Releasing judgement as a practice

As an adolescent, I was irritated by Jesus saying, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Isn’t that, I thought, exactly the point? We judge in order to place ourselves in a hierarchy, to measure where we are.

That’s right in a way, but I failed to notice the corrosive effects of constant comparison. I didn’t know my heart was shut against the world. I assumed that the acrid quality of my mental life was inevitable.

How about you? Have you noticed the internal qualities of judgement lately? Try something for me. Observe the texture of your experience as you bring to mind that one guy. That absolute fraud in your social circles who people mistakenly tolerate. Oh my God, why doesn’t anyone else see through his bullshit? Why can’t he viscerally feel that his soul is defective?

You will probably notice a compression, a hardening in your mind. Also, you may notice that while your mind may have been clear before, it certainly isn’t now. Up until that second of judgement, that person’s stupidity was unrelated to your experience. Someone else might have described their stupidity as clumsiness, or even innocence. Or failed to notice it whatsoever. But you’re now entangled in a simulation of them. A simulation that you’ve designed to make yourself feel bad. Weird move. What do you do now?

It’s maybe impossible to stop yourself from automatically entering into judgement. But you can release your grip on judgement when it arises. For the last couple of years, I’ve tried to take seriously this practice of releasing judgement. This was prompted by noticing what a sanctimonious little bitch I can be, internally. As Brett Ashley says in the Sun Also Rises: “It feels rather good, deciding not to be a bitch. It’s sort of what we have instead of God.” I would amend this, though it makes it a worse line, by saying that it’s one way to get closer to God.

Note that I am not saying judgement is useless or should be banned. Sometimes that hard, sharp compression of harsh judgement is good short-term motivation. But almost none of us is correctly calibrated. Can you honestly say that you are judging exactly the right amount? Remember that judgement is not the same as discernment. It takes zero inner hardening to decide that this particular disco is not for you.

Here’s how the process of releasing judgement works for me.

1. Remember that judgement is based on longing

When you’re caught in personal judgement, the default assumption is that you’re correct about how the world should be different. Maybe you are, maybe you’re not.

But judgement is information about you more reliably than it’s information about the world. I have decided that it would be better if my wife did more meditation. What’s the real information there, what I can actually verify? I can’t actually verify that she would be happier. Meditation doesn’t always work, and maybe her current activity is the relaxing thing she needs. What I can verify for sure is that I’m currently not okay with the way that she is.

If I take a look at that, if I realize the problem is personal, I move inwards. Moving inwards like this, for me, feels like releasing a clamp. Underneath that clamp is a longing: in this example, that my wife share my favorite hobby with me. Okay, so I have a longing. What do I do with that?

1. Decide if I can do something about my longing

With the above example, there are a number of things I could try. Nagging her to meditate probably will not work. But that’s not my only option. I could figure out what kind of experience I’m trying to get out of meditating with my wife, and engineer a version of that we’d both like. Or I could realize that what I want is to share some dimension of my spiritual life with someone, and it doesn’t have to be my wife, so I can phone up one of my meditator freak friends.

This could work. Often, finding the underlying longing results in immediately useful action.

But maybe not, right? Maybe I want something that I’m not going to get: maybe the only thing that would satisfy this particular longing is her doing serious meditation with me, which will not happen, at least right this second.

1. Realize that longing is part of what it is to be alive

There are many wants that I’m not going to get. I want my wife to be into meditation. I want to see through my materialistic cravings, and I also want a Husbands Paris suit. I want peace for all beings in every universe, but I want rageful beauty, surprise, inspiration, barely surmountable struggle as long as I live.

This is, fundamentally, a me problem. And it’s not a problem, as long as I can sit with this longing. Get into the sensation itself, drop the self-righteousness, the victimhood, the resentment, any trace of a notion that this shouldn’t be happening.

The truth is that people pay good money for longing. They seek it with romantic poems, films, nostalgia about their early years. Occasionally people opine that they miss the passion of their teenage desires. All of that is still right there, if you dare to realize you want so much you’ll never get. The best case scenario is that you’ll deeply love a bunch of people who will die.

If you relax into that, settle into that, you notice that it’s vital, vivifying. When you stop shying away from your longing, it opens you to the world. You can be devastated by insolvable lack, without having an issue with that. I’ve never managed to find peace by making myself into a fortress. But I can, when I’m lucky, find peace in being continuously shattered, right now.

Thanks to Erin Shetron for editorial help, photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.