Find the Gap, Lose the Judgement
"It is the inner speech that spins the delusions that cause suffering. Inner speech causes us to be angry with our enemies and to form dangerous attachments to our loved ones. Inner speech causes all of life’s problems. It constructs fear and guilt, anxiety and depression.”
— Ajahn Brahm in Happiness Through Meditation
Grappling with our inner critic; that voice that judges yourself and others is the topic at hand.
Of all the marvelous array of thoughts and obsessions that are possible, negative judgments about ourselves and others are the mind’s most prominent compulsive obsession. Negative and reactive judgments can arise instantaneously and in regard to almost anything. The mind’s ability to generate such judgments is very powerful, because it’s working off old neural programming. A lot of our repetitive judgmental themes are connected to earlier life events regarding others or often rooted in self-judgments or events that happened earlier in our life. This is why it is a good practice to investigate our judgments. It is a brave task as it inevitably will lead you to your own wounds, traumas, and memories of judgment being inflicted upon you. Not to mention that if you allow critical judgments to remain unexamined, they can come to occupy many of your thoughts and emotions, and even your dreams. Your judging mind blocks the energetic flow from your life, it is like an anchor that holds you down and does not allow your life to flourish and become abundant.
Your judgments are the inner speech that is consistently creating a “me vs other” scenario. Think about a recent interaction with a coworker, stranger, family member, partner etc. Were you aware of the constant stream of judgments in your head? The more we watch our minds do this, the more likely we will be able to halt this process and relax our “me vs other” approach. If we continue to let the judgmental mind override our day and interactions with the world around us, we begin to believe our judgments and then we attach to them. This can lead to acting from a small self; a self that is prideful righteous and arrogant. Needing to prove our judgments are accurate, we become rigid and our scope of awareness shrinks smaller. We then experience resentment, anger, anxiety, guilt… To break this habitual pattern we need to notice. Notice your thoughts. Are they really true? Do they have a felt sense in your body? Where are they rooted from? Can you breathe out and find space? Can you find a gap in your judging mind? Breathe and reboot…
Search for the gap
Our addiction to the grasping tendency of mind, the tendency of mind to judge and stick to those judgments, causes us to overlook the spaces between; the spaces around those thoughts and judgments. Without finding this space we miss out on a lot of subtle beauty and meaning. Neglecting these fluid spaces within the mindstream contributes to a general tendency to over-identify with the contents of our mind, and to assume that we are the originator and custodian of our judgments and thoughts. The troublesome equation “I = my thoughts about reality” creates a narrowed sense of self, along with an anxiety about our thoughts as territory we have to defend.
The gap is a profound concept that is not easy to grasp. Yes, it is possible that you have experienced it at one time or another, as you go about your hectic life. The gap is the silent space between thoughts. It is the space where the mind stands still. No thoughts exist in this space. Hence, it is in the gap that you can experience present moment awareness. And since it seems more than half of our thinking mind is judging mind, the gap between judging thoughts might be where the nectar is. We have not been aware of these spaces because our consciousness has been so mesmerized by experience and conditioned to identify with form that it does not become aware of inner space. Always trying to go from one unique and lively experience to the next, to collect an array of colorful stories, to find that thing that makes YOU different and special… What if we drop that narrative and sincerely look at this addictive grasping nature. We are not here to rule the world, we are not here to be somebody big, we are a small part of something much larger than this self, and that can be incredibly liberating if you allow it to be. Stop defending your small self and your judgments. See if you can find the gap, the space between your grasping judging mind. Stop trying to prove something. From cultivating this present moment awareness, inner wisdom and joy can arise.
