Hi everyone, Happy New Year and welcome back! Three weeks ago, since it was the holiday time of the year and because people exchange a lot of gifts around this time; I examined beliefs around ‘gifting’ and what it is that people want to achieve through this process of ‘gifting’! This week, since the holidays gave me time to read and reflect, I happened to read about how human beings are so judgmental. Therefore, this week, I would like to examine the human need to judge everyone and everything.
Belief: Its not good to be judgmental and therefore I should try to control my ability to judge!
‘Judgement’ is an in-built ability that every human has no matter what color, nationality, religion, community you belong to. And I believe humans have this ability so that we can discriminate between opposites like good and bad, fair and unfair, love and hate etc. And without the capability to judge, we will not know the difference and therefore won’t be able to live our lives on Earth! However, in the many articles that I have read so far about ‘judgement’, it’s treated as one of the biggest blocks to living our best lives here on Earth. And as a result, one of the spiritual teachings may sometimes come across as ‘humans should control their ability to judge’. And I agree to this teaching to some extent in that if we are able to judge less, we have the ability to create more – more positive thoughts, more creative thoughts and as a result more positive and creative experiences; however, the part that I don’t agree with is that there is no way you can eliminate judgement from your life as long as you are alive because that’s what makes you human! And you certainly can’t ‘judge less’ by controlling your ability to judge!! It would be like asking someone to breathe less air if they are in a city full of pollution!
Folks, an interesting thing about trying to judge less is that in trying to judge less, you are already judging yourself and your judgements! I know this may sound confusing so let’s take an example and find out how trying to control our ability to judge actually makes things worse and you end up judging even more instead! Let’s imagine you have invited friends over for dinner and you are trying very hard to give them a perfect dinner party which they will remember for a long time, however, in the middle of the party, your 4 year old ends up in a massive tantrum. And since your nice dinner got interrupted, you may already be judging your party to be a failure but on top of that if your beliefs around judging tell you that judging is bad since it causes stress and as a result you ‘should not’ be judging at this time of crisis, your mind will go into a never-ending battle of thoughts some of which will be judging your party as a failure whereas on the other hand, the other thoughts will tell you to kill the judgement thoughts!! And this will NOT help you to get calmer but instead raise your stress levels so much that you may end up lashing out at your own kid in front of all your friends!!
Now let’s look at this same example from a different perspective – a perspective of love and compassion and understanding about human ability to judge. So, lets imagine you are someone who understands and accepts the human ability to judge as normal part of living and don’t create a big deal about it; so, when you are in a situation as in the above example, as soon as you start to judge your dinner party as a failure and realize that you are actually judging, since you now know that judging is part of being human, you will not take your thoughts regarding judgement very seriously. You will instead be compassionate and loving towards your own self for thinking judgmental thoughts. And when you are compassionate and loving towards yourself, two things will happen. One, you will not try to push or control your judgmental thoughts away and second, because you will not be trying very hard to push or control your thinking; the thoughts that were judgmental before will transform into loving and compassionate thoughts. And on top of this, since you are now thinking all these loving and compassionate thoughts for yourself, you will be able to better handle your kid’s meltdown in front of so many eyes!!
Folks, it is very sad that this world does not understand and accept that all these negative thoughts and judgmental thoughts and negative feelings as a result of these thoughts are ALL PART OF BEING HUMAN!! We are not bad people if every now and then we think such thoughts and as a result feel such negative feelings of anger, jealousy, resentment, fear, sadness etc. But because as a society we have created such a big deal about these negative thoughts and emotions, and on top of that emphasize that human beings don’t think and feel such negative thoughts and emotions is why most humans try to fight them away instead of embracing them just like they do with the positive thoughts and emotions. I am not sure about you guys but fighting with my negative thoughts and emotions has never worked for me – ever!! And do you know, that’s exactly what you try to do, control your kids’ emotions when you tell them to stop crying when they are in the middle of tantrums and meltdowns. But does telling your kids to stop crying work or do they spiral down and their tantrum gets worse?
Believe me, I tried fighting my negative thoughts and emotions for several years before I began to really understand the concept of accepting them and feeling them. I know it’s very uncomfortable but the only way through them is to allow them to be thought and felt. There is no other way! And I would like to repeat – you are NOT A BAD PERSON if you think such negative thoughts and feel such negative emotions every now and then. You are simply human! The real problem is not allowing them into your mind and heart. That’s where chronic stress and depression and anxiety begin!
And as always feel free to leave a comment if you feel like leaving one. And until next week, live life, love people 🙂
