What is Living Beyond Judgment?

When the senses contact sense objects, a person experiences cold or heat, pleasure or pain. The experiences are fleeting; they come and go. Bear them patiently, Arjuna. Those who are unaffected by these changes, who are the same in pleasure and pain, are truly wise and fit for immortality.

Bhagavad Gita

The guiding principle of nearly every religion is to live without judgment. People like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Jesus, the Buddha, Mother Teressa, and many more have exemplified this throughout time. They see good and evil, right and wrong, and act out of a place of love regardless.

So what is living without judgment? When I first set out to practice this, I would meditate, understand from a scholars perspective that actions were just actions and it was I that was labeling them as good or bad, beautiful or ugly, and then go for a walking meditation around the block looking at people, animals, and plants, focusing on not giving them any sort of label.

It was only after I had been meditating on the feelings of self-compassion and love (while I was curled around a toilet in a Miami hotel, enjoying food poisoning from the sushi I had eaten the night before) when it hit me… Living without judgment isn’t being in a state where I have no judgments about people or events, for example at this moment, I will have judgments of the sushi spewing back out of me. Those judgmental thoughts will naturally arise. Living without judgment contains two parts. The first is to acknowledge when your judging mind is at work. The second is to emotionally and mentally remain open to anything that happens, and having a loving, welcoming feeling toward it.

For example, if I’m about to hit a golf shot, my goal will be to hit it as close to the pin as possible. Sometimes I’ll hit it close, and other times I may hit it in the water or a sand trap. Regardless of where I hit it, my emotions and mindest should be to lovingly accept whatever my new reality is and move on to the next moment. For you, the goal could be to have a flawless pitch to a client coming up where you get their business, create a profitable ad campaign or even something like not trip while you’re walking to your car with your groceries. Whatever happens, happens.

Fortunately, we have plenty of opportunities to practice this throughout our everyday lives. When Krishna, the God instructing King Arjuna how to live a more spiritual life in the real world, says to remain unaffected by hot/cold and pleasure/pain, you can practice this. It’s the middle of winter and it’s freezing in most places throughout the country. When you’re walking to work, to lunch, or to get coffee, instead of tensing up and saying “holy shit it’s freezing,” try instead to embrace the cold. Welcome it in. You’ll find that it becomes a lot more comfortable to bear when you are in charge, lovingly welcoming it into your experience. The same goes for heat in the summer or by a fire. Next time you bite into a delicious donut, take that first sip of coffee in the morning or get into bed do the same. Embrace the good feelings, however, don’t let them take hold. This doesn’t mean don’t enjoy the experience, but rather, lovingly relax into it, feeling the good emotions. Bear both sensations patiently and watch from your mental seat of awareness.

As you play with this more you’ll see how to scramble toward the good sensations and away from the bad. Over time, however, you’ll understand how these reactions (often from years of subconscious conditioning) are just decisions you’ve made, how neither is truly real. You’ll notice that in doing this, you’ll find more happiness in your lower moments and see what is conditioning you to make decisions to move toward pleasure and away from pain, making you more in control of your life.

The main point of living without judgment is to not beat yourself up or applaud yourself for what you’ve done, but to instead lovingly accept what happened, and move on to the next moment (which may be to solve a problem that has arisen or to move on to the next goal). Regardless of the scenario, I promise if you approach your problems like this, you’ll be tackling them from a more centered, happy, and creative space.