As I went out to lunch from work, I found myself obsessing about getting a good parking place when I came back. I wanted to hurry up with my lunch so that I would beat the majority of the lunch crowd back, and increase my chances of a good place.
Then I caught myself, and started beating up on myself. "Why am I obsessing about a stupid parking place? What's the matter with me? Don't I have anything better to do than worry about if I am going to have to walk a few more feet from the car to the door? God, what a trivial mind I have!", etc., etc
Then another shift happened - I started noticing myself. "Oh, I'm someone who sometimes obsesses about getting a good parking place. I'm someone who occasionally beats himself up because of harsh judgments. Isn't that interesting? I wonder why I do those things?" I found myself now being more curious than angry, and started to muse on the implications of what I had just experienced about myself.
Thinking about this, I realized that when I was judging myself, I was repeating stories from a lot of beliefs I have stored in my brain, ready for moments like this. The beliefs are always the same - they do not vary, and they do not yield easily to evidence to the contrary. But when I started focusing on what was actually happening before me, it became obvious that I hadn't been experiencing myself or my surroundings at all - I was living from a little negative fantasy world about what was happening "out there". When I turned my attention to what was actually happening, I started to notice new things. I was tacitly acknowledging that I did not already know what I would find, that the results were unpredictable, and that they could change at any moment. My experience, not my beliefs, demanded my attention if I wanted to know the truth.
As I mulled over my revelation, I thought about these two ways of relating to the world - judgment and experience. I quickly saw that I preferred experience over judgment for many very practical reasons. Coming from my judgmental stories meant that I was not in touch with the real world, that I was living in fantasy, and that I wouldn't even know it when I was wrong. That could create many embarrassing moments, as well as hinder myself from meeting my own needs. When I focused on experience, I found I was more open to learning new things, to correct beliefs I was carrying, and I felt more alive because my source of information was constantly moving, not static. There was nothing wrong with being judgmental if I wanted - it wouldn't make me a "bad" person for doing so - but living from my experience just made a lot more sense. Judgment was more dumb than bad.
I think that shame comes from believing in judgment. When our focus is on what is, there are no longer shoulds or shouldn't, there is just what is. There is no judgment out there in the world, there are no rights or wrongs, goods or bads; there is only sun, air, trees, people doing what they do, roads in the condition they are in, life behaving like life. All the judgments, shoulds, and shouldn'ts are riding around in the little heads perched on top of our shoulders, and no where else.
This strikes me as a good reason to befriend reality, to connect with what is, to continually take our queues from the continuing experience we are immersed in - in doing so, we can live in a world much bigger and more alive than the world inside our heads.
No comments:
Post a Comment