“Words are Windows (or They’re Walls)” >>>
So how can I be with my judgments in a way that serves life, makes life more wonderful, instead of allowing them the power to alienate me from life? How can I be with my judgment thinking instead of avoiding or judging it in turn?
Words are windows or they’re walls, writes Ruth Bebermeyer. If I use my words as a way of conveying my judgments to others, then the purpose they might serve in helping me align with my needs or explore my inner wounds is underutilized and I may experience nothing different in having shared them than if I had never gained awareness of them in the first place.
Furthermore, as you may have suspected, sharing these judgments with others (which is essentially the same as investing in my judgments the belief itself that supports them) may spark all sort of other mayhem.
It may continue to foster right-wrong evaluations in myself or others that alienate us from life. (Imagine prolonging a fever beyond what the fever is useful for. This could be very dangerous.)
Or it could disconnect me from the other person in ways that neither of us manage to meet our own or each other’s needs.
On the other hand, if I allow judgments to function as they will to inform me of something deeper going on inside me, then I needn’t share them with others to benefit from discovering the feelings and needs to which they point. What’s worth sharing and being tended to for the sake of greater connection or care is precisely those needs and the beautiful emotions that lead us to them.
Perhaps the most important things we can do toward learning from (instead of further blaming) judgments pointing toward our underlying needs and wounds is to request of ourselves to slow down and give care and patience to the thoughts that come up for us around a triggering event; or to request others to help us try and come to this deeper understanding through their listening and reflection and guessing of what may be trying to surface in us.
It is ultimately our choice: to see and embrace judgments as opportunities into a deeper understanding of ourselves — as windows to our hearts — or to invest in them the brick and mortar of ideology and core beliefs and incongruent perceptions of the world, and in this way continue to build them between us and others, as walls.