Judgement Day
Not quite sure where this is going this week, so bear with me while I investigate a few wandering thoughts …

For some reason, the issue of discernment v judgement has been on my mind. It’s an issue that crops up quite often as you tread a path of greater awareness, when you realise you need to drop the judgements you’ve held around people, beliefs or activities that don’t fit with your particular mindset. Compassion and judgement can’t co-exist, but open-heartedness and discernment do. It’s often a tricky call to tread the line between judgement and discernment – and to know when one might be masquerading as the other – so here’s my rough rule of thumb on that one. If you’re holding something or someone in your mind as ‘wrong’, that’s judgement. If you simply know that’s not the right choice for you, that’s discernment. The difference lies in the view you hold.

You can pick between two cupcakes with different coloured icing without making one bad for not being your particular preference, so you can just as easily choose to interact (or not) with someone or something that’s not your cup of tea, without judging them as wrong. One real pitfall on the path of more conscious awareness is that we can become so afraid of making judgements that we forget to be discerning. We think we have to be accepting of everything and everyone all the time, yet we forget that it’s not meant to be at our own expense. While we might recognise others’ freedom to pursue their own paths, that doesn’t oblige us to walk down those roads if they’re not personally right for us. Our discernment allows us to release others to their own choices without making them wrong for doing so.

Bottom line, judgement is just a control issue in another guise. When we don’t feel secure, we attack what we perceive is threatening us – anything different to our own value system – and judge it harshly. We think it makes us safe, but it only makes us more defended, insecure and wary of life. Dropping judgement is one of the first steps in loosening up, in allowing life to unfold itself for you, rather than gripping tightly to how you think it needs to be. We all know how frustrating it is to be around someone with control issues, who will never let you think or choose for yourself. It feels uncomfortable because it’s a restrictive, untrusting energy – a kind of mental concrete in which nothing can ever flower. No real creativity, intimacy or depth of connection can grow in that kind of environment.

When you can’t allow people to be who they are, you can’t sit with them and genuinely share their joy or help to alleviate their pain. Compassion springs from an empathy with others, a heartfelt sharing of common ground and a willingness to step out of your own concerns long enough to be witness to someone else’s. If you’re not judging the one you’re sitting down with, you can be as open to joy as much as pain and find beauty and wisdom in them both.

Jack Kornfield describes exactly this, watching his meditation master at work in a Thai monastery, “At one moment Ajahn Chah would be gently holding the head of a man whose young son had just died, at another laughing with a disillusioned shopkeeper at the arrogance of humanity. In the morning he might be teaching ethics to a semi-corrupt government official, in the afternoon offering a meditation on the nature of undying consciousness to a devout old nun. Even among these total strangers, there was a remarkable atmosphere of safety and trust. All were held by the compassion of the master and the teachings that guided us together in the human journey of birth and death, joy and sorrow. We sat together as one human family.”

Of course, the human family includes you, and one of the places where we hold the severest judgements is about ourselves. If we treated everyone else as judgementally as we do to ourselves with our critical inner dialogue, we’d have no friends at all! This week, try befriending yourself. If you have a habit of judging your body, your achievements, where you are in life, whatever – give it a rest. If you find yourself being critical, try to make it a dispassionate observation, rather than a full savaging. Accept where you are right now and stop trying to make it wrong. You can be discerning about making new choices to bring you what you want without attacking yourself.

Share the love with the people around you. Stop trying to control them and cut back on the judgement. Accept that their path may involve very different choices than yours. Those differences might even bring you a few benefits by pulling you into a different sphere of experience and waking you up to a new way of being.

Finally, be discerning enough to know when something’s not right for you. It’s OK to make a different choice than others around you. What works for them may not be best for you. Don’t hang in there where you’re uncomfortable just because you’re trying to be accepting. Real acceptance allows everyone – including you – to follow their own calling without being judged for it.

For the Coach Fabulous archives, go to www.coachfabulous.blogspot.com and for the I Am Fabulous archives, go to www.fabcentral.blogspot.com. You can email me at coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 14 Jul 08)