Sweet, sweet judgement
A winding road healing from judgment to discernment.
As a young woman, I had a pretty judgemental streak.
An impulse that still takes me over when I am particularly emotional or frustrated.
My first life coach really helped me examine, unpack, and ultimately rewrite.
I credit this deep sense of Right and Wrong to a few things.
As a child, I grew up in a cooperative housing group.
A community built by adults who were trying to figure out how to live more intentionally and equitably together because they had come of age during the Civil Rights Movement and had literally marched on the front lines demanding change in a number of social and planetary causes.
These were people who were not content with the world as it was but dared to fight for a world that could be.
My parents and the adults around me often asked me to look to my own sense of empathy and justice to make decisions or re-examine conflicts I was trying to sort out.
This instilled in me a strong sense that Right and Wrong are determined from an empathetic lens.
‘Right’ looked like compassion, justice for all, dignity, respect for other living things, the celebration of others’ cultures and beliefs, personal and social accountability, and showing up for the hard work of coming together to collaborate in the messiest of moments…
‘Wrong’ looked like exploitation, callousness, imposing your beliefs on others, treating others differently than you would want your loved ones to be treated, dishonesty, hypocrisy, thinking that people didn’t deserve support or generosity, and lack of accountability…
As I grew older, and experienced violence at the hands of men - sexual harassment (earliest memory is 12 years old), rape (at 16), sexual intimidation (plenty of times), gaslighting from partners and “friends”, and casual-to-grotesque misogyny in the media I interacted with every day - the intensity I felt around Right and Wrong became fiery.
Fiery because of the colossal volume of injustice that exists in the world.
So fiery in fact that I lost sight of how my intense judgment was also creating an insurmountable disconnect and impeding my ability to create the change I wanted to see in the world.
I was so angry.
Rightfully so I might add.
But my investment in my own anger prevented me from seeing nuance and complexity.
It distanced me from compassion and understanding the storm of forces at play.
It blinded me from being able to see past my hurt to effective solutions and prevented me from being able to connect across lines of difference.
With help, I began to reflect on whether or not my investment in my own rage was aligned with my values.
I found that in many ways it was not.
(In others, it still was. As I would discover years later.)
In my attempt to course correct, my pendulum swung to the opposite extreme.
In my desire to really understand others - especially the people with whom I was most angry - I looked beyond my own experience in favor of centering theirs.
I began to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
I adopted an assumption that everyone was coming to the table with their own collections of traumas, fears, exposure, and blindspots.
I took on the mindset that everyone is struggling in some way or another and truly doing the best they can with what they have.
To a point, this is a beautiful, new perspective to take on and embody.
It can also go too far.
In my desire to “do” compassion and non-judgment perfectly, I lost my ability to perceive the whole picture from a healthy, grounded perspective.
I became tolerant of intolerance (which is really just a softer word for “Hate”).
I erased the validity of my own experience as I tried to bend over backward to excuse harmful actions in others.
I became complicit in my own mistreatment, investing heavily in people and relationships that were unable to love or relate to me in equitable ways.
I lost my ability to clearly see dysfunctional behavior for what it was in both my personal life and on the collective stage because I was more invested in understanding others than I was in what was healthy, ethical, and just.
Another course correction was needed.
In the aftermath of leaving a self-proclaimed “conscious community” in San Diego where I witnessed all manor of toxic, abusive behavior that was normalized and rebranded as “spiritual”, I realized that I needed to fine-tune my ability to discern - based on my values, commitments, and beliefs - between what was acceptable and what was not.
This meant re-discovering the wisdom of my rage since it had been pointing injustice out to me all along… AND maintaining my connection to compassion and the belief that we all come to the table with our own very real baggage and experiences… AND giving myself permission to choose what I do and don’t allow into the innermost access of my life.
I think of this as discernment.
When I choose not to allow people who are mistreating me into my life, I am not deciding that they are scum and unworthy of love. I am deciding that my life force is precious to me and I have a right to decide who I share it with. AND that I can trust that that person is powerful and on their own path and that they will find their way forward (or not) and that me choosing healthy, self-loving boundaries is also the most ethical, loving thing to do for not just myself but others.
Whether my boundary positively impacts them is really up to them. It might go over their head, it might jar them into self-reflection, or it might even make them double down on their position. And whatever they choose to do with it is up to them.
When I choose not to watch shows that are steeped in race-based discrimination, misogyny, and other widely normalized bigotry, it’s not because I don’t think it’s important to pay attention to those things. It’s that I want my entertainment time to be uplifting so that I am more resourced to tackle the social justice progress I value in ways that I think actually move the needle.
When I choose not to have arguments with strangers on the internet, it’s not because I don’t want to interrupt ignorance and take a stand for a better world, but because I want to spend my time coalition building, community organizing, and sitting down face-to-face with people who have already made the brave choice to work for change rather than sit on the sidelines and sling mud.
Discernment is about unconditional love while reserving the right to make choices about what you want to give your precious, finite life minutes to.
I still get angry in the face of injustice.
I still experience despair, disbelief, and frustration.
Sometimes helplessness and cynicism threaten to overtake me.
And when these moments happen I try to carve out a little space to honor and feel the feelings so I can find what comes next - creativity, solutions, being braver…
Nobody is served by my refusal to be curious.
Nobody is served by me abandoning myself or my values or putting up with dysfunctional behavior.
Most people are served when I make intentional choices that hold myself and others accountable.
My invitation to you, dear reader, is to ask yourself if you can sit at the nexus of honoring your own beliefs and experience, holding compassion for others, AND be willing to take stances for what feels most honoring of people being powerful and able to hold the impact of their own actions.
This will help you avoid unhealthy dynamics, while compassionately seeing others for where they are at in their journey, and ultimately enabling you to live the most nourishing, expansive, mature, fulfilling life available to you in this lifetime.
Dive Deeper:
Interestingly enough, I find that the people I trigger the strongest, negative reactions from are people who are strongly invested in either their ‘right to judge’ others or overinvestment in trying to do non-judgment perfectly.
I have become more and more intrigued with the spiritual value of BOTH. The non-discreet, nuanced, grey area of holding multiple realities at once. Truths that are responsive to each other, interwoven, inseparable, and equally essential.
How do we honor the sanctity of the individual while exalting our incredible responsibility to one another as a community?
How do we leverage the buoyant aim of science while finding just as much value and guidance from ancient, indigenous wisdom traditions, art, and mysticism?
How do we reject reductionism and choose complexity and its inherent invitation to growth?
Extra Magic:
“Dreaming is healthy. t teaches us stuff and leads us places even if it doesn’t work out the way we’d hoped.” - Theora Moench
Yes…. I just quoted myself. I said this to my love and thought it was pretty profound. Too often we try to lower our hopes to avoid disappointment. It is in the pursuit of happiness and daydreams that unimaginable experiences, paths, and futures become possible.
Invitations:
I’ve been gently putting together some workshops and private, relationship coaching packages that I will be offering again soon but need to give myself a few weeks to rest and grieve.
In the meantime, please share this essay, or one of your former favorites with someone who you think would enjoy it, love it, benefit from it, learn something from it, be moved by it...
Thank you. With so much tenderness this week, thank you.
Little Listy List of Noticing:
I don’t love today’s essay. It’s been on my mind and it was helpful to explore the ideas and the path. I entertained deleting it and writing something else… but I think part of this journey I am on with you is to be with the writing I don’t love too and to find what the value in it might be.
This video spoke to me.
Yesterday I hand-processed hawthorn berries with my housemate. They will be turned into tinctures that are good for the heart. It’s circulation. It’s vitality. It’s well-being. It’s openness. They were hand-harvested and we touched each one to clean and remove the roughage. Then they were sorted into a wooden bowl that was made by the man who loves my mother. We listened to sweet music, barely talked, and I carried the exhaustion of love and grief in my body. This, I thought, is valuable. This actually matters.