BE Judgmental

BE Judgmental

Whaaaaa??? In this age of being politically correct, some of you might actually stop reading after seeing the title. Please don’t . People these days might accept the words discernment, or judgement call, but never judgment!  There is no problem with having a judgment; the issue is what you choose to do with that judgment (or judgment call, or discernment). How you respond to your inner voice judging what is happening, matters. It matters a great deal.

If you have been raised to put others  before yourself you will have been taught to not protect yourself but rather to put the needs, wants and desires of others first, in order to protect yourself, to survive.  If you have not questioned your past, or worked on learning about or healing your childhood (which happened on purpose as part of your incarnation, and therefore is a key element of exploration for you to advance in Soul Evolution) you will not even know that putting others first is your default setting. It will simply be “normal” for you while you continue to wonder why certain patterns of you “getting slammed”, or getting taken advantage of,  keep happening. You cannot heal what you do not know. Children of alcoholics or addicts, of narcissists, of childhood trauma (war, earthquakes, divorce, death, sudden poverty, etc.) learned that they had to suppress who they are, what they want or need, even what they think in order to become what someone else wanted them to be in order to survive, in order to literally live. In a sense, this  can be related to Stockholm Syndrome, which is by definition the result of a person being held captive (literally, not figuratively and not just emotionally captive) and having his/her life threatened by a promise of death by another person. Children are captives of parents, legally, emotionally, and physically.  If you are an adult and you are not being held prisoner with an imminent death threat being made by your captor,  you are not experiencing Stockholm Syndrome.  If as an adult, someone emotionally scares you or “makes you” feel bad, you need to judge that, and take appropriate action to care for yourself but that is not Stockholm syndrome.  In this scenario, of someone “making you” feel bad, you can bet you already feel bad inside and someone triggered an old wound in you, again, showing you a place you need to work on healing.  Distinctions such as these (life threatened or emotions feel threatened) need to be made in order for any healing process to be effective. Facts and your judgments about what happened or is happening to you must be honestly assessed on both of these fronts for either therapy or Spiritual Healings to work.

You have judgments, everyone does, and it is impossible to shut them down just like it is impossible to quiet the mind. Neurons never stop firing; the sun never stops shining, even at night. When one meditates you cannot “quiet“ the mind.  Through practice, focus and discipline, you learn to change your focus from the left brain musings to the Divine Silence, the Sound of Spirit so you can bring that energy and Soul Perspective, into your daily human life.  The work at Life Path Healings is called the middle path.  It is not just and Earth life, and  it is not life in a cave or a monastery, it is a Spiritual Mystical Practice (read “work”) where one learns, through an actual Practice, to feel and connect to the energy of your Higher Self   which is an automatic connection to Source (when you are “home” you connected to Source). This Practice teaches you to live this incarnation, this human life that you elected to come into, from a dual perspective, you as a Soul inside of your human experience, challenges, learnings and joys.  You learn to work in balance with the mind and intuition, from Spirit and as a humble human. It is a change of focus, not shutting down the mind, emotions, or judgments.

Every second of the day you are making judgments, on what to wear, what to eat, say, do, buy, etc.  To spend time and energy lying to yourself about being non-judgmental, as if that is a good thing (and if it that is even possible, because it is not) is not only a distraction, it teaches you the practices of denial (to  Self and others), and lying (to Self and others).  Furthermore, it gives the message to other people that they are so weak minded and emotionally frail that you have to protect them from, well, everything, by not letting them hear, feel, or see (via your reactions) that you have any opinion about them other than … wait for it… they  are amazing.  Protecting adults (or rather imagining you are protecting them, or honoring them) in this false manner actually promulgates and propagates a culture of enabling and disabling.  It disables adults by taking away their chance to cope with social interactions, face opposition, develop conflict resolution skills (an essential part of any mature relationship), discover who the other person really is and make some choices based on that information (and judgments), and reinforces the behavior of accepting “polite lies” as normal, don’t ask questions, don’t trust your intuition (or judgments)  but instead comply with the culture. These are the building blocks by the way of creating cult behavior (whether it is the idea of don’t question the Nazi’s, or your new age crystal guru).

This fake feel good norm of being “non-judgmental” deprives you (and others) of  the mature adult capacity of learning to tolerate and even appreciate diversity, to live with ambiguity, to accept , honor and even enjoy the differences that make people individuals.  If  you are busy sucking up to each other with feel good “non-judgmental” approvals of each other, how will you learn to be friends with a racist, a Trump or non-Trump person, a Christian or Jew? If you do not “admit” who you are, what you think and feel, how can the other person make a choice? They are being seduced by you and how you want to be seen.  You take away the other person’s ability and free will to see the whole picture of who you are, the good and the not so good, the contradictions, and then decide that they love you anyways, or they want to have limited relationship with you, or that perhaps you are so different that you might teach them something different that will broaden your horizons. Instead everyone is working hard to be the same, to not object, to not hold each other accountable (which is the responsibility of the tribe, and how tribes policed themselves with no law enforcement), all the while spending the majority of your energy and focus shutting down your inner conversations. When you shut down your inner conversations (because you don’t like them – meaning you have you have judged your judgments to be bad!), you shut down your intuition as well as you cannot selectively shut down only a part of yourself without all the other parts being affected). While spending all this time and energy shutting down and manipulating your responses, you stop learning, you stop being mindful and self-aware. You stop perceiving, even experiencing, and after a while you forget that you made the choices to live like this and actually believe this is who you are even though it is absolutely impossible to be non-judgmental. Like the sun, it is always shining. And like the sun, there is nothing wrong with judgments. They are meant to be.

What you do with your judgments, which is part of your work in this lifetime, is important. If you spend your energy and awareness on shutting down judgments so as to appear a better person, your mistakes will multiply as your radar will be off and your lessons will roll in like a one ton truck. You cannot learn about what to do with your judgments, about choices, if you are busy denying you have them.  You cannot set boundaries if you do not have a judgment that something is not good or appropriate for you right now. You cannot go back and heal wounds from your childhood if you are intent on “not judging” your parents. You cannot even decide what to eat if you shut down judgments, That last statement is not meant to be funny. Abused children learn to shut down to survive. They learn to not judge in order to survive. They learn to adapt, comply, obey, seduce and manipulate in order to live another day. As unhealed adults they literally cannot tell if or when they are hungry or what they want to eat and it takes decades of therapy to rebuild or in some cases install the ability to have judgments, pay attention to them and make appropriate choices in response to each judgment.

You make a million judgments, and choices, a day.  To shut down this part of yourself in order to manufacture some self-image you might like better will set you back decades. Your spouse, family, close friends will not get to know you for decades because you are hiding who you are, even from yourself.  You will become one of those fake Christians or yoga teachers that you hate. You will be a politician except your behavior will be an unconscious behavior pattern instead of a mature choice. As a Teacher and Healer I can tell you that when I work with people who try to be, well anything (instead of just honestly “being”) such as “I don’t have a temper”, or “I don’t judge”, or “I forgive___________ fill in the name” (as soon as someone says this I know for a fact, both as a clairvoyant and due to decades of experience, that there is no forgiveness at all, just left brain desire to appear non-judgmental), that it will take an extra year or two (being optimistic) just to get past those walls and really start to get to the real person underneath.

 Sadly people tend to read books (or social media more these days) and adapt what they think are the “best behaviors”. This becomes quicksand, a nice layer of water on top and you are quickly sucked down into behaviors of compliance.  All vestiges of being able to be honest about who you are, what you like and dislike, what you (currently) believe, what  are your feelings, are now trapped in the quicksand of  your efforts to appear like a Buddhist, Christian, “good person”, “yoga master” , “enlightened new-ager”, etc.   Your radar needed to protect you from people will be broken.  You will be at the mercy of people coming at you who are wounded or just not good for you (right now) and you will find people taking advantage of you (from mild emotional issues to economic swindling, to the full out horror stories you read about in the news of someone having a secret life but no-one wanted to “judge” the person so they got away with it for decades).  You will be teaching other people they can do whatever they want to you because you “don’t judge” (meaning you don’t act appropriately even though the danger signs are there).  And, your behavior, your choice to “appear” non-judgmental as a priority in life, will be handed down to others.

So what do you do once you start paying attention to your judgments, once you become mindful and self-aware? You can decide to leave the situation alone, remain friends or married to someone even though you don’t like some of the things they do or say. You can set boundaries, or renegotiate a relationship. You can look at your judgment and see if you want to reconsider it, like maybe you should or shouldn’t be vegan, or perhaps you do have a temper.  If you accept and work with your judgments, you can end up with friends that range from red-neck to revolutionary, all races and religions, educated and high school dropouts. You will be able to model tolerance of diversity, the basis of world peace, and teach tolerance through your actions without doing damage to yourself because you are not faking being non-judgmental, rather you are making conscious choices based on your judgments.

You cannot practice mindfulness and self-awareness if your first commitment is to “appear” non-judgmental whether it is to yourself or others. You will need to pay attention to your judgments, feel them, accept them, let them teach you, decide to share them with your Teacher, Healer, therapist, have the courage to share them (appropriately) with those you want to have a close open relationship with, and learn about all the choices you have and can make in response to your judgments (self-care, that comes with self-awareness).  Practice honesty with your Self. Take daily inventories on both the good and not so good (don’t forget a big one needs to be done, with someone helping you, on your past, to allow you to be fully present, in the now), write letters about your judgments and your feelings about them (and everything) and burn them, use prayer to tell Spirit who you really are and ask for Divine Guidance for your learning and human and Soul evolution.

Be mindful, practice self-awareness, learn your judgments, acknowledge your judgments, and then make your conscious choices asking Spirit to Guide you.

Journey On