How to be Less Judgmental
Recently a friend asked me to write about “the concept of nonjudgmental guidance into oneself” and I agreed to give it a whirl. This topic is hot right now given that we are sequestered away at home with not much else to do except judge and compare ourselves to others when feeling low. I was a bit of a Judgy McJudgerson (mostly of myself) back in the day before graduate school and countless hours of psychotherapy humbled me into viewing humanity with a more compassion lens.
What really got me over the hump was a Mindful Self-Compassion practice along with remembering that “I’M DOING THE BEST I CAN WITH WHAT I’VE GOT.” As my clients can tell you, this is one of my favorite mantras of all time because it is true for everyone. We cannot consciously choose what family we’ll be born into and we have no way of performing miracles or teleporting ourselves into different socio-economic classes or circumstances. I don’t mean to say that we can’t be resilient and claw our way up to better opportunities, but natural laws do point to certain outcomes. The same can be said for the realistic momentum we are able to create from what we have in our stockpiles aka the resources we have available to us during this lifetime.
How to Not Judge Others
Remember that saying, “You can’t pull yourself up from your boots straps if you don’t have boot straps?” We have to work with what we’ve got. Finding kindness and acceptance of yourself can be as easy as deciding you are going to stop attacking yourself. Imagine yourself when you were 5 years old. Would you yell at your 5-yr-old self and tell them to fuck off or eat later if they were hungry…or tell them they were fat and lazy? If 5-yr-old you were tired or upset, you would encourage little you to take a nap or you would give little you a big hug while helping little you to process all those confusing and scary feelings. But that’s just the basics of going deep within. To really get past judgment, and learn how to not judge others, we should take note of what judgment actually is. Judgment decides the value of something (whether good or bad) and how it measures up. We think judgment can tell us how things really are when in reality, if we are truly outside of something, we can never really know what it is.
When we view ourselves as one and not separate from each other, we are less inclined to want to judge. It is our ego that propels us toward feelings of separateness and guilt. The ego teaches us to deny guilt in ourselves and to project it onto other people, places, and constructs. Our ego thinks that if we condemn others through judgment then we are somehow less guilty. Our egos feeds on guilt and guilt fuels judgment that is intent on keeping us separate from others. When we recognize and relax this ego device we can then delve deeper into the peaceful awareness that there is no benefit of judging others or ourselves.