Stop Judging: We are judgmental people. Even the most accepting of us, is easily given to judgment, and very few of us would be described as being a most accepting person. We have prejudices, biases, complaints, fussiness, and we are judgmental especially when it comes to our SELF. But we can’t be mindful until we can take the position as an impartial witness to our own experience. Being mindful requires that you become aware of the stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experiences and step back from it. We all have this habit of categorizing our experiences into good and bad, or positive and negative. This black or white judging of our life locks us into mechanical automatic reactions to our thoughts. Most often we are not even aware of what we are doing, so naturally we don’t realize that there is no objective basis at all for a judgmental thinking.
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TRY THIS: For just 1 short minute (60 seconds) observe how often your mind dwells on the stuff you like or dislike. Can you count the judgmental thoughts? If not, can you count the self-critical thoughts? Now extrapolate: if you have this many judgmental thoughts in one minute and there are 60 minutes in and hour, and 24 hours in a day, and 7 days in a week then you have 10,080 minutes per week that are stuffed full of judgmental thoughts. If our programing forms our beliefs, actions, and feelings, and if we have hundreds of thousands of self-critical or other-critical thoughts, then how can we hope to be anything other than depressed, grouchy, fussy, hateful, irritable sad-sacks?
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Commit yourself to becoming non-judgmental. You can’t just stop this judging, especially the judging of yourself. In my own case, I’m thinking I may NEVER stop being judgmental, but you and I can commit ourselves to working toward becoming non-judgmental. The mindfulness goal is to see things the way they are, rather than the way we assume them to be.
Commit yourself to becoming non-judgmental. You can’t just stop this judging, especially the judging of yourself. In my own case, I’m thinking I may NEVER stop being judgmental, but you and I can commit ourselves to working toward becoming non-judgmental. The mindfulness goal is to see things the way they are, rather than the way we assume them to be.
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Even when I am consciously trying to notice what’s going on around me, I know that my mind automatically selects the material it wants to report and how – much like a newspaper – it slants the data. ~Boorstein
Even when I am consciously trying to notice what’s going on around me, I know that my mind automatically selects the material it wants to report and how – much like a newspaper – it slants the data. ~Boorstein
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