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)

Original Goodness


One of the great attractions of Buddhist thought is that it functions very much like a spiritually-effective form of psychology, helping us to heal our wounds through the practice of mindfulness to return to what the spiritual writer Jack Kornfield calls ‘our original goodness’. Although Buddhism arose in the East, its approach is incredibly helpful for the uniquely Western condition of self-loathing, the malaise that lies at the heart of a lack of self-confidence.

The Buddhist writer, Pema Chodron, has spoken of being with the Dalai Lama at a conference with Western Buddhist teachers, where a meditation teacher brought up the subject of self-hatred. As Chodron recalls, “The Dalai Lama didn’t know what she was talking about. So he went around the room and asked the other Western teachers about it, and every one of them agreed with her. Self-hatred was something the Dalai Lama didn’t understand. The first noble truth of the Buddha is that people experience dukka, a feeling of dissatisfaction or suffering, a feeling that something is wrong. We feel this dissatisfaction because we’re not in tune with our true nature, our goodness. And we aren’t going to be fundamentally spiritually content until we get in tune … only in the West is this dissatisfaction articulated as ‘something is wrong with me’. It seems that thinking of oneself as flawed is more a Western phenomenon than a universal one.”

There’s comfort to be found in those words. If self-loathing is uniquely Western, it’s not part of who we are at heart, but simply a form of cultural conditioning. That makes it about as valid psychologically as a cultural preference for tea over coffee – just because it’s habitual doesn’t make it important. Part of the release from self-destructive habits comes in the form of recognition and detachment, by realising that they actually mean nothing about you. You may have a long-held story about your unworthiness or your unlikeability that you keep running in your head, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true. Knowing that self-loathing isn’t a universal disease is a helpful step in uprooting the belief that it’s normal to treat yourself that way.

Another step in releasing those kinds of demons is to face them. We spend our whole lives running away from what we fear and trying to do the opposite to convince ourselves that we’re OK. If we’re afraid that we’re bad, we try so hard to be good that we overdose on people-pleasing and have trouble setting boundaries. If we’re convinced that we’re weak, we’ll knock ourselves out trying to seem strong, putting up defences in all our relationships, afraid of the vulnerability of allowing others to see us as we are, lest they see our fragility. Those coping mechanisms just make the problem worse, however, as they reinforce the need for a false persona because we believe our true nature to be flawed. To shake free of these chains, we must face what we most fear – our own pain and self-loathing.

Describing her own experience of feeling deeply into an ancient pain, Chodron says “There was a recognition that I needed to relax into the pain. Until then I had avoided going to this place where I felt bad or unacceptable or unloved. No language could express how awful that place felt. But I just started breathing into it … but as I relaxed into that feeling, it passed through me. And I didn’t die. It passed right through. That was a big moment for me. I realised that resistance to the idea that I was unlovable only made the pain worse … I realised what a source of happiness turning towards pain actually is. Our avoidance of pain keeps us locked in a cycle of suffering.”

We’ll be held in the grip of a nightmare unless we remember that we’re dreaming. Any story you tell yourself about not being good enough is just a story, and an old one at that. When you can really face your fears about how bad you think you might be, on the other side lies the truth of your original goodness.

There’s plenty of evidence for the beauty of our original nature. The Tibetan Book Of The Dead instructs us to remember “O nobly born, O you of glorious origins, remember your radiant true nature, the essence of mind. Trust it. Return to it. It is home.” Recalling a mystical experience where he was shown the truth about humanity, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote “Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the Divine. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed … I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

This week, live as if you remember your original goodness. Know that wherever you’re habitually attacking yourself, you’re telling yourself a lie. When you have some quiet time, step into the lie more fully. Really feel all the dreadful things you believe about yourself deep down. Feel them as deeply as you can until you pop right through to the other side. Release yourself from the bondage of an old, outdated story that never was true in the first place. When you’re no longer afraid of what you might find, you can embrace exactly who you are with love and compassion, with no need for defences. When you have nothing to defend, the paradox is that you’ll become incredibly strong, with an unshakeable depth of self-acceptance and confidence. How else could you be if you knew the fabulous truth about yourself?

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 16 Jun 08)