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 try to explain how my mind works, and I think it will make sense by the end of the episode so stick with me and let's hope it does.

The Buddha taught that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.

That is to say the pain of old age, sickness, and death is inevitable, but we don't have to suffer through it.

In mathematical terms, pain plus resistance equals suffering.

The cause of suffering therefore is not

necessarily any experience but our resistance to it, our opinions and

feelings about it. If you think of suffering as the gap between the life you want and the life

you've got, then the problem isn't life itself, it's that you want a different one.

That desire for something other than what's right in front of us is the problem.

Luckily, there's an easy fix for that. But I only mean easy in the sense that you

the story about Carol, the elderly woman whose husband died after a long battle with cancer.

Her son didn't want her to live alone, so he invited her to move in with him in Europe.

During their flight to England he started to describe the house to her and she immediately said

oh I love it but you haven't even seen it yet he laughed just wait in the He

laughed, just wait until we get there.

That's when Carol said, I don't need to see it, to love it.

Happiness is something we can choose ahead of time.

How much I like the new house has nothing to do with the exterior paint,

the way you have decorated my room,

or how you've arranged the furniture.

It has everything to do with how I choose to look at it and I have already... to what we need. I'll talk more about that later. So whenever I find myself in less than

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