Finding Your Way from Judgment to Discernment
You aspire to live a life of integrity. You feel confident about a set of ethical standards to which you adhere. At the same time, you notice yourself get angry and judgmental when others don't follow your principles. It's confusing because you don't want to judge others, yet there has to be some moral standard, doesn't there?!
From the framework of Mindful Compassionate Dialogue, we can extract ourselves from the impossible job of deciding who is moral and who isn't. Rather than defining morality around your opinions, you can engage in careful discernment about what really serves life. This isn’t easy. It’s complex. It won’t offer the perceived security of thinking you know what’s right. But it will open your heart and expand your mind. It will ask you to slow down and examine key questions like, “For whom might this be life-serving and for whom might it not be?” As you examine what needs are met or unmet in a given situation, you will be called into creativity with the question, “What strategies or actions would care for all needs in this situation?” or, “What can I contribute here and now?”
Judgment is a sort of protection against hopelessness or insecurity, but the cost is high. Judgment costs you your heart— your sense of connection to All That Is. Let judgment be your signal to pause. Check in with fear, grief, or hurt and then ask yourself what universal needs are at stake for you and others in the situation at hand. What universal needs is the other person attempting to meet or align with when they behave a certain way?
Choosing to discern what’s life-serving rather than engaging by labeling and judging makes space for grief rather than anger, for negotiation rather than controlling, and for calling people in rather than excluding others.
Practice
Take a moment now to reflect on a situation in which you engaged in judgments or labels rather than curiosity about what is life-serving. Using the needs list, discern as best you can whose and what needs were met and unmet in that situation.