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.
New concepts can be very difficult for us to accept after believing the exact opposite for
so many years. If you grew up constantly being called ugly, for example,
and then somebody comes along and calls you beautiful, you are more likely to think
they are lying, crazy, or both, than you are to believe them and accept it as true.
That's why when a friend said something to me recently that was so far removed from
the narrative with which I grew up, it took a long time for me to digest and accept as an
alternate reality to the one I previously believed. I grew up hearing many variations of
this old joke about this little boy who gets
slapped across the face by his father first thing in the morning.
And when the child asks: What was that for?
The dad says: Oh, I'm sure you'll do something later today to deserve it.
That so-called joke is not just a sign of
old times when beating your children was acceptable, it is also an extension of many
people's deeply-held religious belief that they are born sinners awaiting judgment.
Even Buddhism implies we deserve whatever happens in our lives, so there is potential to
feel like a screw-up no matter where you go for comfort.
You can imagine my surprise after a lifetime of guilt, shame, and believing the best we can
hope for is forgiveness, when I heard my friend say: You are already forgiven.
My mind was blown.
I thought the only thing we deserve is that preemptive slap across the face.
And what about the negative self-talk about how terrible we are?
Does this mean we can let that go, too?
It is much easier for me to forgive others than it is to forgive myself.
So, believing I am already forgiven is a life-changing paradigm shift.
It required that I switch my thinking from: Who in their right mind would forgive me?
To: Who in their right mind wouldn't?
I've been punishing myself over the years for so many missteps, it is strange to
wrap my head around the notion that I am not only forgiven for the past,
but I am already forgiven for what I haven't even done yet. We are talking about
the opposite of a slap across the face, we are talking about unconditional love,
which is a foreign language to many of us who have gone our entire lives never
experiencing that level of acceptance from anyone, including ourselves.
For centuries, philosophers, poets and songwriters have been trying to define Love,
and I really think the Dalai Lama nailed it when he said:
Love is the absence of judgment.
It's that simple.
Love is the absence of judgment.
If you think about what is standing between you and being able to
love the person in front of you, it's judgment. And once you remove that judgment,
all that's left is love, even if the person in front of you is you.
What would your life look like if you accepted that you are already forgiven?
During our in-person and online Buddhist Boot Camp discussions about these
podcast episodes, we even discovered a flaw in the notion of already being forgiven:
it still suggests we are inherently bad people who can do good things.
So, I'm working on truly flipping the script into one of two possibilities:
the first is that we are actually all inherently good, but can sometimes do bad,
or as Rumi suggested, beyond wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field...
I will meet you there.
This concept of unconditional love feels strange but liberating.
I wonder if I would even be able to recognize and accept love if someone offered it to me.
Would you?
Perhaps we need to unconditionally love ourselves first, so we can lead by example.
A life with no shame, no guilt, and no slap across the face.
Already forgiven, already good, already loved.
What a wonderful life this could be if we let go of the narratives that no longer serve us.
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. 🙏