Letting Go of Judgment
One of the components of being mindful is to pay attention to your experience without judging. That is because the act of judging an experience will cause the attention to be changed.
One way this happens is that what is judged positively will be attractive, while what is negative will be resisted. This attraction and resistance then changes the experience. Some aspects of the experience are amplified, namely that part of the experience that is generating the judgment. The decision to want one part of the experience or to not want another aspect of it draw attention. Other, less emotional aspects of the same experience will be over looked.
A second way that judgment alters experience occurs when the judgment assigns a label to something. "It is a bird" or "It is a sunset" tricks the mind into thinking that it knows what the experience is, so it moves on to the next experience. Yet no two birds are alike. And no two sunsets are alike. Letting go of the label allow for an attentiveness to experience that is richer and deeper.
Letting go of judgment occurs at the experience level of our awareness. Good judgment occurs within the decision about how to act because of our richer awareness of the experience. John Weaver, Psy.D.
