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.

I'm going to start by sharing a scenario I've used in the past and then I'm going to take it to the next level to see if it makes you uncomfortable. That's the indication that I'm doing my job, raising awareness of biases we didn't even know we had

because it's only after we acknowledge them that we can work on letting them go.

If you and I were to walk down the street together and suddenly see a big dog running toward us,

I personally love dogs more than people people so I'm thrilled and I think the dog is the

cutest in the world. If you were perhaps attacked by a dog at some point you might think

this is a very scary moment.

So is the dog cute or scary?

Well, Buddhism teaches us that the dog is neither cute nor scary.

It's just a dog.

We, on the other hand, are meaning-making machines who assign value to everything we see, thereby

creating our own unique experience. Whether it's pleasant or unpleasant is apparently completely

up to us, and whether our perception is accurate or not is completely irrelevant.

To get to the core of why bias and segregation is so detrimental to us,

imagine walking down the street again, but this time, instead of a dog, you see, let's say, a white man in a make America great again hat.

What experience does that trigger in you? What if you see a black man wearing that hat or a woman?

What if, let's forget the hat, you see a soldier in uniform, a doctor in

scrubs, a monk in robes, or a firefighter in full gear.

What sort of thoughts and assumptions get triggered then?

In reality, the person in front of you is just a person, multifaceted and unlike anyone else.

But we assign meaning and labels to everything we witness, which triggers all sorts of emotions

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