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. At the cornerstone of Buddhism are the three jewels, the Buddha, the Darma, and the Sanga.

If life was a sport, then the coach would be the Buddha, the game would be the

Darma, and the players would be the Sanga.

It makes sense that Buddhism is called a practice and we are the

practitioners. As such we exercise mindful conduct, speech, resolve, livelihood,

effort and so on, the same way athletes exercise their skills between games.

We are not perfect, but even professional basketball players don't make every shot. Discipline is the practice of repeatedly choosing

what we want most over what we want on impulse and much like a muscle our

discipline gets stronger than more often we exercise it.

As part of my personal mindful consumption discipline, I practice intermittent fasting, for

example, and I haven't had any alcohol or cigarettes for more than 20 years.

I say it takes discipline because what I really want sometimes isn't to fast, it's an entire bag of chips in the middle of the night.

And believe me, when life gets extra challenging, I'm tempted to abandon my practice altogether.

That's exactly what happened when Tiknot Han died in January. An unexpected wave of anger came over me that I know was masking the hurt underneath.

I suddenly had the urge to drink, smoke, and overeat in order to escape the pain, I wanted to breathe fire.

To quote Fight Club, I wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every panda that won't screw to save its species.

That's how angry I was. And when I expressed this to my friends

the same way I am telling it to you now, a few were confused and said, but you're a Buddhist, as if that makes me immune.

Let's be clear that neither Buddhism nor Catholicism, veganism, or any other ism makes us perfect.

But our practice does make us disciplined, and it's thanks to our practice that I didn't drink, smoke, or overeat.

I honestly don't know where I would be without you, my teammates. We lost our star player and we may be done a few

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