A lot of my personal growth and breaking out of ego thought has been directly tied to the process of removing judgement of myself and others. Today I wanted to talk about this from a philosophical standpoint and explain why I feel that judgmental behaviors and patterns are so toxic. I realize not everyone will agree, but anyway more perspective is always welcome and hopefully sharing mine will expand the perspective of others as well. Without further ado, why I stopped judging myself and others:
1.) It lacks compassion.
I feel that as fear is the opposite of love, judgement is the opposite of compassion. When we judge anyone it is a reflection of our own inability to find the compassion to understand them. Everything won't always make sense to us and we can't change everyone's beliefs or toxic behaviors and we also can't condone behaviors that inhibit the free will of others, but if we approach these situations with compassion instead of judgement, I have found that the other parties involved are often much more inclined to hear my perspective and many times we find a mutual understanding. This brings me to the next point.
2.) It's perspective based.
We are often quick to judge others and those of us prone to judge ourselves most harshly of all will understand this very deeply. Just because we disagree with someone and can't understand why they do something doesn't automatically make our view the correct one. I often have to check my own ego when discussing things like broken political systems and concepts of right and wrong. We all have our own moral compass, and with greater self awareness it becomes much easier to follow. It can often feel like "losing" when we are proven wrong or we discover a flaw in our own logic, which brings me to the conclusion and why we shouldn't be so quick to judge anyone.
3.) Life isn't a competition.
I feel that ultimately everyone wants to just live and be happy. I realize there are people that will argue with that statement for the sake of being contradictory, but I don't really care because if you are seriously going to argue that you don't want to be happy then you aren't paying attention to this post anyway. When we focus on ourselves and stop finding faults in others or perceived ways in how they have wronged us, we can focus more on understanding ourselves and our own inability to make peace with the world around us. If we all want to be happy and just exist, we don't need to focus on taking that away from someone else to achieve it. It's not a better than or less than situation when it comes to living. Compassion fills the void. Namaste.
Free use image from Pixabay.