It happened like this. I was in the kitchen and irritated that Diane wasn’t putting things away the way I would. My thought was, “She should do it the way I do.” And I wasn’t liking her at that moment.

I realized that judgment is my ego’s way of pushing someone else away and decreasing the love and connection we normally experience. In fact the statement, “She should do it my way,” is a denial of the reality of the way she is and puts me in this narrow angry box of fighting for the rightness of my position to the detriment of what I actually want.

I want the connection and love I have with Diane and I don’t want to live in a world in which everyone is exactly like me – how boring! But my ego/mind seems dedicated to not giving me what I really want.

As I looked deeper, I realized I was already feeling frustrated with the lack of progress in the projects I was working on. And that this “helplessness” in regard to the actualization of my intentions, brought up a deep fear, the solution to which has been my propensity to keep things in order, to have “a place for everything and everything in it’s place”. My solution to my discomfort with chaos.

So rather than just notice my fear of chaos, I judged Diane for a little disorder, making her wrong, me right, and me loosing the love and connection between us. The price I pay for judging and being right!

This is my notion of how judgment always works. Something in yourself that is not complete and you are not neutral and unattached to, gets triggered by outside circumstance and you judge it or them and push it/them away form you. “That is not part of me,” you say. It is the pushing away and the loss of affinity that distinguishes judgment from discernment.

Discernment is a way of recognizing distinctions and making choices that can define who you are choosing to be and the life you are choosing to live. Judgment is the negative side of that same process. And they have two very distinct accompanying experiences – one is fulfillment and satisfaction and the other is only righteous alienation

May we all be letting go of the suffering judging brings.