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Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, 

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and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life.

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Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.

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A friend who recently retired told me he is having difficulty figuring out 

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who he is without a job. He spent his entire life working and developing a routine

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without ever developing a personality, and he is not alone. But this episode is not about

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retirement, it's about figuring out who we are.

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A personality is defined as The mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.

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There is nothing distinctive about me, he said.

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My beliefs are not my own, they were handed to me, and I've never reached for

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anything in life except for a promotion.

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I have tried so hard to blend in, I faded into the background.

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Few people ever question what moral qualities are distinctive to them unless

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certain life events force them to self-reflect.

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My buddy Mike, for example, wrote a book about his time in prison called Going Om,

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where, for the first time in his life, nobody cared that he was a CEO, a husband, a father,

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or anything other than inmate number 60419066. All the labels with which he had

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previously identified were stripped from him, and it took going to prison for him to realize 

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he was already in one. He essentially freed himself while behind bars.

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A woman who recently lost her only grandchild told me she has to constantly

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remind herself of everything else she was before she became a grandmother,

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or she starts feeling like she lost everything.

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And a year after my buddy Jessie came out as gay, he realized his orientation is

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only as much a part of him as his hair color, not his personality.

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"Who are we?" is a deep question,

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and it's important not to confuse identity with personality. Someone can identify as 

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Christian, for example, but not be Christ-like, just like according to Jewish law, I am

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technically Jewish by birth, even if I never identify as such.

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The questions that constantly ring in my head are: HOW am I Jewish? HOW am I Buddhist?

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What else am I? And according to whom?

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When I first heard Tyler Durden say: 

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You are not your job, you are not how much money you have in the bank, 

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you are not the car you drive, you are not the contents of your wallet, you are not your

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f*cking khakis, I literally owned 42 pairs of khakis, believe it or not, for business casual,

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drove a sports car, and worked at a law firm. I thought that's who I was,

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but I wasn't even close.

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Identities can be restricting and confining if we identify with our job or relationship status,

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our health, youth, or anything that is either temporary or directly contradicts what we

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know in our core to be true.

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Gender identity is a perfect example of how personal & individual these answers must be

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rather than anyone else deciding for us. But again, be it gender, religion, wealth, or health,

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identity is not the same as personality.

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I would go as far as to say that when we set aside the identities that segregate each of us,

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we tap into the personality [the moral quality] that celebrates all of us.

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On the one hand, we have Buddhism, which is all about awakening from our illusion of

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separateness, but on the other hand, personality is determined by qualities 

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distinctive to an individual. So, which is it?

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I picture the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi Tree and realizing that we are all one.

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And this concept of unity is not unique to Buddhism, of course, the last line

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in the prayer of St. Francis reads: it's in dying to Self that we are born to eternal life.

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Who we are, therefore, is collective, fluid, and interconnected.

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Something doesn't need to happen to each of us for it to matter to all of us,

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and nothing needs to happen to all of us for it to matter to each of us.

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Our personality is developed when any concern with ME changes to WE.

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And instead of asking, Who am I?

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We ask: who am I in relation to everyone and everything else?

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In answer to that question, I am another you, and you are another me. Namaste.

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Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Faithfully Religionless

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and Buddhist Boot Camp.

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For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com,

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where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project,

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watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list.

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We hope you have enjoyed this episode

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 and invite you to subscribe for more thought-provoking discussions.

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Thank you for being a Soldier of Peace in the Army of Love. 🙏🏼