If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
Mother Teresa
It is so easy to judge, is it not? It happens so automatically because our mind has been conditioned to judge.
Judgment is always based on past experiences, and most often, using information we have collected from age-old experiences. More recent experiences merely trigger old responses, including old judgments.
The judging mind is never a peaceful mind. It is restless because it is not accepting of the way things are. It is in constant quarrel with the world. Such a mind, as Mother Theresa so succinctly says, has not time to love.
You cannot judge and love at the same time. To judge is to believe in and reinforce duality and consequently, separation, whereas the essence of love is oneness.
I have never found judging to be a pleasant, fulfilling or loving experience. On the contrary, I have always felt more angered with and distanced from the people I claim to love or at least seek to love. Sadly, for a long time, I was not even aware of these unpleasant and often painful associations with judging.
As I said earlier, the habit of judging is so ingrained in us that unless we remain mindful, we may not be aware of our habit. And even when we begin to develop greater awareness, it tends to be over the more obvious objects of judgment such as the pedophile or the war criminal or a particular race or culture.
But what about the judgments we make about ourselves or our partners and our children? Somehow, we seem to think that we have a right and even a duty to judge! That, without our judgment, we/they may stray from what is ‘right’ as we have deemed it.
Perhaps it is time to ask ourselves: Is there a different way? Is there a way I can respond to the world, to people and things, to myself without judgment and its associated sense of separation and distance?
I believe there is. I believe that the consciousness of love, of awareness, gives us the freedom of true choice; choice which is not governed by judgment but guided instead by our feelings, our good, joyous, peaceful, and yes, loving feelings.
In love, Lucy
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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A very warming piece – thank you Lucy.
How much of our judgemental behaviour of ourselves can be so restricting, self-demeaning and inhibiting of our liberty?
How much of that behaviour is a learned response from childhood perhaps – that we later mistakenly attribute to our concept of God?
Why are we so hard on ourselves and others?
[How much of that behaviour is a learned response from childhood perhaps - that we later mistakenly attribute to our concept of God?]
Fortunately, almost all of it, I would say:-). Which means that as adults, we can get past the filters of judgment. We can see through them into the wide, open field that is free of judgment!
Yes!
Jai Sat Chit Anand!!!