Refraining from judgement is one of the most powerful tools for psychological wellbeing and one of the most difficult to train your brain to do. Yesterday, I shared with you a Zen story, full of wisdom, about a Chinese farmer who refused to pass judgements on the value of events even as his neighbors did so. Again and again, his refraining from judgement demonstrated wisdom while his neighbors erroneously rushed to judgement.
In the quote of the day, "the ability to observe without evaluating" is lauded as the highest form of intelligence. In therapy, I have seen that the ability to become an observer of the events of your life and feel curiosity about what their value might be leads to an inner peace and to the joy that curiosity brings. Unfortunately, the downward spiral we can fall into after an event occurs often begins at the level of the subconscious with a hair-trigger evaluation and then an automatic thought. Since this is all happening at the subconscious level, we don't have access to our evaluation or our automatic thoughts. Their origins of our automatic thoughts often come from our childhood or past experiences. People often carry with them their playlist of automatic thoughts and, once their playlist is triggered, off they go into a downward spiral. These automatic thoughts are also called cognitive distortions. Through research the common cognitive distortions have been identified (more information about cognitive distortions can be found on this site). The ability to observe an event that happens to you without evaluating can be used to halt the downward spiral that results from cognitive distortions. Next time you can sense yourself spiraling, ask yourself a couple questions, do I actually know what this means for me or am I reacting to what I THINK it will mean and what's the thought or evaluation I had that is making me feel this way? Once you've done that, try to back up and test how it feels to tell yourself that you're going to wait to see how things turn out before you evaluate, the highest form of intelligence. Take a pause and refuse to judge.
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