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 concept 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's 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 friends

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 to? 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.

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