Judgement Day....
Right before the Holidays, I got listing to a Marie Forleo's You Tube talk with Gabrielle Bernstein on the subject of judgement. Yes, judgement! We all have in one way or another been effected by it! I've been discovering that we must first need to take care of the self judgement that is within ourselves to be the shift that we want to see in the world. Like many American's I have too been effected by what I witness as being the worst pre Presidential Campaign with so many fingers being put on the other parties and calling each other out just because they didn't agree with each other. In a lot of ways the world has gotten better since JFK took office, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.
I just love the message of this talk that I discovered. My heart was singing with joy to go buy the book from the Amazon's website. Over the Holiday's I did indeed treat myself to this beautiful book. As I read the book, a light went off that I too have been working on my own self judgment with the many tools that Gabrielle speak about in the book from EFT (tapping), journaling, prayer to mediation. Most importantly, as the Buddha taught the principle of non attachment, non attachment, non attachment and to ask from forgiveness first from yourself then to spread the forgiveness onto all who have hurt you. There's a beautiful story in the book from a mother of a victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. It's a beautiful tear jerker sharing the beauty of the process and to promote hope and love onto others.
I got many wise insights from reading this book. The principles taught are not new. It's just that we are in a shift of great changes. We need to first look within ourselves to see what is not working for ourselves and be the light that we need to change the world. It's really up to ourselves to be the light, not to wait for others, family, the media, corporations, etc to do it for us. Self love is the answer. We must love our shadows to bring the light in and shine bright.
I just love the message of this talk that I discovered. My heart was singing with joy to go buy the book from the Amazon's website. Over the Holiday's I did indeed treat myself to this beautiful book. As I read the book, a light went off that I too have been working on my own self judgment with the many tools that Gabrielle speak about in the book from EFT (tapping), journaling, prayer to mediation. Most importantly, as the Buddha taught the principle of non attachment, non attachment, non attachment and to ask from forgiveness first from yourself then to spread the forgiveness onto all who have hurt you. There's a beautiful story in the book from a mother of a victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. It's a beautiful tear jerker sharing the beauty of the process and to promote hope and love onto others.
I got many wise insights from reading this book. The principles taught are not new. It's just that we are in a shift of great changes. We need to first look within ourselves to see what is not working for ourselves and be the light that we need to change the world. It's really up to ourselves to be the light, not to wait for others, family, the media, corporations, etc to do it for us. Self love is the answer. We must love our shadows to bring the light in and shine bright.
"Just witness it and trust that this is the first step toward healing," I say I explain that in order to truly heal our feelings of judgement, we must begin by healing our minds. We must acknowledge that attacking someone who has attacked us only creates more attack. If we want to free ourselves from this nasty cycle, we have to shine light on the darkness. The way to do this is to witness our judgmental thoughts.
The process of witnessing our darkness is a brave and sacred act of love. Being willing to accept the parts of our consciousness that are out of spiritual alignment makes us stronger.
When we take an honest inventory of the way we judge, we can become aware of the root cause of all our suffering: our separation from love. At our core we are loving, kind, whole, healthy, and compassionate people. But over the course of our lives we've separated from that love and wholeness. We've become fragmented beings with dark, scary parts. Range, anger, trauma, and painful memories contribute to a sense of dissociation. We become numb, frozen, and asleep. We shut down the power of our love and innocence in an attempt to protect ourselves from feeling our deepest, most shameful wounds. We've done the best we can to survive, and we're grown to rely on attack and fear the presence of love.
In many ways, judgment has been our greatest defense mechanism. We have used it to defend against our vulnerability. We fear that if we let our guard down and act compassionately and lovingly toward one another that we will be taken advantage of and will no longer be safe. This is totally understandable given the traumas we've experienced in the past all all the new traumatic events in the world. All we have to do is turn on the news and we're engulfed in the negativity of it all. So day after day, month after month, year after year we've built up a wall against the presence of love and instead grown to rely on judgment as our protector."
~Gabrielle Bernstein