Uberman

Yesterday I spent a few hours at a wedding in my hometown, Sacramento.  Oddly enough the wedding was a blast and I partied afterward and felt really at ease.  I was hanging out with amazing individuals with great energy (and delicious wine…).  I spent a good portion of the night laughing, which was great and it felt good to be open to that in the place I had grown up and left behind.  Somehow, it tied some loose ends together for me.

Another portion of the night was spent talking about life and transformation.  A great friend of mine, someone I consider to be a unique source of knowledge and emotional acuity shed light on some of the things changing in my life and solidified those changes in a way that I would like to share with you.  Somehow the most random discussion and statements are actually the most purposeful.

One of the most frequent habits of mine in the past was sizing people up.  Upon meeting someone, I’d make a decision after talking with them a bit about their life and other random things as to whether that person would be someone I’d consider respecting and drawing closer to.  This respect stemmed from their seeming adherence to certain ethical principles that I deemed the definitive principles to be used as a judgment scale. 

Well, of recent, life has invited me to rethink how I judge and if I judge at all.  Judgment is defined in different ways for different people.  I seek not to define judgment but to speak on what my experience has been with the judgment which I have seen in action in my life. 

My friend began to speak about a friend of his who is an exotic dancer.  He mentioned how I should meet her and that I would really enjoy her company and enjoy her presence. 

Now, in the past, I would have chuckled and reminded him that I do not consort with women like that.  Furthermore, were I to have met her in the future, I would likely be friendly but resist getting to know her fully due to her occupation.  There would have always been a curiosity nonetheless. 

If you have been following my recent posts, I wrote an essay entitled Becoming a Stronger Leader.  You will see how closely aligned that essay is with what I have to say here and the lessons life is inviting me to master.

So the conversation continued and I asked him how he felt about her choosing that occupation.  He just shrugged, without expressing the least bit of interest: “I don’t really feel the need to judge people.”

Those words struck me.  Me neither.  Actually, feeling the need to judge people has created challenges for me. He began to express his interest in her as an individual with unique characteristics as a unique human being.  I smiled inside.  Somehow, through his lack of judgment, I felt peace come over me.

Life Schools You

I like to refer to the interesting choices of others which I see manifest around me each day as entertainment.  I mean, think about it.  When I consider all of the people I meet each day and all of the interesting things I hear, the obvious path of health for me is to be at peace with what I see and to live as closely aligned with the health that I see within that person, situation, behavior, or decision.

Life will at every turn create situations and opportunities for growth and challenges will come up right before you which will cause you to question your most cherished beliefs and deeply ingrained modes of thinking.

In the past, I would often focus on the many woeful things taking place in the world, the injustices, the things which need fixing, and the ways in which I and those closest to me could contribute to fixing the world by changing things about themselves and how they live their lives.  This focus was useful to some extent and there certainly was a reason for it: put simply, I love.

The world that I live in is an amazing place and I have always wanted nothing more than peace and equality and abundance for everyone.  I have always wanted to see those closest to me growing and shifting their lives into healthier directions.  Yet not every person relates to health in the same way or travels the same path to sustain a healthy journey.

Fear may develop when the complexity of the world occurs to us and we attempt to judge at every turn to somehow make sense of it, categorize it, and experience in a way which we feel we can understand and even affect.  The desire to understand the world and affect it is beautiful.

This fear can lead to challenges as we search for ways to “fix” the world and others while attempting to direct where and how the pieces should be reorganized. This feeds fear as we never actually face that fear.  Instead, we interpret the fear as something which requires some action, some stance, some decision.  The action that follows is often counter intuitive and does not lead to further understanding.  Things may then become seemingly more complicated.

Passing Judgment v. Practicing Neutrality

People, places, and all life forms on this planet are fluid.  All things transmutate in time and nothing is permanent that we can be sure of.  With this in mind, does passing judgment even really make sense?  If you think about it, jud as a root in Latin deals with law and with what is “right”.  Yet is it essential to judge to live and enjoy life?  Is judgment some kind of precursor to happiness?  Last I checked, no.  Is it essential to play referee with life and to constantly be gauging all things in terms of score or fouls?  Is judgment even an effective means to answer the questions we may have about life and our place in the world?  I have not experienced this.  Judgment often creates more disempowering questions than we started with, often limiting options and solutions by feeding the need to make concrete decisions about any given situation.  Thus we create more fear in our lives by not actually facing the fear itself.

The image of a referee really hits home here.  Imagine what a referee does.  He makes calls.  He decides.  His say will dictate the game in some way.  So when a referee makes a concrete decision, one team may score or gain and the other will likely not.  This affects the outcome of the gain.  It is a system of scores.  The ego is involved.

When we choose to act as if the questions we have will be answered without our having to act as referees of situations, people, behaviors, and decisions we then open ourselves to the answers we seek.  Why would we wish to create more uncertainty and limit options by building walls that we have no business building?  How can we really even genuinely referee anything?  Think about it…

Neutrality takes out the “keeping score” element in life.  It allows us to be present to a situation, a behavior, and see it for what it is and not necessarily feel the need to respond or engage it.  It also frees us.  Neutrality does not color our response so to speak, so if we do decide to respond, we can do so in a way which reflects our complete acceptance of the moment.  We can be at peace with it.  Neutrality is a precursor to peace in that it prevents an investment of energy in building walls. 

Building walls essentially leads to a break in communication.  Judgment builds a wall and blocks off some form of free communication with another.  Often, this break in communication leads to a sudden loss in understanding between two parties. Fear then sets in, and often begins to flourish. 

Coming to a place of neutrality is very powerful and can welcome transcendence where the need to referee in life dissolves and the appreciation for communication is heightened.  When we come from a place of fear, we often create fantasies which serve to further the wall’s strength and we take solace in our fantasy as we seem to think that it justifies our situation, has validated our decision to create a wall between ourselves and some part of the world.

It may be reinforced that creating a wall between yourself and some part of the world is healthy and essential depending on who is on the other side of that wall.  It may also be reinforced that everything that enters our life is, at some level, an essential part of our growth.  Think about that. This does not mean that a wall built through judgments never comes from a place of love at least on some level.  When we love ourselves we wish to protect ourselves, and in some ways our ego plays into that.  Loving our Being is essential.  Yet when we wish to protect ourselves are we not prescribing at least on some level to fear as well?  Important things to consider.

Feeling the need to referee is often more damaging to the referee than the game of life or the other present parties.  Often passing judgment is merely a reaction to something which, upon further introspection, may dissolve in time.  The ego can invoke some interesting things within us at times.  That is why we have access to freedom and transformational lifestyle practices to keep ourselves balanced and whole.

Meditation and reading some of the greatest philosophers and thinkers throughout time are great ways to expand the mind and to invite healthier ways of relating to life into the heart.  Drawing closer to a spiritual understanding of others and focusing on the health in others and situations may be very critical aspects as well.  Likewise, a commitment to maintaining open communication with the world, to be receptive to its lessons for us, will help to prevent the walls from forming between ourselves and all that could serve to benefit us. 

We also have amazing things to offer the world as individuals.  What benefit is it to build walls between our gifts and the world around us which could greatly benefit?  Open lines of communication mean opportunity.  Being receptive means gifts.  To receive the blessings abundant around us, we must be aware that they are there.  How will we get the gift in the box if we decide the box is too big, heavy, small, smelly, purple, or poorly wrapped? 

Schooled Twice

I had asked a trusted friend to share with me anything that he felt I could alter about my current state that he believed would exponentially increase my health and the joy in my life.  After watching me and bantering back and forth for a bit, he actually told me that I should work on verbal abuse.  Verbal abuse?  What?  I hadn’t thought about that and I was being so aware of my speech, or so I thought.

I was curious about what may have drawn his attention to this particular detail over others and he said that it’s the words that I chose to use jest when referring to situations and even myself.  Random words like “retard”, “idiot”, “stupid”, etc. came to mind. 

This may sound silly yet the words we repeatedly use, even casually in jest, will impact how we experience the world.  How can we shift the mind to create more joyful experiences filled with laughter and enjoying our lives?  This need to verbally referee and pass judgment in adjectives which are creating walls and blocking the health in a person, behavior, situation, or decision only leads to fear.

When we speak each day to ourselves and to others, what kinds of words are we using to describe our lives?  Are these words those of a person who is committed to communicating with the world, being receptive to the gifts and lessons present in all things?  Committed to neutrality?  Are these words committed to loving? 

Every time I turn around I am being schooled.  Every situation before me is so ultimately guiding and perfect for my growth and health. 

Approach life as a student.

Be receptive to the lessons around you.

We are all one on this journey in life.  Truly.  Is there any division?  We stand before the same sun, the same moon, the same stars, the same sky, and we all breathe the same air.  Our walls are futile. 

Confines stifle the new sprout as it seeks the sun through the soil, breaking through the barriers, it travels upward and outward.  True growth breaks through the walls.  It seeks the sunlight and could imagine no alternative to its own divine inheritance to space and expansion in a world full of color. 

Tagged: judgment, questions, challenges, meditation, change, neutral, energy, neutrality, holly lewis, peace