Don’t judge yourself for judging

Don’t Judge Yourself for Judging

The tricky thing about judgment is that it is sticky. If you judge anyone about anything, you will manifest that same quality in yourself or in your life. Here’s a cute example.

While I was growing up I heard my mother speak negatively about her mother on only two occasions. Once, while she and I were waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store, she mentioned how her mother embarrassed her in such situations. “She never saw a stranger. She would just talk to anybody like she knew them.” The other embarrassment was that Grandma always had big round bright pink patches on her cheeks (it looked a bit like she used food colouring rather than rouge). Mom told me once that she hated that as a kid because she was afraid people would think Grandma was a tart.

Now that Mom is getting on in years herself, she talks to everyone, everywhere. She walks up and has long conversations with people in restaurants who are trying to eat their meals. She has special radar for ministers and their families, with whom she launches into the story about how she was a lingerie model before the war. And, of course, she sports highly rouged cheeks.

Yes, that’s right. We become exactly like our parents in all those ways we hated, and we will continue to be that way until we get out of denial about it and forgive them and ourselves.

Judgment is our only problem, the cause of our experience of separation. If we gave up judging, we would go straight to enlightenment.

We have guilt and self judgment that first started back when we separated from God and assumed that that must have hurt Him. Terrified that God will punish us, we sweep the guilt under the carpet through the use of denial and projection. But we can learn from our judgments on others if we can stop and recognize that they are the projections of our own negative beliefs about ourselves. If we weren’t judging others, how else could we recognize our projected self concepts, own them back and heal them?

Many times, when people are first learning about the concept of projection, they are willing to own back their projections, but then get stuck with guilt because they make themselves the bad guy. The ego is perfectly willing to shift the guilt back to you, as long as someone is still seen to be guilty.

It is that third step, the one that comes after recognizing a projection and owning it, that is a little more challenging, because to do it you must step out of the paradigm of guilt. You must be willing to turn that feeling of guilt over to the Holy Spirit (or whatever name you have for the aspect of God or Higher Self that reaches here into this world) to let it be taken away from you. If you can feel the guilt and offer it up, it will be taken and you will be freed of that self concept. You will also be helping those whom you have been projecting upon.

So don’t judge yourself for judging – just catch yourself, own it and turn it over. The movie that you see played out as your life can then become a fascinating revelation of the interesting beliefs you have about yourself that you are willing to be wrong about. When that movie has played out, and you see only innocence on every face you see, you will be free.
Lency Spezzano