About this item
When his pursuit of happiness in Corporate America feels counterproductive, Timber Hawkeye escapes the flourescent-lit hell of his cubicle in Seattle, and sets out to fully embrace the stress-free lifestyle of Hawaii. Intrigued and curious about what people believe (and why they believe what they do) , he questions everything he ever thought was true, and discovers the beauty of letting go.If you consider yourself spiritual but not religious, then you're going to love this inspirational book. And if you want to lead a simple and uncomplicated life with happiness at your fingertips, then you'll want to read this page-turner more than once!"It's not that I'm against religion, I simply don't have one (nor do I believe that we need it to be ethical) .
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
