Brittani with Grace: Judgement
Contributed by Brittani Grace
Hello everybody! Welcome to my column. Each month I will draw a Major Arcana tarot card which represents one of many possible paths to follow. Major Arcana cards represent the archetypical themes of life, presenting the overall possible experiences.
Deck: Mermaid Tarot By Leeza Robertson Illustrations by Julie Card: #20 Judgement
Judgement; It is a voice of lies. The voice can take many forms, sound like many different people over a lifetime, and turn into our own belief system. Where does it come from? By observing the words of others around us and in turn, absorbing a meaning we think applies. Living by this code of what we think others view as acceptable can be crucial and life preserving.
When we feel as though we don’t live up to these “acceptable” standards we are capable of completely drowning in a wave of shame, guilt, and fear; sentenced by the false Judge presiding over our brains. Yes, discernment is absolutely important; but when does the line between Judgement and Discernment start to fade and cross from healthy decisions into plain cruelty, swallowing up our sanity and torturing our minds?
I know that I can judge myself incredibly harshly. I set a perfectionist level of being and expect myself to achieve it at every moment. It’s as though I am in constant competition with myself, and with the world. While I excel at helping others to understand that this is unfair to themselves and that they deserve the peace of understanding that doing our best changes from moment to moment, I will then turn around and berate myself for a mistake or not feeling as though I achieved the highest level of perfection for that moment. It’s exhausting. Thankfully, this path has brought me to the breaking point of deciding “enough is enough!”
Judgement can come so easily and so fast. It even sneaks into our thoughts hiding in the form of a single word, “should.” Should implies that there is a certain set of ideas that we are required to follow, and required to live by. Should says that what we are feeling, thinking, or doing in the moment is wrong and goes against a natural state of being safe. If we were to break it down simplistically; in the end, what happened was, a decision was made, acted upon and a result was produced.
Switching from something so pinpointed on “correctness” to something much more open, such as “could” re-opens the possibilities of any single moment. Our emotional belief of what that result means and how it affects us gives a way to either berate or learn; live by a voice meant to keep you feeling trapped, or set yourself free and choose to offer yourself grace while learning to understand what was being felt.
What lessons suddenly arrived when the awareness appeared? How can this information be applied to our daily peace? We get to decide if we are going to do something different than the previous moment before and produce a result that we feel be[er about. Time is constantly flowing with every breath and every decision we make.
Sometimes, old coping habits come back around and we suddenly catch ourselves in the midst of the deep corners of our minds(egos). We slide right back to our safety zone and we process. Even when we feel we are not “being productive” by returning to comfort, we absolutely are. Sometimes these habits appear for the sole purpose of having us slow down and evaluate where we are in this time. It allows us to see and focus on where we were the last time we slid into survival mode to see how far we have come since then. It gives us time to be aware of how we are actually feeling.
In a cloud of despair, I had such a moment of awareness. It was a tremendous amount of clarity in a time where I sat still and connected the web of many experiences with such understanding of personal-projection behaviors, individual and shared habitual pa[erns, focused “flashlight mindset”, acceptance, and mirroring concepts. Seeing these webs connect led to tears as I realized how severely I was berating myself over the fact that I had turned to the comfort of hiding. In that moment I released the cruel observer in my mind, and just like a pressure valve, I physically felt my energy exhale.
The harsh reality of judgement happens to all of us. It just does. Whether we are judging other people or judging ourselves, the most important thing is to be open to the awareness of when it is happening. We can then decide to embrace all the remarkable things we’ve overcome and choose not to steal our own joy from moment to moment.
Release the pressure from yourself, and just show up for your part, whatever that means.