23. Self-Judgment, Tara
Self-Judgment and Self-Compassion
Tara: During the last week or so, we've been looking at thoughts and feelings through the lens of mindfulness. Today, we’ll explore how mindfulness can help unhook you from one cluster of thoughts and feelings that can be particularly difficult, and that’s self-judgment. You might have found, even during this mindfulness training, that there’s been a tendency to put yourself down in some way. Maybe you've been critical about your level of effort, or maybe you’ve felt you weren’t doing it correctly. Maybe you’ve felt that you're falling short in some way. This tendency to not feel good enough can arise in every domain of our life - how we're performing at work, the quality of our parenting, our desirability as an intimate partner, and in the deepest way, even our worthiness as a human.
I like the way cartoonist Jules Pfeiffer puts it. He says, “I grew up to have my father’s looks, my father's speech patterns, my father’s posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.” If you have a tendency to get down on yourself, please know that you’re not alone. As we've discussed, a key part of our survival strategy is a negativity bias. The brain is inclined towards focusing on and remembering what seems bad or wrong, and this negativity bias gets turned inward. We fixate on the times we feel we've fallen short. Being at war with ourselves is a pervasive form of emotional suffering.
It’s something I have come to call the trance of unworthiness, and it’s a trance because we don’t realize how much a sense of deficiency - that undercurrent of “not enough” - influences our entire life experience. It gets in the way of our capacity to be comfortable with others, our freedom to be creative or take risks at work, our capacity to just relax and enjoy the moment. Sometimes, the trance is thick, and we can feel like something is really wrong with us, that we're damaged goods. At other times, it’s that nagging sense of needing to improve ourselves.
One of my favorite prayers goes like this: “Dear God, so far today, I've done all right. I haven’t gossiped, been greedy, grumpy, or overindulgent, and I'm very thankful for that, but in a few minutes, God, I'm gonna get out of bed, and from then on, I’m probably gonna need a lot of help.” The key to stepping out of the trance of unworthiness is mindfulness - being aware of when the inner judge is activated. When you learn to pause and recognize “Oh, there’s the judging mind again,” you're interrupting a pattern that’s been moving through you for most likely many years and beginning to decondition it.
The power of mindfulness to free you from self-judgment will increase as you learn to see the pain that comes with the judging, how much tension, or anxiety, or depression, or shame our self-judgment causes. With mindfulness, when you note that, you can simply say to yourself, “This hurts. I’m hurting myself with judging.” When we bring a mindful presence to the pain of judging, a natural compassion for ourselves begins to arise. It's a feeling of tenderness and of care in the face of a difficult, often lifelong habit. This self-compassion is the antidote to self-judging. It’s what helps us to wake up from being identified as a deficient human.
When we feel self-compassion, we're no longer living in the identity of the judge or the deficient self. We’ve opened to a larger, kinder sense of being. At those moments, when you're feeling self-compassion, you can see the truth about yourself. You can even see your imperfections, but without that added toxic layer of self aversion. It takes practice if we're going to loosen the entrenched habit of self-judgment.
We’ve been judging ourselves for a long time, and undoing that requires seeing and recognizing the judge again and again, but you can trust that every time you become mindful of self-judgment and pause, every time you recognize this cause of pain in your life and feel a sense of self-compassion, you’re rewiring your neural circuitry in a profoundly transforming way. So, we’ll continue with our basic practice together and include the arising of self-judgment as an opportunity to awaken and free ourselves through mindfulness.
Please find a comfortable posture, allowing your body to settle and your mind to be at ease, and then, simply bring a relaxed and focused attention to your primary anchor of the breath or body sensations, taking some moments to collect your attention and deepen presence.
Continue to be mindful of your primary anchor, and when you find your attention has been distracted or called away by thoughts, simply note “thinking, thinking” and gently return. If the thinking is charged or persistent, you might refine your notation - “worried,” “obsessing,” “upset” - and notice if there's also self-judgment. Often, along with negative thinking, there's a layer of self-judgment, and if you notice that, name that too with a kind attention - “judging, judging” - and then pause, give yourself time to simply notice and allow the feelings that arise with self-judgment to be held in a non-judging attention, and then you can gently return again to your anchor.
In a similar way, if strong feelings arise, bring a presence to them, notice what you're experiencing - anxiety, anger, fear - and as with thoughts, be aware if there’s a layer of self-judgment that comes with the feelings. In this way, you're being mindful of feelings, and also how you’re relating to the feelings. If it’s anxiety, can you accept its presence with kindness, or is there an element of judging yourself for the anxiety, as if it shouldn’t be there? Again, if you notice self-judgment, name it, and then pause, allowing yourself time to be present with the feelings and sensations that arise with self-judgment, and then gently return again to your breath or general body sensations.
Continuing to notice what’s happening as thoughts and feelings arise, noticing if there’s also that layer of self-judgment. And, for these last moments, simply resting with your anchor, relaxing, feeling the simplicity of moment-to-moment presence. We’d like to invite you to continue informally through the day, noticing when judgment arises. When it does, just name it and pause. In time, this will become a spontaneous noticing and create much greater ease and freedom in your life.
© Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield
Reprinted by permission.
I like the way cartoonist Jules Pfeiffer puts it. He says, “I grew up to have my father’s looks, my father's speech patterns, my father’s posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.” If you have a tendency to get down on yourself, please know that you’re not alone. As we've discussed, a key part of our survival strategy is a negativity bias. The brain is inclined towards focusing on and remembering what seems bad or wrong, and this negativity bias gets turned inward. We fixate on the times we feel we've fallen short. Being at war with ourselves is a pervasive form of emotional suffering.
It’s something I have come to call the trance of unworthiness, and it’s a trance because we don’t realize how much a sense of deficiency - that undercurrent of “not enough” - influences our entire life experience. It gets in the way of our capacity to be comfortable with others, our freedom to be creative or take risks at work, our capacity to just relax and enjoy the moment. Sometimes, the trance is thick, and we can feel like something is really wrong with us, that we're damaged goods. At other times, it’s that nagging sense of needing to improve ourselves.
One of my favorite prayers goes like this: “Dear God, so far today, I've done all right. I haven’t gossiped, been greedy, grumpy, or overindulgent, and I'm very thankful for that, but in a few minutes, God, I'm gonna get out of bed, and from then on, I’m probably gonna need a lot of help.” The key to stepping out of the trance of unworthiness is mindfulness - being aware of when the inner judge is activated. When you learn to pause and recognize “Oh, there’s the judging mind again,” you're interrupting a pattern that’s been moving through you for most likely many years and beginning to decondition it.
The power of mindfulness to free you from self-judgment will increase as you learn to see the pain that comes with the judging, how much tension, or anxiety, or depression, or shame our self-judgment causes. With mindfulness, when you note that, you can simply say to yourself, “This hurts. I’m hurting myself with judging.” When we bring a mindful presence to the pain of judging, a natural compassion for ourselves begins to arise. It's a feeling of tenderness and of care in the face of a difficult, often lifelong habit. This self-compassion is the antidote to self-judging. It’s what helps us to wake up from being identified as a deficient human.
When we feel self-compassion, we're no longer living in the identity of the judge or the deficient self. We’ve opened to a larger, kinder sense of being. At those moments, when you're feeling self-compassion, you can see the truth about yourself. You can even see your imperfections, but without that added toxic layer of self aversion. It takes practice if we're going to loosen the entrenched habit of self-judgment.
We’ve been judging ourselves for a long time, and undoing that requires seeing and recognizing the judge again and again, but you can trust that every time you become mindful of self-judgment and pause, every time you recognize this cause of pain in your life and feel a sense of self-compassion, you’re rewiring your neural circuitry in a profoundly transforming way. So, we’ll continue with our basic practice together and include the arising of self-judgment as an opportunity to awaken and free ourselves through mindfulness.
Please find a comfortable posture, allowing your body to settle and your mind to be at ease, and then, simply bring a relaxed and focused attention to your primary anchor of the breath or body sensations, taking some moments to collect your attention and deepen presence.
Continue to be mindful of your primary anchor, and when you find your attention has been distracted or called away by thoughts, simply note “thinking, thinking” and gently return. If the thinking is charged or persistent, you might refine your notation - “worried,” “obsessing,” “upset” - and notice if there's also self-judgment. Often, along with negative thinking, there's a layer of self-judgment, and if you notice that, name that too with a kind attention - “judging, judging” - and then pause, give yourself time to simply notice and allow the feelings that arise with self-judgment to be held in a non-judging attention, and then you can gently return again to your anchor.
In a similar way, if strong feelings arise, bring a presence to them, notice what you're experiencing - anxiety, anger, fear - and as with thoughts, be aware if there’s a layer of self-judgment that comes with the feelings. In this way, you're being mindful of feelings, and also how you’re relating to the feelings. If it’s anxiety, can you accept its presence with kindness, or is there an element of judging yourself for the anxiety, as if it shouldn’t be there? Again, if you notice self-judgment, name it, and then pause, allowing yourself time to be present with the feelings and sensations that arise with self-judgment, and then gently return again to your breath or general body sensations.
Continuing to notice what’s happening as thoughts and feelings arise, noticing if there’s also that layer of self-judgment. And, for these last moments, simply resting with your anchor, relaxing, feeling the simplicity of moment-to-moment presence. We’d like to invite you to continue informally through the day, noticing when judgment arises. When it does, just name it and pause. In time, this will become a spontaneous noticing and create much greater ease and freedom in your life.
© Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield
Reprinted by permission.