Toward Mindfulness >>>
Let’s see how else I might have responded to the experiences of compounded judgments coming up for me earlier:
“Wow, why on earth would someone honk at me for stopping for pedestrians? What a jerk!
“Ah! That was a judgment! Oh great, why am I still thinking that way? I’ve done so much inner work — I ought to have stopped thinking like that by now. I should meditate more, and I should stop judging others. Judgments only make the world a lesser quality place to live…
“Okay, hold on, Kelsey — breathe. [Three slow breaths]
“Alright, I’m really irritated that I’m still reacting this way to judgments in myself. But why is this irritation so up for me?
[Waits with care-full patience for the need under the emotion to surface]
“Oh. Yeah, I see. I’m so wanting to see signs of progress in myself around my reactivity to others. I really value remembering just the observation, that all I actually witnessed was the man honking his horn — the rest is part of the story I’m telling myself of what’s going on… And I really want that remembering part of myself to be there early enough that my reactivity doesn’t stimulate more pain or violence in others…
“Yeah, there’s a real tender part in me that just really wants more care and understanding for others — pedestrians, drivers, or whoever — in my actions and in my responses…”
The underlying needs beneath the judgments could be entirely different for someone else, but the important point to me is how I may never have encountered the severity of “unmet-ness” of my needs for care and understanding had I not given mindfulness to the symptomatic value of the judgments that pointed my awareness toward the needs.
These same judgments might also point out to me a deep, possibly unconscious wound, a place in me where a past experience with pain may have resulted in a protective strategy I fortified to defend myself against such pain — a strategy often in the form of a belief that promoted the judgment in the first place, like “People generally don’t care about each other, only themselves.”
Witnessing such a deep inner wound may be part of the healing I’m needing and the transformation I stand to undergo toward a new set of beliefs or strategies that are more life-serving for me (and promote different, or perhaps fewer, judgments).
In either case, the needs or the wounds may have gone unnoticed had not the judgments that accompanied them not come to my attention.
When we hold judgments in this light, we don’t need to agree with their content or condone the messages they might immediately foster in ourselves. We can see them as beautiful indicators of an inner-dwelling dis-ease.
(I’m using the term “dis-ease” to avoid connoting something wrong, bad, “invasive,” etc., about what happens in our hearts or bodies that the word “disease” might promote; if I were to cultivate in the reality of unmet-ness the idea that there’s “something gone wrong in me,” this principle of the value of judgments wouldn’t hold true for me as it does.)
To this extent, our judgments may even be seen as attempting to serve us, to attract our busy attention to the dilemma inside us.
A mindfulness of this life-serving capacity of judgments can open us to a way out of the reiterative cycles (the “inner Samsaras“) of our evaluative thinking, and cultivate a space of tenderness to the purpose judgments stand to hold.
As the fever to the infection, a healthy, life-serving approach to our symptoms, judgments or otherwise, recognizes them for what they are in indicating to us the occurrence of something needing our greater attention and respect. Such an approach accounts for their ability to aid in pointing out to us the inner obstacles to our path toward wholeness (“to be whole,” “to be in full health”).