From the Library: Judgement - a dialogue with P.
October 2001

Dear Sandra,

I'm wondering about judgement. I do it all the time and I don't like it - I'm judging my self, my friends, people I don't even know. Why do I want other people to change, why do I want them to see things the way I see them? How do I stop judging and become more loving?

P.

Dear P.,

The judgement issue can be a tight knot. Part of what keeps the knot in place is that we judge ourselves for judging others.

The other piece that keeps the knot in place is that we don't want to stop judging. We receive information all the time, and this is just information. It becomes a judgement when we attribute value - negative or positive to the information. One of the reasons why we don't want to stop judging is because our minds think that if we do, we will also stop receiving information. It is as if this noticing ability of the mind is all wrapped up in what we do with what we notice - which is usually judgement. The mind wants to do what it is meant to do, and because we've gotten so used to judging the information the mind receives, we think noticing and judging are one and the same thing.

They are not. If I stop judging, I don't have to stop noticing. What I notice is simply that, me taking in information. If I twist what I notice into a judgement, it doesn't mean to say that what I noticed in the first place is of no consequence.

If we don't separate these two things - what we notice, and what we judge, we will not want to let go of our judgements, because by doing so we also throw away all our insights.

In other words, I might notice that someone has a particular behavior. If I judge that behavior as being bad or wrong, this is a separate thing, it is about me, and a great opportunity to bring my attention to my reaction. And, I still see the behavior.

If you experiment with allowing yourself to notice things about people, rather than going to a place of judging yourself because you notice these things, a softening happens inside the body, and it becomes clearer what actually is happening. You are less likely to caught up in a loop of judgement of other / self judgement.

If we judge something, we want it to be different. We usually want someone to be different because we don't like what happens in ourselves when are in contact with what we judge. Someone might get angry, for example, and we react with fear. We judge the anger as being 'wrong', because we don't like the fear we experience. We want our experience to be different.

And, as many others have said, what we judge in others is what we judge in ourselves. If we judge someone for getting angry, it usually means we don't accept our own anger. If we judge someone for being fat, it's because we are not accepting of our own body (regardless of our size).

If you begin to experiment with paying attention to your own reactions and judgements, if you gently bring your focus to these things, and experiment with not 'doing' anything as a result of what you experience (telling the person not to be angry, for example, or making a comment about the size of someone), the judging process softens, loosens its grip, and we become more accepting, more loving of both ourselves and of others.

Simply seeing something in someone is simply that, seeing something. No need for them to be different. As you become easier with what happens in your body when you're in reaction, you will have less need for anyone, including yourself, to be different, and you will become more aware of the source of your judgements, which is always in yourself.

Many of us want to be 'better' than others - more important, more beautiful, more wealthy. If we do not feel these things, we try to create this feeling by putting other people down. If we can find something about another person we can judge, we create the illusion that we are better than them. It is an illusion. Is a small tree 'better' than a large tree?

It is also an illusion that being more intelligent, more beautiful than another person will bring you happiness.

Some of us judge others for being less charitable than ourselves. This is just another form of self-righteousness, motivated by wanting to feel better about ourselves.

If you notice yourself judging others it is a sign to bring your attention to yourself. What choices are you making that are not supportive of who you are?

Sandra

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