Non-Judgment
When we take time from the activities that fill our lives to sit and be
with all parts of ourselves, feelings and memories that are painful might
arise. It can be challenging to know how to deal with these experiences
because the practice of forgiveness may seem new to us. A practice that
can be helpful in looking at past incidences of pain is that of non-judgment.
In the book Living By Conscious Choice (2005), Nancy Only talks about
the beliefs of the founder of Attitudinal Healing, Gerald Jampolsky. According
to Only, Jampolsky states that forgiveness means giving up any hopes that
our pasts could have been better. The past already happened, and its events
cannot be changed.
What can be changed, however, is our own perceptions of what occurred in the past. In looking further at this, Nancy Only also brings in wisdom from Allen Watson in his book A Workbook Companion: Volume II. Watson points out that in forgiving a past experience, we need not focus on forgiving others, but instead on ourselves. At some point in our lives we choose to see the world as being separate from us, and it was this choice that caused us to loose our sense of peace with the universe. Watson is quoted as saying, “When you forgive, the first is that you recognize that you have not lost your peace or your love because of what happened; you lost it because you chose to lose it. You decided, at some point, to let go of the peace of God in your heart. The event then came along to justify your loss of peace. You projected the loss of peace onto the event and said, ‘That is why I am upset.’” By seeing our loss of love and peace as our own choice, we can no longer blame others for the ways that we feel. We can take responsibility for our own lives and choices. It is true that we may feel others have done things that we do not like or approve of, and according to Watson, this is fine. We simply need to differentiate between not liking what someone does and feeling that they are responsible for our emotional pain.
Please take a moment at this point in the course to notice how you are feeling. Take a few deep breaths and tune into how taking responsibility for your feelings feels. It is a huge shift for many people and can trigger self-doubts. We can begin to say, “But my situation is different” or “He really did harm me, and if that didn’t happen I would be happy.” If these doubts do come up, this is fine. Simply sit with them and listen. It is good that we begin to feel the beliefs we have around our own self-empowerment in being co-creators of our realities. We have been taught by our society, religions, teachers, maybe even parents, that we are not powerful, that the outside world is strongest, and that we need to continually change the outside world in order to feel differently inside. Radical forgiveness, quantum physics, and many spiritual leaders are saying just the opposite.
Nancy Only invites us to explore what our expectations of life, and specifically, of certain situations, look like. It is when we set up expectations and they are not met that we feel victimized. We then point fingers at the outside world and say, “It’s all your fault.” Only suggests that when people or events meet our expectations that we want to keep them in our lives because they feel good. When someone or something doesn’t meet or expectations, we first distance ourselves emotionally, mentally, or physically from the person or situation. Two key questions that Only states in her book Living By Conscious Choice (2005) are: “…to what extent will we allow our expectations to control our experiences? How personally do we choose to take the events in our lives?” We can attain true freedom and happiness when we allow our expectations and judgments to go. We oftentimes form judgments without knowing enough information about the person or situation. Our views are based on a limited understanding of reality.
In the book The Four Agreements (1997), Miguel Ruiz states that we all have our own books of laws. These laws say what is good and what is bad, but they are different for each one of us. The fact that each of us looks at the world differently and has differing expectations is not part of many of our realities. We expect everyone else to follow our own book of laws. We project our realities onto others, and when this happens, we set ourselves up to be disappointed.
How, then, can we let go of judgment based on our expectations? Nancy Only says that simply letting judgment go seems impossible to her. It is too hard to let such a pattern disappear from our minds instantaneously. However, Nancy Only does suggest using the practice of surrendering to every moment as a way of noticing when feelings of judgment arise. When judgment does come up, we can acknowledge the desire to feel the judgment because of its familiarity to us, and then breathe deeply. With the breath, release the judgment. It is then helpful, according to Nancy Only, to affirm our “willingness to be open to each new experience.” Many of us can see what it is like to feel judgment by looking back at our lives. Experiencing non-judgment can open up many new experiences for us. Nancy Only states, “When we give up our insistence that we are right, we make room for joy, for peace of mind, and for wealth of new experiences to fill our lives.” When we can understand that our memories of the past are made up of our own expectations and judgments, we can then move that to the future and see that our visions create our future experiences.
When we talk about the future, many “what ifs” may arise, and it is in this frame of mind that many people go about living their lives. People are often never fully in the present moment, but instead in fear or anger about the past and future. John Lennon said, “Life is what happens while we’re making plans.” Nancy Only does not say that surrendering into a non-judgmental, present, and fully conscious state of being is easy, but that it is a highly worthy goal for life. In taking steps towards opening ourselves in these ways, we will begin to feel the benefits. These steps include seeing our realities from the perspective of co-creators and letting go of expectations by breathing and choosing to be open to life. We can send love to ourselves when we are judgmental and trust in a larger plan of life than we might be able to understand. We then open ourselves to the new experiences that we encounter with an open heart and mind.