wrong or proving them wrong but to just understand how did you end up where

you are and when you hear the story of a young boy who struggled so much to fit in as a kid and was bullied in the playground and had a really terrible, violent home life and just needed a place to fit in and was so desperate to just not fight internally anymore and just find a place to call home.

And then he's approached by their brotherhood, as they call themselves, and they welcome

him in as one of them.

And he finally has this love, this place that embraces him, which is all he really wants.

And you can kind of understand how one day he could be so close to suicide and giving up because

the whole world feels against him and then being embraced by this brotherhood why that sounds

so welcoming. And it's interesting for these groups to

almost always need to have an enemy figure because it creates cohesion within the

group. It gives everybody in the group something to be against. And so immediately I stepped away from judgment

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