Nonjudgmental and Compassionate Awareness
Does the Healing
We have been studying the 12 PTCI spiritual energy principles this year. At our most recent, May 3rd, Meditation Gathering, I spoke about our sixth spiritual energy principle: Nonjudgmental and Compassionate Awareness Does the Healing. And, as I shared then, the sixth spiritual energy principle rests upon the previous five principles and deepens the message of each one as well.
Here are the previous five spiritual energy principles:
- Doing follows Being.
- When we whole-heartedly commit ourselves to an intention, we begin to “see” and “feel” ourselves differently, allowing us to respond from a new place within ourselves.
- Energy follows attention.
- What we hide from ourselves and others has power over us and takes away our real power. (In other words, the thoughts, emotions, feelings, and actions that we deny, fight against, and fear control us until we bring then into our awareness, transform, and heal them.)
- The Inner and Outer Worlds are Reflections of Each Other.
The sixth spiritual energy principle talks about a certain kind of awareness – one that is nonjudgmental and compassionate. This quality of awareness is truly innate; and, because it’s our deepest nature, it can heal. This is not the kind of awareness that uses willpower, or self-criticism. Nor is it the kind of awareness that focusses on analysis or abstraction. Rather, this is an awareness that is open, tender, accepting and fully present, without condemnation. This quality of awareness is the medicine; it is the healing.
Let’s consider how all of this relates to the discomforts and distresses of life. Most of us know what it feels like to suffer. But what we don’t always notice is how much of our suffering isn’t the original pain. Suffering is what we do to ourselves as one possible way to respond to the pain.
First, it is instructive to reflect on the Buddhist distinction between pain and suffering. Their insight is that pain is inevitable; but suffering is optional.
The pain that we all meet in this life includes the experience of loss, sickness, old age, and death. All of these experiences are inevitable and very naturally cause deep pain. This pain, the Buddhists share, is like being hit by an arrow… right through one’s heart. That’s the first arrow — the wound, the loss, the disappointment, the fear. It hurts. Of course it does.
But then, almost immediately, we reach for a second arrow and shoot it at ourselves.
“I shouldn’t be feeling this.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Why can’t I just get over it?”
“I’m so weak.”
The first arrow is often times unavoidable. The second one — we shoot ourselves. And that second arrow is often what keeps us stuck.
The contemplative teacher Alan Wallace says it plainly: what we suffer most from is not always the original wound. It’s the judgment of the wound. The shame. The self-criticism.
Now here’s what’s interesting. Most of our instincts tell us the way out of our suffering, our self-judgment and self-condemnation is to try harder. To discipline ourselves out of the pattern, to analyze what caused it, to push through. But all of that tends to just introduce more arrows.
Instead, spiritual wisdom traditions keep pointing to something that is almost the opposite of “effort.” It’s presence. It’s the simple act of looking at what’s there — without adding a verdict.
Not fixing it. Not approving of it. Not pretending it isn’t there. Just… seeing it. With kindness. With a type of inner spaciousness that says: you are allowed to be here. This is true for me right now and my heart can be open to you.
That’s what nonjudgmental means. Not indifference. Not moral blankness. It’s the most intimate kind of seeing there is — seeing without the armor of a verdict, without being the judge, the prosecutor and the jury. And when we tap into that quality of nonjudgmental awareness something shifts. The inner persecutor goes quiet. The nervous system, which has been braced for judgment, finally relaxes.
Turning Toward
I know from personal experience that turning toward my pain and my suffering is not easy. It is a spiritual practice.
Most of us have spent years — sometimes decades — turning away from pain. We’ve gotten very good at it. Distraction, busyness, numbing, intellectualizing. And this makes sense. Pain hurts, and of course we try to get away from it. But so does that second arrow, and then the pain turns into suffering.
Another of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Pema Chödrön, offers her wisdom that I find both radical and at the same time, deeply comforting. She says that the healing movement isn’t upward and away from pain. It’s downward and into it. Being fully present to our pain. Not turning away or fleeing from it or trying to overpower it. In fact, she says that it is the avoidance of pain that causes our suffering and sustains it. But instead, we can choose the kind of awareness, the quality of compassionate awareness, that makes it possible to be with our pain, to turn toward it and hold it. Not toughness, not powering through our pain and suffering. But instead, it’s a matter of being open, loving and accepting. Being compassionate.
In our March Meditation Gathering session, we practiced turning toward an inner wound. We practiced tenderly bringing into our awareness and into our hearts a limiting belief, a challenging emotion, or unhelpful behavior. Not trying to change it. Not blaming anyone. Not analyzing it to death. Just… holding it. Letting it know it was seen.
And many of us found something unexpected: What we thought was a monster could be seen in a whole new way. In the light of that gentle, nonjudgmental and compassionate awareness, what we initially condemned about ourselves, we found had been trying, perhaps in its own confused way, to protect us. It had some wisdom to share with us. But first, it needed to be seen and understood. And so, the spiritual energy principle that embodies this inner movement toward healing says this:
What we hide from ourselves has power over us and takes away our true power. When we turn toward our inner wounds with nonjudgment and compassion, we regain our power and our wholeness, our holiness.
It sounds almost too good to be true. But it isn’t magic — it’s just what happens when something that has been isolated and shamed is finally welcomed home.
This Is Who We Are
I want to bring this home now to something that our PTCI sessions have returned to again and again.
The first PTCI spiritual energy principle — Doing Follows Being — says something profound and counter-cultural. It says: before we can act from our deepest values, from our Ideals, we have to know who we truly are. And who we are, at the deepest level, is not a separate self, struggling alone against the world. We are, as every wisdom tradition affirms, inseparable from one another, from the earth, from life itself.
This isn’t a piece of philosophy to merely agree with and then put aside. It’s something to be experienced. And our practice together — these gatherings, this community — is one of the places where that experience becomes available.
There’s a beautiful image that came out of our April Meditation Gathering session: the idea of a spiral of knowing. Each moment of genuine clarity opens us a little further. Each experience of real connection — with ourselves, with each other, with something larger — invites us into greater connection still. We don’t have to get it right all at once. We just have to keep turning toward.
And here’s something that matters: this practice isn’t just personal. It isn’t just about feeling better inside our own heads and in our own bodies. As we heal our own inner critics, our own fears, our own habitual judgments, something changes in how we move through the world.
As Cynthia Beaugeault, the Episcopalian priestess and mystic teaches, when we’re seeing through the heart, our “organ of spiritual insight,” rather than through the lens of separation — we begin to look at ourselves and others with the eyes of compassion. Like someone who hears the cry of every creature. And from that seeing, naturally, action arises. Not forced, not depleted, not righteous. Just clear. Just responsive. Just kind.
Then we can move through our lives and respond, not from anger or fear, but from the clarity that comes when we’ve done the interior work. Being compassionate doesn’t mean stepping aside when harm is being done. It means stepping in — while remaining loving.
Living from this inner space — with nonjudgmental and compassionate awareness as your home base — does not make life smaller or more careful or more serious. It makes it larger. It’s what naturally flows when awareness has stopped pretending to be divided.
And, it brings two things that I think we all quietly long for and rarely expect to find together: fearlessness and joy.
Fearlessness first. Most of our fear — beneath all its different disguises — is the fear of being judged. Found wanting. Exposed. Rejected. And that fear makes sense when we believe that our worth is something that can be taken away, that our inner life is something to be ashamed of, that the things we hide about ourselves are proof of our inadequacy. The inner critic runs on this fuel.
But when we have genuinely turned toward our own darkness with clarity and compassion — when we have seen it, held it, and found that it did not destroy us — in fact it enlivens us and completes us — something fundamental changes. There is nothing left to hide. And when there is nothing left to hide, the fear of being seen simply dissolves. You can walk into any room, any conversation, any difficulty, without the bracing. You are already known to yourself, already accepted within yourself. That is what fearlessness actually is. Not the absence of danger. The absence of the need to protect a false self.
And joy spontaneously arises as well. Joy is different from happiness. Happiness depends on conditions. Things going well, people being kind, life cooperating. Joy is something deeper. It is what is present when awareness is open and nothing is being resisted. The contemplatives across traditions are remarkably consistent on this: joy is not the reward for having a good life. It is the natural quality of undivided awareness. It is what awareness feels like when it is at home in itself.
Rumi, the Sufi mystic, knew this. His poetry overflows with delight — and he was no stranger to grief, to loss, to longing. But he had discovered that when you stop fighting what is, when you meet even sorrow with an open and loving attention, something underneath begins to sing. The wound and the music are the same instrument. Suffering moved through without resistance becomes a kind of joy — not because the suffering wasn’t real, but because the awareness that holds it is larger than the suffering, and that largeness is itself a kind of delight.
So this simple, yet challenging path of nonjudgmental and compassionate awareness is a path of full immersion into this embodied life. Each moment met without armor is a moment fully lived. Each fear released is a freedom gained. Each old wound welcomed home becomes energy returned — available again for love, for creativity, for genuine presence with others. This is what healing actually looks like from the inside out: not a subtraction of difficulty, but an expansion of the one who meets it.
That’s it. That’s the medicine. Not something to acquire. Something to recognize.
Nonjudgmental and compassionate awareness doesn’t have to be imported from somewhere far away. It’s what this moment feels like when we stop fighting it. When we stop adding the second arrow. When we turn toward what’s here with the same gentleness we would offer to someone we love.
And in that quality of awareness — naturally, quietly, without effort — healing is what happens. And something else too: a kind of fearlessness. And underneath that, something that enfolds all of it – Joy.
Come join us for one or both of the upcoming Vision and Courage programs, where we continue to explore these ideas more deeply and intimately.
Our online Vision and Courage program is June 12, 13 and 14. Our in-person Vision and Courage program will be held at our home in Round Hill, VA from the morning of July 24th through Noon on July 26th. We also warmly invite you to attend our PTCI Open House on the afternoon of July 26th.
You can read about both programs in more detail on our website and register for one or both of them at transformationandcourage.org/courses/vision-and-courage/.
