How to Practice with Fear and Judgment
Now, more than ever, it is essential that we maintain a personal spiritual practice. Relative to the framework of Mindful Compassionate Dialogue (MCD), this means cultivating consistent access to the 4 Fruits: loving-kindness, compassion, wise action, and agency. Your state of consciousness matters. When you are grounded in care and non-judgment, you are a contribution to the whole.
Allowing fear to take over blocks your access to the 4 Fruits, and disconnects you from yourself and others you wish to love and care for. The first and most important practice is to remain grounded in your care. This means constructing supportive conditions, and having enough presence to watch fear when it arises—rather than being subsumed by it.
Thus, I continually encourage daily meditation and mindfulness practices. Find what is easeful and joyful for you to engage in. When you engage in practices that offer an immediate sense of well-being, you will naturally maintain consistency.
Perhaps the most common form that fear takes is judgment. When you entertain judgmental thoughts or express them openly, you have momentarily contracted into a fear state masquerading as anger, righteous indignation, or moralism. Pause! Say to yourself, “I have been caught by fear. My commitment to care and compassion is more powerful than fear.”
Then, go to core MCD skills. Ask yourself what you deeply care about with regard to the person or situation you are judging. Look for the deepest value or need present for you. Rest your attention here until you can feel the power of the need itself, and your commitment to it.
At this point, you are standing on a precipice. You are ready to take a step and stand firmly in love; the power it offers you, and the whole. Witness your fear from this place, without letting it trigger thoughts of judgment and doom.
This may be a challenging practice. You are asking yourself to trust a new way of relating to your experience—and to life—that doesn't include intellectual analysis, labeling, and predicting.
As you build trust in standing firm in your care, old habits of mind may present resistance. You might hear yourself having thoughts like: "This is foolish, I can’t just ignore that what’s happening is wrong!" "This is a waste of time. My peace isn’t preventing harm." "Why should I try to come from care, when others are not. It’s too late anyway." Arguing back and forth with these thoughts will not help you to be of service. Interrupt these thoughts. With warmth and compassion, recognize these voices as a form of reactivity and acknowledge the fear from which they are arising. Remind yourself of basic relative truths such as:
Responding with judgment and anger to violence and injustice is actually participation in that which you oppose.
Repetitive cycles of violence and division in our world need new responses. New, creative, and wise actions arise out of expansive states of love and care. Love is the protest of these times… a refusal to believe there is any power greater.
A new response requires every one of us to stretch beyond the norm of our day to day lives and participate more fully in communion with community—inviting others in, and maintaining a steadiness together.
These relative truths, you already know. Keep them in your awareness and ask yourself, “How will I reach for others outside my circle today and offer love and care?”
Practice
After taking three centering breaths:
Take a moment to bring any recent trigger into your awareness. Identify judgment thoughts that may be present. Say hello to the fear underneath. Notice exactly where it lives in your body. Ask yourself what you care most about under all of this. Let your attention rest there until you can feel the gift of that universal need/value. From a groundedness in what you care about, ask yourself what action—however small—you would like to take to tend to that need.
For example, if you identify the need for equity in the world, you might ask yourself to offer something to someone who has less than you. If you identify the need for safety in the world, you might ask yourself how you can contribute to safety in your home, neighborhood, workplace, or larger community.
