Practicing
Non-Judgment
“It's
not what you look at that counts, it's what you see.”
Henry
David Thoreau
A
friend threw me back to my nine-year-old self with one announcement
yesterday. She is going on a trip to the west coast with a friend
this summer. That's a very normal thing to do, right? Taking a trip
with a friend does not rank high on anyone's list of strange or
outrageous events. But this friend, who professes to love me like a
sister, has turned me down for dinner repeatedly, refused to take day
trips to anywhere with me, and even said her extreme fear of flying
has kept her from most airplane travel. What I saw in her simple act
of going to Oregon with her friend was the same rejection I felt from
other children when I moved to a new school in 4th grade.
It stung to the bone.
What
we look at and what we see are often completely unrelated because
they travel through the filter of our personal history. Perhaps we
are having a bad day, feeling unappreciated or especially lonely, and
we view someone who is not; sudden resentment grabs us with its
predatory talons. We hurt—not because of the other person's
actions—but because of our own leap to judgment. We travel rapidly
through our past rejections, our feelings of never having been loved
enough to satisfy us, all the way back to understanding we were perhaps not
lovable in the first place. It's a rapid backward spiral that we
perpetrate on ourselves.
Non-judgment
requires diligence in monitoring our thoughts. The Tiny Buddha
website suggests this exercise: “Vow for the rest of the day, you
won't judge your friends and you won't judge any strangers you happen
to see.” Seems simple, doable. That doesn't even get into all the
heavy-duty stuff that calls us to judgment in this world. Just
friends and strangers—and I would add, ourselves. It's as good a
starting place as any.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment