Contemplating and establishing the practice of non-judgment in our lives is another one of those evolutionary tools for us to use as we step more and more into the New Reality.
I can hear it now … “I understand, Darity” you may say, “but we have to make judgments all the time!” Well, that is correct. However, there are distinctions that support understanding the practice.
Many times, what we think of as judgments are really decisions, generally speaking. Although the relative value of one thing against the other is important in making decisions in life, the practice of non-judgment has an evolutionary perspective that making decisions may not. This distinction, I think, helps us in contemplating non-judgment as a new way of life, as a practice that brings more and more coherence, presence, and resonance into our lives.
With our very own Heart’s Knowingness, we can feel that non-judgment is a powerful spiritual practice that allows us the opportunity to really, really engage in the true compassion, understanding, and flowing our love to our planet and all living creatures.
Needless to say (and I would be the first to say it), the practice of non-judgment is not necessarily an easy path to follow. Indeed, it is one of the more difficult ones because of the profuse amount of conditioning provided by our parents, schools, friends, life, etc. for years and years. It is only when we stop to look at it that we realize the truth of this matter.
Every year on my birthday, for the past 50 years or so, I have asked Spirit for a guiding path to work on through the year, from birthday to birthday. And some years ago, I was given that year’s path as: beginning to learn how to exercise non-judgment. I remember thinking “What’s that?” and then telling a friend about my given path for the year and watching her laugh out loud at the very idea. “You can’t do that!” she said, “How the heck can you do that? Everything is a judgment one way or the other.” Being an attorney, that did seem right to me… ”How the heck am I going to do that?” And you know what? Over the course of that year, I learned the truth of the matter and discovered the difference between judgment, discernment, and observation. I found for myself, through non-judgment, a much higher level of acceptance for “what is” – more than I ever had before – and a calmer, more balanced experience of life.
Instead of judging everything in my life as good or bad or right or wrong, I learned the joy that comes from releasing judgment, from discerning and observing without judgment.
Now, as you can imagine, it is an ongoing practice. It is certainly one of my daily practices; one that I practice all along the way. I have found that stopping my Monkey Mind when it starts with the judgments is the best and most appropriate way for me to deal with it. I then bless or forgive if it happens on the roadway, whatever I was beginning to judge and move on.
It’s with the concepts of discernment, perception, and observation that we can begin to change up our need to judge everything and allow it to simply be what it is.
The key to understanding judgment, for real, is to see how it is defined in the dictionary. Merriam-Webster says: Judgment is an opinion or decision that is based on careful thought. In my experience, the types of judgment we are talking about here are not about what color to wear or which car to buy, or any number of mundane decisions we make in our daily life, but shifting our consciousness from the mundane to the spiritual. When we do this, we grow in the understanding that what we feed the field matters We discover that making judgments about other people, situations or even negative judgments about ourselves, does not support our evolutionary perspective of working for the good of the whole and feeding the field with love, compassion, understanding, and kindness. Instead of judgment, we can choose observation and discernment.
Discernment is perception in the absence of judgment. Whatever is… is. You can certainly discern someone’s actions or a situation without making a judgment about it. And that is, indeed, a worthy and powerful evolutionary spiritual practice.