400 Days of Surrender — Day 22: On judging others
400 Days of Surrender — Day 22: On judging others
New to this series? You can find Day 1 and why I’m writing this here.
Today, I thought I’ll write about surrender as the first viewing of my flat unexpectedly happened and it dawned on me that I will really be leaving this place that I’ve called home and there’s no going back.
I felt constriction for a moment and then reminded that this will make me free of having to be here and hence open up all the possibilities that will be unfolding in front of me because of me giving the place up.
It’s so easy for us to focus on what could go wrong, on the downside, which makes us blind for all the possibilities that giving up something we love will open up. Yes, they are uncertain but uncertainty just means we don’t know. It could get worse — whatever that means — but it could also get much much better.
We focus on the negative apparently three times as much as on the positive. Or we weigh the negative/loss three times as strongly as the positive/gains. It’s a survival driven bias that makes sense when it’s about life and death but not for most or all people that are reading these lines.
I randomly bumped into a friend in the park and I ended up accompanying him for part of his daily 15,000 steps journey. I actually had a few things on my to do list before travelling tomorrow but I surrendered to meeting him and enjoying a deep conversation with him which ended up being around judgement.
What I have come to realise is that when we judge others we actually judge ourselves. His particular story was about a girl that likes wealthy man (so called gold digger) and his friend judging her for that. We judge others because it makes us feel superior and hence it makes us feel better about ourselves.
But what we might not realise is that when we judge others, we constrain ourselves by believing one should or cannot do x or y. We thereby unconsciously constrain our own freedom to be because we are not only judging ourselves but are also afraid of the judgement of others even further constraining our freedom of what we can do. We are creating a walled garden of shoulds and have tos that we have to live in.
And it’s the very opposite of what we want which is freedom to be ourselves and be able to do what we want — and when we judge that’s what we are taking away from us. Yes, we might feel good in the moment but it’s like an anaconda slowly and secretly but increasingly tightly wrapping herself around us — with life getting more and more difficult. It really is like getting drunk. It feels good when we do it but then the painful hangover comes.
And the more we judge the tighter the grip on our freedom. And to make matters worse, when we judge we are also in a negative state vs in a state of love and so we not only constrict our freedom how to live but also the frequency that we live in which depresses our quality of life and experience.
And when we judge we always judge from our point of view which is just that: our point of view. We don’t know why the person is doing x or y, why they feel the need and we can observe ourselves doing the very same thing but in another area of life. Maybe we have a hard time getting up in the morning (me), maybe we are worried about not being appreciated or understood (used to be me), maybe …
We are all a product of our experiences and that influences how we see the world. If someone does something that does not make sense to us you can be damn sure they are doing it for a reason — that you just might not grasp because you live in a different world. Not a better one, a different one.
The less you judge, the less you will love and the more beautiful your life will feel and become. It’s really funny how life works. You get what you give. ✨
Continue to Day 23: On being attacked.
This is a repost of my Instagram series of 400 Days of Surrender that I started in September 2020. If you want to skip ahead, you can find all posts here. If you wonder who I am, check out my website. Always excited to hear from you. ❤️