I spent a life time living under this rule of this or that.  You are right or wrong, this situation is right or wrong, this feeling is right or wrong.  It created so much suffering towards my self and to the relationships around me.

One of the gifts that I have discovered in these last few years, is that right and wrong don’t really ever fully exist.  Yes, there are societal structures of how we operate and that maintains that we can live together safely.  But if I judge the other in this binary way, I will lose people, relationships and parts of myself by the rigidity of this thinking.

I can see that, previously, if a friend behaved in a way that I thought was “wrong”, I would isolate them from me, judging the whole of them as “wrong”. I didn’t feel safe to trust other parts of them that I termed “good” because of this flawed behaviour.  So, my relationships had categories of safe & unsafe.  I found this really interesting, I could see the repeated behaviour and so I started to shine some attention on it.  What I could see was that this external representation of how I viewed and judged people, was an internal story.

I could see that this binary thinking of right and wrong was how I was judging different parts of me.  Ways of behaving which I was ashamed of, I termed wrong but this overshadowed anything that showed up in the good category because it couldn’t be really trusted. It was so interesting to see that  this rigidity and judgement that I  held myself in prison by, I reflected out into my relationships.  I could see and can see that, a lot of the need to categorize a person or situation, is to make it known and an idea of safe.  What I am becoming more comfortable with, is that every part of me or situation is made up of multiple shades, some are pleasant  & some not as pleasant.  If I dismiss the whole because of a perceived wrong doing, I lose everything.

I am becoming more forgiving of the parts of me that are unskilful and that allows me to be more forgiving of the parts of others that are unskilful.  When I hold my humanness in compassion and forgiveness, it softens my experience.  It allows me to make mistakes, to learn from them hopefully and it helps me to forgive the other.

When I meet someone now who is being judgmental, I think to myself “ouch, that must be sore to be inside that space”. I can empathize in our human journey.

Aileen xxx