About this item
Buddhism is all about training the mind, and boot camp is an ideal training method for this generation's short attention span. The chapters in this small book can be read in any order, and are simple and easy to understand. Each story, inspirational quote, and teaching offers mindfulness-enhancing techniques that anyone can relate to. You don't need to be a Buddhist to find the Buddha's teachings motivational. As the Dalai Lama says, "Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are."So whether it's Mother Teresa's acts of charity, Gandhi's perseverance, or your aunt Betty's calm demeanor, as long as you're motivated to be better today than you were yesterday, it doesn't matter who inspires you.
About the Author
Ten years ago, when I left the corporate world and moved to Hawaii, I started emailing my friends and family every month to let them know what's going on in my life. About eight years later, my friend Kim suggested that I share those emails with the world because she found the letters inspirational, and she figured other people would benefit from reading them as well. That's how the blog-to-book Buddhist Boot Camp was born! Each chapter is only a page or two long, and you can read them in any order.
Faithfully Religionless reads more like a conversation that we might have on a park bench somewhere. It is an open and honest memoir that gets more intimately personal than Buddhist Boot Camp did, while still sharing the underlying intention to awaken, enlighten, enrich and inspire.
Kim was right! People all over the world have found the message in Buddhist Boot Camp refreshing, inspirational, and more importantly, motivational!
I think motivation is more important because inspiration without action is just entertainment. My invitation is for us to go beyond thinking that something is a "good idea" to actually implementing it into our daily lives.
The stories and quotes in both books offer mindfulness-enhancing techniques that anyone can relate to, reinforcing what we intuitively know but have somehow forgotten: how to live a simple and uncomplicated life while being the best version of ourselves there is.
Being Faithfully Religionless doesn't mean that I'm against religion, per se, I simply don't have one (nor do I believe we need religion to be ethical) . But when I tell people that I don't have a religion, they automatically assume I don't believe in God, and nothing could be further from the truth. My definition of God is somewhat unique, however, as it doesn't conjure a white man in the sky who dispenses blessings for good behavior and harsh judgment to condemn the bad. That's because I don't believe God does that; religion does. And as Anne Lamott cleverly put it, "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image if it turns out that your God hates the same people you do."
The way I understand it, God has very little to do with religion, the Bible, or, least of all, the church. But when people have a bad experience with one aspect of their faith (be it the church, the Bible, local clergy, or when religion gets mixed with politics) , they end up tossing all of it away (God included) , throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. So while religion asks us to believe in someone else's experience of the divine, spirituality invites us to have our own.
To put it another way: faith is a spiritual practice of continually letting go of certainty, of ego, and of the underlying compulsive need to know, while religion is a traditional, ceremonial practice of attachment to concrete dogma
