Non-Judgmental Awareness Itself Does the Healing
Doing the work of spiritual transformation – what we might call “making the unconscious conscious” – includes connecting deeply with our wisdom, gifts and talents. It also requires us to embrace the wounded parts of ourselves and welcome them into our awareness. This process takes a lot of courage, but it also takes equal parts of self-compassion.
Part of the reason we draw back from investigating the many layers of our personal unconscious is that we may not want to see what is there! All of us have made mistakes and not lived up to our personal Ideal and standards. Some of our mistakes have been “unintentional” while others were carefully planned and executed. Memories of past thoughts, emotions and actions can bring up feelings that are hard to acknowledge and work with – feelings such as embarrassment, shame, and self-condemnation.
But in the process of self-exploration, we also push away the truth about our spiritual gifts. We tend to dismiss the hard work we have done in tapping into and living our Spiritual Ideal. Often we ignore, diminish and even deny our hard-earned soul growth and the many ways we have engaged our journey of personal transformation.
That is precisely the reason why the sixth Spiritual Energy Principle, Non-Judgmental Awareness Itself Does the Healing, is so vital on our journey to wholeness.
What does it mean to be non-judgmental? We all know how it feels to stand in judgment of ourselves and of others. Judgment divides and categorizes. It compares in unhealthy and harmful ways. It is marked by its unconscious, reactive stance of separating ourselves from our innate goodness and condemning ourselves and others. It is rooted in false beliefs about who we are and beliefs about others that are defined by categories of good vs. bad and acceptable vs. unacceptable. We have adopted these judgmental standards from others, most often without really investigating their truth and the impact they make in our lives. Because these ideas, emotions and actions do not reflect our true self and our innate wisdom, they create a lot of inner turmoil and even more judgment about ourselves and others!
The sixth Spiritual Energy Principle, Non-Judgmental Awareness Itself Does the Healing, teaches us how to turn away from the destructive forces of judgment and instead build the inner capacity to be a compassionate witness to ourselves. Compassionate witnessing is a positive, therapeutic force that transforms our woundedness. With the clarity of compassionate witnessing, we can look deeply into our hearts and souls, taking notice of both our spiritual gifts and our woundedness. Through compassionate witnessing, we can explore our “inner Milky Way,” welcoming into awareness both our successes and our failures without falling into self-aggrandizement or self-condemnation. The energy of compassionate witnessing helps us remember and align with our personal Ideal and claim the highest and best of who we are. With practice we can connect more easily with those spiritual gifts, and we can bring them more intentionally into our daily lives.
Compassionate witnessing also creates an inner posture that invites us into our loving and forgiving heart in order to begin the process of healing from the inside-out. Through compassionate witnessing, we more readily recognize the energy of self-judgment and self-condemnation. Instead of succumbing to that force, we remember to connect with the unshakable foundation of our personal Spiritual Ideal. This process leads us to an inner space of open-heartedness and wisdom, where we can begin to work constructively with the other side of our soul experience – our mistakes, trespasses, limiting beliefs, and challenging emotions. It opens the path to understanding, forgiveness and the courage to commit even more deeply to our journey of personal transformation.
This innate quality of awareness – our capacity to be a non-judgmental, loving and compassionate witness to ourselves – is the key to our inner healing. And, as we heal ourselves, we can bring a new understanding of our gifts and our experiences of self-healing to others in our families, our communities and our world.
