Over the last half year I’ve been working on fine tuning my awareness internally. Paying attention to thoughts, emotions, and beliefs that are running through my being.
I believe that becoming aware and releasing judgments are a big key in to have more love, compassion, understanding, and empathy for yourself and others.
This are some notes and some of the process that happens with me including observations and experiences:
- Recognize and be aware that I have been triggered or reactive. This includes self judgment or judgment of others.
- If my attention is on someone else and not myself, then I know that the mechanism inside myself to avoid looking at what is going on with me is in play. Whenever I find myself fixated on someone else, what they said, what they did, how they are acting, then I know I’m avoiding looking within and an old habit of looking to blame someone or something else for what I’m experiencing has surfaced.
- And recognizing that is happening, is a huge part of it too! And if that is what happened, I remind myself not to judge myself for it.
- Inside my own heart and mind, whenever I judge myself for anything I’m experiencing – thoughts emotions – it makes it so much worse. Something small then starts entangling into a bigger ball. Emotions are a great example of this. Part of my journey I fell into the “false light” narrative. To me this means designating certain emotions or feelings as “negative” (and pretending everything is love and light and butterflies all the time) and then attempting to correct myself for feeling them… or judging myself for feeling them. “Fear is bad, i shouldn’t be feeling fear” “Guilt and shame is bad.” When I really was ready to look at this and looked at my patterns of avoiding these emotions… I found I was shaming myself for feeling shame. Shaming or judging myself for feeling guilt. And once I was able to become aware that’s what was going on inside of me, I was able to shift it and start telling a different story. Even simply “It’s supportive for me to feel anything I am feeling.” The different emotions we experience are often guide posts that are telling us something deeper going on and are all opportunities to feel, release, and grow from when we start to look and listen to them.
- Judgment is a part of this, like shaming oneself. I found myself judging myself for feeling emotions, or having certain thoughts. Instead of loving myself through them.
What I found interesting and one of my recent shifts in the last few months, I found myself judging someone else for their judgments of someone else! It was even a 4 tier cycle! Person A said a judgment/insult about something or someone. Then Person B reacted to person A and judged them for having their judgement. Then I judged person B for having a judgment about person A. Then judged myself for having a judgement about person B. I was able to recognize this loop and that helped bring a lot more clarity. It helps to consistently remind myself that I have zero control of what anyone else thinks or does. And there’s no right or wrong in my world. Any way which someone chooses to live their life experience and anything that includes is a free will choice of theirs and I’m not here to have any issue with it. I can only look at my own habitual patterns of the mind, emotions, belief systems, and become aware of them and once aware, intentionally choose something different when they start to arise until a full shift has occurred where that rarely manifests inside of me. And when it does, it’s always an opportunity for me to learn and grow more!
I’ve also found that social media and the internet is one of the best training grounds for releasing judgments if you decide it is. There’s so many social media posts and an infinite amount of things to disagree with and have problems with online. It’s been years in the making for me, just recognizing each little one here and there and letting that go. But it’s been worth it! And recognizing all of these judgments that I held within myself as well.
Over the past 2 years I went through many very difficult lessons. But what I came to understand was that to really have empathy and compassion for other people, it starts with myself. Understanding and having compassion for myself first. And I think one of the greatest gifts we can give each other in this life is to be present with another person, hear them, do our best to understand them and what they are experiencing, and that enables empathy and compassion to come in as well.
I came to understand both with myself and others that so many people on our planet feel unheard and unseen for who they really are. And claiming and expressing your own soul to share who you are with others is important, but being able to see, hear, and understand another person is a tremendous gift we are all capable of giving.
