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.

There is incentive behind everything we do. We exercise, for example, to either get in shape or burn calories, to stay healthy, just for fun or to unwind, blow off steam, and so on.

We are incentivized to save money so we can go on vacation perhaps. We have incentive to brush our

teeth every day, to go to work. You get the idea. But sometimes the incentive isn't about

getting something in return necessarily. People volunteer for

example not for recognition or reward but out of a sense of purpose or moral values.

Either way incentive is what motivates us. So when it comes to meditation, what's the point? What's the motivation?

This episode is my effort to explain how it helps me. Let's say you decide to sit for a few minutes every day without

physically moving no matter what. You can sit in a chair on the floor whatever you

want so long as you don't move for a designated period of time.

If you have an itch, don't scratch it.

If you are uncomfortable, wait until the timer goes off to change positions or stretch.

If your mind starts making up stories about a spider crawling on your head, let it.

The benefit of sitting still like that and witnessing urges as they come up but not reacting

to them isn't so you can pat yourself on the back for sitting still. The benefit not of being patient and of not letting your thoughts control you starts to impact your daily

interactions in every way.

Someone does something annoying, but you choose not to get annoyed just like you chose not

to scratch that itch while you were sitting.

You find yourself in frustrating situations but you don't lose your temper the way you

used to, just like being uncomfortable while you were meditating but you simply waited patiently for it to pass.

And when you get anxious in life about the future, of which you have absolutely no knowledge

or control, your anxiety subsides and you come back to the present moment, just like when your mind created that story about a spider crawling on your head, but you practiced not entertaining every crazy thought.

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