Judgment, Love, and Wholeness

A big part of loving (to me) is learning to (and making the effort to) let go of judgments of the one I love (and, by extention, progressively, of everyone). This involves unpacking my assignment of the label “bad” into its parts, such as:
a. I don’t like something
b. I can see (and usually articulate) that it has harmful effects
c. It violates my sense of ethics, aesthetics, etc.
d. I have unpleasant feelings about it
e. It embodies some personal issue I have trouble with.
f. etc.

For me this is often accompanied by seeing that there is more to it than that:
a. There is often some “good” that accompanies the “bad”
b. There are reasons for this bad happening, that can be viewed as more important than its badness, such as someone’s past or current traumas or restimulation
c. Other (often significant) people may feel very differently about it than I do.
d. etc.

So the judgment — the putting something in the category “bad” — is a thought-terminating cliche. It stops my thinking prior to a truly deep understanding of what’s going on, while creating a lot of distance between me and the “bad” person or thing, hindering my relationship with, dialogue with and affinity for it. It projects internal things (like my internal feelings of dissonance/upset) onto the thing itself (the sense that the thing itself IS dissonant/bad). And, if I act on my judgment of a person, that person often will feel unseen, unheard, disrespected, dismissed and other painful things.

So loving to me involves (among many other things) learning to get beyond my judgments — especially of badness — without losing my discernment and discrimination, by expanding that discernment to cover a wider territory of SEEING the fullness of what is.

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