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.

A few years ago, I encountered someone who lacked a sense of gratitude. They moved through life as if everything was owed to them,

including life itself. They got me to reflect on how little we truly deserve in life,

if anything at all, and how we don't earn any privileges by simply

waking up in the morning.

I realize that if we don't view everything in life as a gift, we run the risk of losing our sense of gratitude and replacing it with

entitlement. So I decided to challenge myself to respond to everything with a thank you, which

is easy to do when life showers you with abundant health, love, and friendships, but it's much harder when faced with illness, injury, or loss.

Gratitude is a sense unlike any other in that if you don't use it, you lose it.

A few years later, I met someone without a sense of empathy, and more recently, someone else without a sense of remorse. Let's call him Bob.

Meeting someone with no remorse about anything from their past surprised me because after more than a

decade of working with those who are incarcerated

I have grown so accustomed to witnessing the most beautiful aspects of humanity

and the people who are behind bars self Self-reflection, vulnerability, remorse, and accountability, even gratitude

for being in prison so they can reinvent who they want to be upon release.

Bob, on the other hand, like many others on the outside, might live for decades

without ever admitting any personal wrongdoing even to himself and no sense of responsibility.

Most of us are familiar with the five senses of sight, sound,

smell, taste, and touch, and many of us even know people who were perhaps born

without the ability to see or hear, for example.

But it never occurred to me that some people might lack other senses that we assume are innate, such as love, empathy, and self-awareness.

So I looked up the definition of sense in the dictionary,

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