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. One of my friends recently attended a family reunion, which in previous years has always been a joyous opportunity to get together

with multiple generations of relatives, their spouses, children, and even pets.

Due to COVID, however, the reunion was postponed for two years in a row, during which my friend was diagnosed with cancer, fought it, and successfully beat it.

Nobody expected him to live long enough to make it to the party this year, let alone to be cancer-free by this point.

Many people at the reunion were still grieving other family members who did not win their battle with cancer.

So my friend suddenly felt his presence was an

inconsiderate form of bragging or showing off his survival. What he was

experiencing was a form of survivor's guilt, a side effect for which no doctor had prepared him.

Weighed down by heavy feelings of unworthiness to be alive, let alone dancing at this party,

he went home to call friends he knew were happy that he was still alive.

The people at the reunion didn't wish he was dead, it just didn't feel fair that he had

survived. There's a difference. Thanks to therapy, he now sees the

irrationality of survivor's guilt which in and of itself doesn't make it disappear,

but much like grief has been described as a large hole in the ground that we keep falling into, while

mindfulness doesn't make the hole in the ground go away, it does teach us to acknowledge

but walk around it.

My conversations with him about Survivor's guilt uncovered an old memory that I haven't recalled since the 90s.

I was living in San Francisco at the time and most of my friends were members of an online community called SFNet.

This was before the internet as we know it today was born.

Computers didn't have windows or a mouse, so online meant people from around the bay logged into a text-based portal to speak to one

another in code and to plan what we called net-gets around the city, such as bonfires on the

beach, parties, and get-togethers. This was around the time people of all

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