THE WISDOM OF WORDS - JUDGMENT

PREFACE: My husband was recently hospitalized and upon discharge his doctor ordered a hospital bed to help his breathing when he sleeps. This necessitated moving my office into another area at home to make room for the bed. Having moved everything I began the process of re-organizing my files, and lo and behold I found the following piece I had written one evening when I couldn't sleep. I looked at it with a judging eye thinking, who would want to read this, and started to throw it away. That little voice inside said, why not share it? Hmm, laughingly I thought "what for?" Knowing the importance of listening to my intuition, I decided what the heck…so here it is.

Sometimes a word just pops into my head. So it was with the word Judgment. When I focus on the word judgment what comes up for me is judging myself. Engaged in the process of creating content for a book I'm working on, reading what I had written, I started judging myself..."what will people think" (those were my mother's words, repeated over and over to me when I was growing up). As a child we lived in a small Califo
ia town and I would walk somewhere with my mother everyday. Always curious I would notice things and stop to look, or just feeling good I would skip along, and my mother would say, "What will people think...stop doing that...people are looking at you."

Thinking about judgment, in this sense, what I became aware of is that judgment is fear-based - a way of self-protecting from the perceived pain of potential rejection; a way to self-insulate and keep other people, places or things away.

While thinking about my own self-judgment as protection against rejection, the universe dropped in with a little blessing. In an attempt to distract myself from thinking about judgment, as I turned on the television a woman's voice was saying the words...Rejection is God's Protection. Thank you universe for always being here in loving and supportive ways...I love these little miracles.

My judgment lesson is that I can allow my self-judgment to stop me or propel me, the choice is mine. I believe that everything contains the power to be both creative and destructive, so it's not so much what it is, but what I choose to do with it. My lesson and my teaching came through the example of writing, a process that often requires editing (judging the content) to create a final product.

What I choose to take away from this is Compassion. I have compassion for my mother who was always judgmental of me. It was her need to protect me from her perceived fears. She did the best she could with what she knew growing up with the judgments that were placed on her. Even though she has left this earth, I send her love.

This reminds me of something my mentor/teacher, Charles Tebbetts, once said: "If you were born in someone else's body, and experienced everything that person experienced, in exactly the same order, you would be exactly like that person." Whenever I'm in an awkward situation with another person, those words automatically pop into my mind and turn what could have become a negative result into a positive one.

As a professional hypnotherapist I often share that thought with clients, especially those who are having issues with so-called difficult people. We discuss this before the session, review it during the session and utilize it as a post-hypnotic suggestion. It’s amazing how this simple statement resolves long standing or highly charged issues and opens the door to genuine communication and connection.

Ahh, CONNECTION, another word to focus on – but that will come later. Thanks for being here.

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