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The Secret to Living Your True Life: Stop Judging Yourself !!!

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Do you want to discover your true life’s purpose? More ease? Maybe even more money? I have one simple answer, so simple you’ll push it away thinking that it could never work. Here it is:

Stop judging yourself. That’s it. End of story.

Oh, you have questions? Of course, just like me.

When you stop judging yourself, you can listen to inspiration. You can hear the voice of love, choice, wisdom and true direction. Or you can listen to self-judgment, a voice of attack, limits, smallness, and a voice that always threatens some misfortune, or just can’t help but point to cobwebs in your past. In the wisdom tradition of A Course in Miracles, it says “Your divided devotion has given you the two voices, and you must choose at which altar you want to serve.”

What does serving the voice of judgment get you? It’ s like inviting a bad houseguest into your living space, one that is noisy, rude, throwing things around and then complaining about the mess. I used to think that self-judgment was somehow a tool for staying sharp, getting ahead, not falling asleep at the wheel. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent, deciding, that while I’ve never been this age, or in this career, or on this exact leg of my journey, I knew how it should go, what should not be happening. I spent so much time lamenting my circumstances, that I had no real time or energy to actually investigate them. Self -judgment doesn’t keep you savvy. It keeps you ignorant and uninvolved with reality.

Self-judgment blocks your sense of true direction. You can’t hear the bird song when the tuba takes over. “Oh, you’ll never get anywhere, this isn’t good. You’ll never amount to anything. I can’t believe you’re this age and you still haven’t gotten it together.” But what if you were listening to a voice of trust and love instead? One that said, “I know you can do this. Take all the time you need. I believe in you. I know you have more strength than you can imagine. ”

This is the best piece of advice I can ever give you: Cultivate the voice of self- love inside you.

Listen to the angels of acceptance. Listen to your Buddha Nature. Listen to the smallest golden leaf on the aspen tree, your Aunt Sadie who bakes oatmeal cookies, Jesus, that rascal of forgiveness, your golden retriever. Listen to the exuberant river. Listen to Allah or Moses come down from the mountain with awe on his face. Listen to the poets Rumi or Kabir, Blake or Whitman. They are all saying one thing and one thing only: You are loved. You are loved. You have everything inside you. This moment will absolutely free you, if you free it from judgment.

Everyone struggles with self-judgment. Even one of the most famous peace leaders of our time, Gandhi, once said, “My most formidable opponent is a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi. With him I seem to have very little influence.” But where does self-judgment come from? Self judgment is often somebody’s inappropriate expectations or distorted opinion pressed down upon your innocence. It’s somebody’s lack of love for themselves, their own soul’s jaundice, poison, or ache that got foisted onto you. You didn’t know it was a misunderstanding. You believed the lie. You believed you were broken or doing it wrong. You believed what your soul could never believe. So you stopped listening to your own soul and allowed the lie to move in and buy furniture, home décor, an education and a lifestyle. Now it’s time to listen to your soul. Now it’s time to let go of the cracked and blackened mirror.

But maybe, you think that if you stopped judging yourself, you’d really slide down that hill. That’s also a lie. You will never grow into your greatest capacity under the manacles of judgment. Carl Rogers, the renowned Humanist psychologist, said “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

I’ll give you an example. Just before I wrote this piece, I’d planned to work on my new book. But I’m sick, with some kind of cold or virus or what really feels like an undiagnosed plague. Still, I sat in front of the computer, all sullen and determined. I was going to use my time wisely. “I don’t feel well,” whimpered a voice within. “Yeah, well, this is the time we have to write, so too bad, and maybe you should have gotten it together twenty years ago, so we wouldn’t need to rush now,” says the other voice. (By the way, no matter what your life looks like, the critic brings up the past and the “right usage” of time. It’s standard issue for the abusively inclined.) So I sat there, feeling sick and defeated as time rolled on. Then I had this thought: What would you feel like if you weren’t judging yourself right now? All of a sudden, this wave of tenderness came over me. I saw how I’d been practically holding my own head underwater, while trying to force genius, or at the very least focus. I saw my own innocence, this woman who does work too hard, who doesn’t always save her best energy for her creative times, who does have a wandering mind, and who really did feel as though she might have some new rendition of the Bubonic plague. I felt this wave of forgiveness come over me. Then, immediately, I had this wild urge to write, to write the beginnings of this piece as a matter of fact. And I felt awe, at the power of self-forgiveness.

Letting go of judgment didn’t mean I immediately ran to the refrigerator, ate every chocolate bar in my stash, drank a vase full of Merlot, and blew off all my deadlines, though maybe the thought did flit across my mind. Instead, letting go of judgment relaxed me. It gave me immediate comfort and peace. And from peace, I touched my natural desire to what was right for me in the moment.

Can you imagine not fighting yourself, belittling your own desires, besieging your own energy? Can you imagine encouraging yourself, supporting yourself, finding whatever tools and resources you needed, and giving them to yourself-- no questions asked? This is your lifetime. How do you want to live in it? In a duel to the end? Or in a duet to the end? I’m opting for the flute music.


reg,
ashok...
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