“Day to day, person to person, moment to moment, our judgmental thoughts must stop. This is not a simple task. We must continuously challenge the belief that we need judgmental thoughts to protect ourselves, prevail, and prosper in a chaotic, hostile universe. We don’t. Certainly, we need to evaluate situations, look at people’s behaviors and decide if we want to cooperate with them or not, but we don’t need to judge them. We need to evaluate their behaviors without attacking their personhood. We need to judge the actions, not the actors. This is a critically important distinction that we must learn to make.
The concept of releasing judgments applies not only to the behaviors and actions of others, but also to the judgments we make about their physical attributes…All sorts of critical judgments, observations and put-downs, some more mean-spirited than others, flash through our minds on a daily basis, in terms of what people look like, how they comb their hair, what clothes they wear, what jewelry they adorn themselves with, what body parts they expose, how they laugh, how they chew their food, what knick-knacks they have on their desk, the list goes on.
Despite how innocent or harsh these judgments may seem to be, and despite the fact that they’re all in our mind, that we’re not expressing them to the people involved, none of them are harmless to us.”
Walter E. Jacobson, M.D., in “Forgive to Win”
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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.
