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 used to think there was a war inside of me.
I mean, I try to eat healthy, but I also want cake. One minute I'm grateful to be
home and don't want to go anywhere else, and then I think Costa Rica must be nice this
time of year. I love being alone, but sometimes I crave the company of others.
And I haven't eaten animals in almost 20 years, but I miss the ease of finding
places to eat wherever I go.
Over the years, I have written about the internal struggle of guilt and redemption,
balancing hope and despair, and oscillating between confidence and insecurity.
So long as I thought of it as a war or a battle to be won, I figured one side needed to
destroy the other. It didn't help that one of the Buddhist temples in which I lived
didn't have a typical Buddha statue on the altar like the one we have all seen of a
serene, meditative figure sitting cross legged.
They had a warrior with a sword raised high above his head, sitting on top of a lion,
depicting a Buddha cutting down ignorance, training the ferocious beast,
which was representing the mind.
This visual further confirmed for me that the spiritual journey was a fight to the end.
And all these years later, I'm either wiser or simply tired of fighting, so thinking about
my mind as a battlefield no longer serves me.
The name of that Buddha on the lion, or sometimes the dragon, by the way,
was Manjushri, which translates to Gentle Glory. The statue, although appearing violent,
is not about killing the wild beast, it's about taming it. And Tame means domesticated,
docile, mild, and no longer dangerous.
And since this isn't a war, I am calling for a ceasefire. All sides need to stop arguing
and understand that perfection is the enemy, not the goal. Moderation does not mean
mediocrity. And it's actually possible to be healthy and eat cake. Thank God!
It's almost comical how despite studying the Middle Path for so many years, it remained as
slippery as algae-covered-rocks in a river.
The spiritual journey is about learning to walk that stream, knowing full well you will
get wet from time to time, you will slip, you will fall, and you will get up again.
It's about balance. It's about knowing when to take a small step and when to leap.
It isn't a war at all. It's not a battle against the elements, it's about cultivating a symbiotic
relationship with all of them: the rocks, the water, the algae, the lion, and the dragon.
After you spend enough time together without fighting, you eventually get along.
The key is to remember not to fight.
My old Temple Keeper had no artwork on her walls, no photos, no paintings or drawings,
but she did have a large, handwritten sign in her room that read:
STRUGGLE IS NOT A REQUIREMENT.
What an incredibly wise and peaceful reminder.
I do realize that even the name Buddhist Boot Camp in itself has militaristic connotations,
but the cover of the book is of half of me in the dark, another in the light,
peacefully coexisting as neighbors, not enemies.
It's an invitation for the God and the ego within you to agree to a truce.
None of my books prepare you for war, but for peaceful resolution thereof.
In fact, by no longer calling it a war, we are that much closer to peace.
By thinking of the spiritual journey as a leisurely walk in the park instead of an
arduous trek up a steep mountain, we remove the struggle component out of it completely.
As the old saying goes, enlightenment happens by accident,
spiritual practice simply makes us more accident-prone.
If we want inner peace, we must be peaceful.
So call a truce. Struggle is not a requirement.
Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Buddhist Boot Camp, Faithfully Religionless,
and The Opposite of Namaste.
For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com,
where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project,
watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list.
We hope you have enjoyed this episode
and invite you to subscribe for more thought-provoking discussions.
Thank you for being a Soldier of Peace in the Army of Love. 🙏