Buddhism is often difficult for Westerners to approach, let alone incorporate, due to how different the mindset is compared to the standard Western mindset.  The West is very ego-based from a philosophical standpoint, while the East, generally speaking, is the opposite.  Just as we have inordinate trouble contemplating not having an ego that we personally identify with, practitioners of many Eastern faiths, including Buddhism, have trouble identifying with any kind of ego after living in a spiritual culture that doesn’t emphasize it.

This makes it hard for a lot of Westerners to grasp certain concepts, such as suspending judgment, as well as suspending expectation and simply accepting an outcome.  The West, and America in particular, is extremely judgmental, which leads to suffering.  The goal of Buddhism is to avoid suffering, so it has an emphasis on the suspension of judgment in favor of understanding, and therefore loving-kindness and compassion.  The same rationale exists for expectation, which leads to suffering in the form of disappointment when the outcome isn’t what we want it to be.

I spent an estimated three years engaged in a sometimes minute-by-minute effort to suspend judgment in my life, not just outwardly expressed towards others, but far more frequently levied against myself.  For those three years, I maintained meditative awareness of my thoughts, and when I caught myself being judgmental, I simply thought the word “judgment” and diverted my mind to something else.  I thought it would never work, such was the onslaught of my internal judgment once I became aware of it, but eventually the judgmental floodwaters eased to a manageable trickle.

I would sometimes think about also working on suspending expectation, but that was too big of a hurdle just yet, though I didn’t know why.  All I knew was that suspending expectation and practicing acceptance felt too much like surrender, too much like giving up, and that’s not in my programming.  So for the time being, I abandoned any effort to suspend expectation and continued to focus my attention on the practice of suspending judgment and reinforcing that habit.

In the last several months, however, I’ve come to realize that suspending expectation is reliant upon suspending judgment first.  It’s judgment that causes us to appoint a particular expectation to people or situations in the first place, so if we want to be open to any outcome, we must first suspend judgment.  And I am here to attest to the difficulty of suspending judgment in a culture positively steeped in judgment, and I don’t even have the literal cross to bear of being raised Christian.  One doesn’t have to be raised Christian in America: Christian values permeate every level of our culture and society like indelible ink.

Suspending expectation and cultivating acceptance in an ego-based culture that tells us we need to focus on and achieve our goals at almost any cost is extremely difficult.  It’s hard-wired in most of us to do just that: set our hopes and desires on something.  Hope is an easier concept to manage from a Buddhist perspective, because it’s not locked onto a goal in the same way that desire is.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have things that we want in life, but as we go about trying to achieve those things, it’s wiser to leave room for error and even failure.

This also doesn’t mean abandoning optimism for pessimism.  It’s not an either-or, black-and-white kind of an issue.  I prefer to see it as realistic idealism.  You keep your sights set on the ideal that you’re aiming for, but you start with the reality you have.  Too many people fail because they try to start from where they want to be, not from where they are.  This is usually due to impatience, from a desire (there’s that word again) for our dreams to come true as quickly as possible, when in reality, dreams rarely manifest quickly.  They’re not Divine miracles, they take time and effort.

I finally got good enough at suspending judgment that it has become very nearly automatic, which is nice, if for no other reason than I spontaneously find myself able to do less of the “grasping and clinging” spoken of in Buddhism that causes the suffering in our lives.  It’s the grasping that is the root of expectation, and the clinging is the root of many sources of suffering in our lives.  I find that as I naturally grasp less, the fewer expectations I have.

For instance, I used to obsessively check the weather forecast at least twice a day, morning and evening.  Then I realized my life wasn’t really being informed by that information, particularly since the forecast is wrong about half the time.  So I stopped checking it and now just accept the weather as it is each day, only checking our own little weather station for temperature, humidity, and pressure.  This is huge for me, because I’ve been a weather nerd since before I was 10.  However, now that I’m not checking the forecast, I find I’m paying more attention to the actual weather, and I’ve gotten pretty good at making my own little 24-hour forecasts based on present conditions and pressure trends.  It also feels good to be more in touch with Mother Nature.

I’m also clinging less.  We cling because we don’t want things to go away or end, but nothing is permanent.  This is one of the fundamental truths of Buddhism: everything is impermanent.  We all begin dying from the moment we’re born and in fact, we are never born and we never die – spiritually, we merely transition from one state of being to another.  This was a difficult inner reconciliation for me to make, as it is for most people, between the rational knowledge that of course I’m dying some day, and the emotional realization of my mortality.

Once this realization occurs, suddenly you view the world differently and the priority and importance of everything in your life shifts almost overnight.  You take a look at what you’ve brought with you to that point in your life and wonder why you ever thought some of it was so important in the first place.  This is why some middle-aged people, particularly women, start getting rid of stuff in their 50s.  Conversely, some find it hard to get rid of anything because they haven’t accepted their mortality.

I did this recently, and it was gloriously liberating.  In the words of the Sinead O’Connor song, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got”.  I have nothing that I do not need or desire, and aside from some gardening tools, outdoor furniture, and camping gear we still need to replace after moving over 2200 miles, I can’t think of anything we don’t already have.  I’m perfectly aware of and okay with the fact that I’m going to die someday, and in fact, I’m kind of looking forward to it, though not in a suicidal way.  Good things lie ahead of me on my particular spiritual path, and I’m looking forward to experiencing them.

Suspension of judgment and expectation has also allowed me to tackle a problem I’ve had for decades with catastrophizing, at which I am a world champion.  I have the ability to leap to the worst conclusion in a single bound, regardless of how improbable it is.  However, I’ve noticed recently that as I’ve continued to cultivate acceptance instead of expectation, it leaves room in my mind, and perhaps my heart, for more positive outcomes, rather than judgmentally assuming that something bad is going to happen.  Consequently, instead of seeing nothing but multiple negative paths extending outward into the future that all converge on one or two awful scenarios, I see more positive ones that branch out and multiply.  It’s not that I don’t sometimes see something bad happening, but it’s not as intense as it used to be, and it’s much more balanced out by more positive things.

This is massive from a personal standpoint.  As long as it took me to suspend judgment, it took even longer and was far more difficult to stop mentally destroying every single relationship and situation in my life by contemplating the most negative outcomes possible and shitting on any positive outcomes I might allow myself to entertain.  I hated myself for doing that, which I know didn’t help the situation because a lot of that catastrophizing came from not thinking I was worthy of anything good happening to me.  How could I think I was worthy of anything if I was constantly engaged in a judgment-driven act of self-loathing?

As with most of my breakthroughs, I couldn’t say precisely what precipitated this.  It’s never just one thing, it’s always at least a half dozen factors coming together while I’m not even really paying attention and then BAM! I suddenly find myself doing things on a mental level that I’ve been aiming for but may have even consciously given up on because they were taking so long.  My subconscious never gives up on me, though.  It just puts things on the proverbial back burner and lets them cook slowly before integrating them while I’m not paying attention and letting me notice consciously sometime later.

I have to say that it’s extremely refreshing to have a mind full of positive opportunities stretching out into my potential future instead of a mind full of narrowing pathways to a small handful of negative things.  I’m not used to this, and part of me is afraid it’s going to go away because it’s just an artifact of my mental disorders.  I’ve had positive breakthroughs dissolve before in the wake of a disruption of my neurotransmitters.  However, this feels different somehow.  It’s accompanied by progress in other areas of my life that all seem to be lining up together and synchronizing so they, and therefore I, are all on the same page and pointing in the same direction with the same goals in mind.

This is a nice feeling that I’m working hard to just let…be.  After a lifetime of shitty experiences, it’s hard to allow positive things to just…be, without immediately thinking of ways it’s going to get fucked up.  I know why I did that, it was a way to avoid being disappointed by others or situations by doing it to myself first.  Kind of how it hurts less to take off your own bandaids than it does to let someone else do it.

All of this together is slowly enabling a Buddhist necessity that has thus far eluded me, until recently anyway: being in the present moment without fretting about either the past or the future.  Letting go of both the past and the future was very difficult, but for different reasons.  Like releasing expectation and cultivating acceptance, it just kind of happened to me subconsciously without my noticing at first.  I think it started with the suspension of paying attention to the weather forecast in favor of just paying attention to the weather itself.  What’s the weather today?  Look outside, walk outside.  That’s the weather.  Proceed accordingly.  Simple.  Where I live in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, I have to be prepared at all times for any kind of weather, anyway, so it’s a little silly to get all hung up on the forecast in the first place.  There’s a reason we all live in hiking shoes, flannels, raincoats, and hoodies.

Perhaps ironically, I was not expecting the ability to suspend expectation.  As with most moments of revelation in Buddhism, it was accompanied by no small measure of humor. 😆  Plus, a lot of the “a-HA!” moments in Buddhism are accompanied by a feeling of “well shit, why didn’t I think of that a long time ago?”  It used to annoy me until I realized it’s like learning math.  You don’t ask a 6-year-old to understand calculus, they haven’t had the foundationary material taught to them yet.  Show them after another 10 years of material gradually increasing in difficulty, and it’s no problem.  Unfortunately, like the 6-year-old that wants to learn Everything Right Now, so too does everyone who starts on the Path of the Dharma want the same thing.  That’s not how Life works, sadly, and again, like the little kid, it’s frustrating.

But that means it’s really fucking rewarding when you realize you finally figured out something you’ve been working on for a really long time, if for no other reason than reaching a milestone reveals further avenues for growth.  After you rest for a bit, of course.  Which I am greatly looking forward to after nearly 7 years in The Abyss, for all intents and purposes.  However, I discovered what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls la luz del abismo, ‘the light of the abyss’, in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves.  Like the dark side of the yin-yang symbol, dive deeply enough into yourself and you will eventually find the light.

To confront a person with their own Shadow is to show them their own Light.

Carl Jung