It’s Too Easy to Be Judgmental: Finding the Communion Beyond Calamity

It’s so easy to judge ourselves, isn’t it? ‘Judge’ in the sense of putting ourselves down. We do something we think is wrong and we suffer regret. Or we wonder: am I a good person?

 

Is this self-judging a flaw in our character? Something conditioned by culture? Maybe, a way we hurt ourselves? Or something entirely different?

 

Maybe we’re judgmental of others. We might feel another person is too blind to see the truth. Or they’re trying to undermine us. Or that they think they’re “better” than us.

 

Or maybe we sometimes feel we’ve wasted time, or our lives. When it seems we’re wasting time, what’s wasting away? It’s wonderful we don’t want our lives to be meaningless. But maybe we know this yearning not to be meaningless because we thankfully know meaning; we know moments when we’ve done something that feels glorious, that make a difference.

 

Or we feel vulnerable. Being alive means we’re vulnerable. When we love, we’re vulnerable. But our vulnerability, although frightening, is a life-giving gift. Because we’re vulnerable we can learn; we can feel. We can act. Vulnerability can reveal our need for and our essential connection to others. It can reveal our sincere presence right here and now.

 

Sometimes, we get competitive with our ideas and turn a discussion into an argument we feel we must win. But what is it we think we lose if we don’t get the other person to accept our viewpoint? Underlying the passion of this competition is often a feeling we could be mistaken. The more insecure or wrong we feel, the more vigorously we might defend our position. When I was still teaching, I noticed the more experienced and comfortable I was in my profession, the more open I was to a diversity of ideas⎼ and more capable at helping students be themselves.

 

Or we see ourselves as “bad” because we so want to be “good.” Or, when we judge others, or ourselves, it could be because we feel, deep down, there’s something more to us; there’s such a wonderful possibility in us of living more deeply and kindly.

 

Recently, I became anxious about a medical procedure I needed to undergo. One doctor reminded me of a mindfulness teaching I thought I already knew: we often feel anxious because we know calm and want to live. This was a helpful reminder.

 

Right now, we’re all suffering from a divisive world, and from wars and other unbelievable horrors. But our understanding of how threatening divisiveness is to our survival is aided by knowing the need for cooperation and peace. We might know, somewhere inside us, a communion sits waiting beyond the calamity.

 

Because what’s not often seen in our perception of division, competition, duality, self-judgment is there’s something distorting our thinking process or conclusions about the world, about life….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

My House is My Teacher: When We Feel A Deep Sense of Presence in A Moment of Our Life, Happiness Arises

For several years, my wife and I lived in our house and did little work on it aside from cleaning and basic maintenance. It seemed to go on almost by itself, keeping us warm and comfortable. Then, something major went wrong. We needed a new heating system and to fix the roof.

 

My wife started watching HGTV, the home building channel, and I joined her. We saw houses changed from rat traps to beautiful mansions in a few months and at relatively affordable prices. Once we watched such programs, everything in our house seemed in need of improvement.

 

We didn’t realize at first that these programs were basically long commercials created to make viewers dissatisfied with their homes, so they’d invest in new ones or renovations. All of a sudden, we were noticing things that “needed” to be fixed or updated. The ceiling was cracking, the kitchen didn’t have enough counter space, the deck was moldy, the living room was too dark, and the bathroom too small.

 

Before watching HGTV, the idea of an out-of-date kitchen or bathroom had never occurred to us. One minute, we thought of the house we lived in as a home, complete and satisfying. The next, it was deficient and lacking. Once we began to look through the lens of some image of perfection and think of our home or the world as needing to be fixed⎼ or we expected things to remain as they once were, new looking, young looking⎼ everything began to look old.

 

Then we actually undertook the needed major renovations, and we realized the prices on tv were shockingly low and timelines unbelievably short. The images of perfection were deceptive.

 

This experience pointed out that I could do the same thing with my life as a whole, or with myself, that we did with the house. Suddenly, I felt out of date. If I started thinking of my life in terms of characters in movies or tv, or myself in terms of how others appeared to live, I could get lost or feel lacking in some way. If at the gym I compared how many lifts I did to some of the bigger, younger men, or how long I did aerobics in comparison to other people, I would lose a sense of what my body was able to do and needed to do in that moment….

 

To read the whole blog, go to The Good Men Project.