Ever since my Awakening nearly 8 years ago, I have struggled mightily with the concept of Judgment.  It was my therapist who first suggested that when I’m struggling with internal judgment, it might not be my own judgment that is working against me.  My therapist is a wise man who knows how to drop little hints that my conscious mind will ignore, but that will take root in my subconscious, where they will eventually flourish into progress on my own terms, in my own way, and in my own time.  This may have been the most valuable hint he dropped on me, for over time I did indeed discover that the vast majority of my internal judgments were not sourced from myself.  Rather, I had been conditioned from about a dozen different sources to judge myself on behalf of those sources.

At some point, I began the assiduous process of identifying judgment within my thoughts in an effort to root it out through mindfulness.  As I did this, I continued to ponder the concept of Judgment.  I was confused because on the one hand, it’s a barrier to growth in many ways, but on the other hand, it’s unwise to go through life with an absence of judgment.  There’s positive judgment and there’s negative judgment, and if there are specific terms to refer to these two states of judgment, I don’t know what they are.  They may not exist in English, and that may be the root of the problem of Judgment for me personally and also with our society.  If we’re all using the same word but mean different things when we use it, then we’re going to have problems individually as well as collectively.

Finally, I consulted the dictionary, and the source of my confusion became clear.  There are no less than six definitions of the word ‘judgment’, and most of them have sub-definitions.  Linguistically, in order of importance and history, beginning with the Ancient Greeks, ‘judgment’ has implications of: discernment, nuance, probability, intellectual authority, legality, spiritual belief, and eventually, Divinity.  It’s easy to see how the definitions of the word evolved over time from one concept to another.  I found it interesting that despite judgment’s religious prominence in American culture and society, Divine implications of judgment are actually its last definition and, linguistically, the least important.  The original definitions of judgment fall closer to the world of empirical, logical, philosophical, and scientific thought rather than the world of religion.

Reading through these multiple definitions of the word “judgment”, I could see how a once noble principle eventually became tainted by dogma.  Judgment is supposed to connote wisdom and maturity that enable the kind of discernment necessary to form good decisions and opinions.  At some point, religious authority, and later financial and political authority, was equated with that wisdom and maturity, and judgmental decisions have been in their hands ever since.  Not positive judgment, either: the kind of negative judgment that uses guilt and shame to force people into submission for the purposes of power and profit.

Suddenly it became much easier to identify which judgments within me had an internal or external source.  Over time, I came to see that judgments that I had been holding against myself had actually been imposed from the outside by other people and institutions, both directly and indirectly.  We are subconsciously bombarded on a constant basis with judgmental messages about every single aspect of our lives, and once I became aware of this, I felt like I was walking around wrapped in chains with weighted shackles on my legs.

Thus began the arduous process of removing the shackles and chains of judgment that had been wrapped around me by family, friends, school, culture, society, and multiple other sources.  Every time I thought I was reaching the end of the process of identifying and purging judgment, another layer from another aspect of life would present itself.  I began to think it might not ever end, and indeed, it hasn’t yet.  However, I am much freer of judgment than I was when I began the process of identifying and purging it several years ago.  In the process, I have gained a relieving sense of freedom as more virtual chains and shackles have fallen by the wayside, one by one.

I still have quite a bit of judgment to work through and purge, sadly.  I certainly don’t hold it against myself, since that would be judgy (lol), but it’s frustrating to understand the depths to which I was prevented from ever even knowing my authentic Self, let alone find ways to allow me to express that Self.  I had to silence internal criticism that told me I was a bad person when I made mistakes.  Over time I was able to replace judgment with compassionate wisdom, which allows for learning from mistakes without letting things slide.  It’s a much gentler and kinder way to exist, rather than constantly living under the hammer of critical judgment.

I have written repeatedly on the subject of Judgment over the life of my blog.  Here are my previous posts on Judgment.

Judgment
The Judge and the Victim
Stigma
Looking Back to Move Forward
Chip Away the Stone
On Becoming
Onward Through the Fog
Sukkha and Dukkha
Deprogramming Anger
The Art of Mindful Awareness
Anger’s Many Faces
Peeling Back the Layers
On Judgment