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)

Feet Of Clay

I’m not entirely sure what set me off on this train of thought, but I’m noticing a lot about hero worship cropping up in various ways. It probably started a couple of weeks ago when I was mucking about with a MySpace page because a friend had sent me a link to his new blog at www.myspace.com/chriscrudelli – well worth a read if you want the lowdown from a true martial artist – and one of the required formats on the page was to list your heroes. That got me thinking that I don’t actually have any. I have inspirations, for sure – people whose work, spirituality or integrity is something I value and admire, but I just don’t go in for the whole hero worship thing.

Having met many of the major figures in the self-help and spiritual arena over the years, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that there’s no-one who’s got it totally together, whose life works seamlessly and who behaves impeccably every single day. That’s an illusion – and a very real danger spot for those who begin to believe their own publicity – as well as being pretty much a human impossibility. We all have our vulnerabilities, our blind spots and our bad hair days and it’s a cruel joke we play on ourselves when we think everyone else has got it together but us. If you’re alive, you’ll have issues. That’s just the way the story goes. Life is about letting go of the stuff that gets in the way of knowing that there’s a divine perfection within you. In that process you’ll need to have compassion for yourself as you work through your human frailties – it’s about aligning yourself with an inner truth, rather than trying to create an outer facade through rigid control and perfection obsession.

The Brand Beckham phenomenon is a perfect case in point. They are both subject to an almost unimaginable amount of hero worship, not only for their careers, but also for being an allegedly perfect couple (until the wheels fell off in the shape of Rebecca Loos et al). Yet whenever I see them appear in the media I just feel exhausted. Victoria Beckham is the epitome of someone who is dedicated to the ‘trying too hard’ school of style and she never, ever looks happy. Control and rigidity are written all over her face and the staged ‘togetherness’ pics – particularly when their marriage crisis was in full swing – simply smack of desperation to uphold an image rather than a genuine attempt at togetherness. We seem to have reached a societal nadir where we value image above all else. We hero-worship people who are little more than just famous for being famous and a whole generation of children is growing up with the idea that fame is a goal in itself, rather than a by-product of success in your chosen field.

Couple this with the explosion of glossy magazines showing airbrushed celebs with cosmetic enhancements creating a kind of dubious beauty that doesn’t exist in nature, and we’ve created a seriously poor breeding ground for self-esteem, not only for ourselves, but for children who are too young to know any better. At least we’ve accumulated a little life wisdom that allows us the perspective to realise that no-one’s perfect, but what chance do they have when calculated imagery is all they see? Stars have always existed, but they were escapist figures, remote from daily life, and there wasn’t the modern pressure to meet those impossible standards in real life.
I wonder if we’re all yearning for a time when perfection wasn’t the byword and people were more raw, honest and interesting. The huge popularity of the BBC TV show Life On Mars with its unrestrained, testosterone-fuelled 70s detective Gene Hunt, played with gloriously unashamed machismo by Philip Glenister, makes me think so. Of course Gene Hunt’s a complete git and every feminist’s nightmare, but it’s wonderful to see a real character come to life, full of flaws and utterly beguiling in his humanness.

The 70s were fertile ground for recognising that heroes had feet of clay, with the most infamous tale coming from John Lennon’s lengthy sabbatical from his marriage to Yoko Ono, the ‘lost weekend’ period with girlfriend May Pang. One night, drunk on Brandy Alexanders, Lennon was at a gig at the Troubador in LA when – with the kind of twisted genius that alcohol is known for – he came across a clean sanitary towel on the floor, which he decided to wear as a headband. When the waitress refused to serve him, he pulled the “Don’t you know who I am?” card, to which the waitress rather dryly replied, “Yeah, you’re some asshole with a Kotex on his head”. She later went on to muse about what a bummer it is to find out that your hero is an asshole. That’s the downside of hero worship – it’s ultimately going to come a cropper because sooner or later we all do something stupid, no matter how famous we become.

One of my favourite inspirational authors has pushed the boundaries of acceptable behaviour recently. I’ve followed the work of Caroline Myss from the early days before Anatomy OfThe Spirit became a runaway success and was particularly looking forward to her latest work, Entering The Castle, based on the writings of St Teresa of Avila’s extraordinary treatise on the soul, El Castillo Interior. I’m still working my way through the book, but I found her meditation CDs based on that work almost impossible to endure, due to the berating, judgmental and condescending rants that accompany them. Sadly, for me it’s kind of up there with the John Lennon incident – there’s a point at which it might be prudent to realise that perhaps you’re taking yourself a little too seriously and that being contemptuous of your core audience could turn out to be a risky strategy.

This week, take a look at those you might be hero-worshipping, even on the mildest of scales. If you’re comparing yourself to them, by assuming they’ve got it all together and you haven’t, take a closer look. Things are not always as they seem and none of us is perfect in every way. That doesn’t mean you need to look at them negatively or judge them, but that you can see that they have their own struggles and you can love them for that as much as their achievements. A lot of greatness comes from people who are driven to achieve extraordinary things because they’ve had to overcome real difficulties. Know that having compassion for others helps you to have compassion for yourself. Having a blind spot isn’t the problem – not being willing to face it and do something about it is. We may not always get things right and we should just get comfortable with the idea that we’re not meant to be perfect all the time, but it’s the willingness to move forward that really counts. Be kind to yourself this week, learn to love your own frailties and have compassion for those who can’t relax long enough to let themselves just enjoy their own lives, however imperfect they may be.

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column by using the link in the Favourite Sites section on the right or by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. To contact me, email coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material © 2007 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 16 Apr 07)