Opening up to the Bigger Picture

     Being nonjudgmental is a key attitude in mindfulness, psychotherapy, actually all healthy relationships. To be nonjudgmental is to be open-minded, to intentionally cultivate a "beginner's mind" attitude even towards people, experiences & things we may strongly dislike. A basic component of being nonjudgmental is empathy.
     Carl Rogers, one of the founders of the humanistic (client-centered) approach to psychology, said this about empathy:
     "I believe [empathy] to be a process, rather than a state….
     1. It means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it.
     2. It involves being sensitive, moment to moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever they are experiencing.
     3. It means temporarily living in their life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments, sensing meanings of which they are scarcely aware, but not trying to uncover feelings of which they are totally unaware, since this would be too threatening.
     4. It includes communicating your sensings of their world as you look with fresh and unfrightened eyes at elements of which the individual is fearful. It means frequently checking with them as to the accuracy of your sensings, and being guided by the responses you receive.
     5. You are a confident companion to the person in his or her inner world. By pointing to the possible meaning in the flow of their experiencing you [can] help the person... to experience the meanings more fully…”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMi7uY83z-U&feature=emb_logo

      Many of us are extremely judgmental, in fact triggered, shut down & run from the words: 'God,' 'Buddha,' 'religious,' 'spiritual.' While this may have been entirely justified in our past, we now find ourselves defensively walled off from ultimate reality & depth of meaning - "the greater than my self", as well as clueless about getting there.
      So we suffer in isolation all the while sensing our need to connect with something greater. Until we heal this disconnect, ALL our relationships, even with our self, feel insubstantial, vague, undependable - we feel alone, lost, adrift, chronically dissatisfied, unable to get there from here.
     A few 'slender threads' to help extricate ourselves from this paradoxical, painfully frozen state:

     "... the meaning of life (is) that which supersedes one’s egocentric view of life - to find something that’s greater than I am; something that I can work for, outside my own egocentric structure. And I must safeguard my egocentric structure, in order to have a platform for that too. That’s the either and or that’s so difficult for the modern person.”
      Robert A. Johnson. “The Golden World. The Search for Meaning, Fulfillment, and Divine Beauty.” Sounds True, Audiobook, 2018.

     “By religious attitude I am not referring to following a path toward redemption or salvation or even necessarily to being a member of a religious institution. A religious attitude relates to the cultivation of an openness to wonder, awe, fear, and reverence with respect to the ‘other,’ those numinous forces that exist outside our conscious control. These powers have been called at various times fate, destiny, the hand of God, or (to use Robert Johnson’s term) slender threads.

     Over the years I discovered that virtually everyone that comes to analysis is in some way facing a religious crisis, a term I prefer to neurosis, and every analysis is in some way a religious dilemma.
     This is the essence of what I learned from Dr. Jung: listen to your interior intelligence, take it seriously, stay true to it, and – most important – approach it with a religious attitude. His psychological term for this is individuation – discovering the uniqueness of yourself, finding out what you are not and finding out what you are. Individuation relates to wholeness, but it is not some indiscriminate wholeness but rather your particular relationship to everything else. You get to the whole only by working with the particularity of your life, not by trying to evade or rise above the specificity of your life. This is the blending of heaven and earth. This is a truly religious life."
       Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

     "Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it’s important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering. We’re discovering the universe. When we discover the Buddha that we are, we discover that everything and everyone is Buddha. We discover that everything is awake and everyone is awake. Everything is equally precious and whole and good. When we regard thoughts and emotions with humor and openness, that’s how we perceive the universe. We’re not just talking about our individual liberation, but how to help the community we live in, how to help our families, our country, and the whole continent, not to mention the world and the galaxy and as far as we want to go.” Pema Chödrön

 

          "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
          Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
          It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us."           Marianne Williamson 

 

     In a remote Indian village home, Robert Johnson was asked:
     “‘We know our Indian scriptures and the sayings of our wise men. Please tell us some wisdom from your wise men.’
     This put me on the spot, and I searched my mind for something appropriate to say. Finally I remembered something from Meister Eckhart. ‘Well, one of our wise men says that the eye by which we see God is the same eye by which God sees us.’ …
     After several minutes, … ‘I don’t understand, what does this mean?’
     ‘Well, it means that God needs us as much as we need God.’
     The man fell over backward with a clump on the dirt floor. I couldn’t see (in the darkness) if he was laughing or if he was insulted and angry. When he sufficiently recovered and sat back up, he said, ‘Robert, we have never had such a thought as this.’ ”
       Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.

          “We have calcium in our bones,
          iron in our veins,
          carbon in our souls,
          and nitrogen in our brains.
          93 percent stardust,
          with souls made of flames,
          we are all just stars
          that have people names.”                 Nikita Gill

          "To be truly happy in this world
          is a revolutionary act
          because true happiness depends upon a revolution in ourselves.
          It is a radical change of view that liberates us
          so that we know who we are most deeply
          and can acknowledge our enormous ability to love."       Sharon Salzberg

          “We are
          the scientists,
          trying to
          make sense of
          the stars
          inside us.”                Christopher Poindexter

Sculpture by Paige Bradley