Moving Beyond Self-Judgment

Have you ever been afraid to tell a loved one the truth about a part of yourself because you’re certain he or she would leave?  That is the “I am not good enough, right enough, perfect enough to be loved” place.  The chant goes on to say, “I should be better.  I have to, I ought to, I must do or be whatever my arbitrary definition of being enough is.”  So, you become an ongoing project, struggling to approximate perfection, all the while secretly knowing you’ve become an idea about yourself rather than being who you really are.

The shoulds and oughts within you can grow to monstrous proportions, completely blotting out your beauty, uniqueness and perfection, and preventing you from directly experiencing your life.  Imagine you are sitting in a restaurant with two people in the booth behind you.  One is talking to the other exactly the way you talk to yourself.  After a few minutes you would have to get up and leave.  As Stephen Levine has said, “If we talked to our friends like we talk to ourselves, we wouldn’t have any friends.”  The judging mind’s cruelty is pervasive and relentless.

The good news is that you don’t have to be at the mercy of your Judger anymore. You don’t need to destroy the judging quality of your mind, nor do you need to deny that it’s there or leap over it by trying to become perfect.  This only gives it more power.  Rather, the healing comes from your ability to see the Judger—to begin to relate to it rather than being lost in its cruelty.

I had a judger of enormous proportions. (It felt like my Judger went to law school and was president of the debate club!)  In my twenties I tried to kill myself three times because it convinced me I wasn’t worthy of life.  Slowly I discovered that none of its stories were true   I also learned to see how scared it was (even though it felt like a bully). Slowly the Judger came home to my heart, so now it has no power over me.  Sometimes it still arises like a wave from the depth when I am being deeply challenged by life, but as I have learned to see it and say “hello” with curiosity and compassion rather than believing its stories, the wave just passes through, leaving me grounded and connected with my heart.