Our Pathway Home, Emotional Healing: Judgments and Judgment Release

What exactly IS a judgment?

A judgment is an evaluation, a measurement, of how something feels and what it is. The mind makes judgments based on feelings. The primary problem we're facing today, however, is that the mind has judged that the feelings are bad, because they feel bad. Mind has judged itself superior to feelings, and has tried to get rid of the feelings of pain.

This is actually a very infantile response to pain, and mind needs to evolve past this stage now. The problem is that by forcing feelings to stay quiet and unexpressed, we are now faced with piles and piles of stuff to heal and frozen belief systems where neither mind nor emotions can evolve.

How does this happen?

PAIN ...	Something happens, or fails to happen, that causes pain. The emotional body / Soul responds by trying to move / express / heal in its natural way.

JUDGMENTS ...	Primal Judgments are made in a knee-jerk fashion to the pain. º Emotional judgment - XYZ feels bad, and if not allowed to move toward healing naturally, the judgment is made that XYZ needs to be avoided/forgotten... forever. º Mental judgment 1 - XYZ IS bad because it caused pain, and needs to be avoided/forgotten... forever. º Mental judgment 2 - The essence that feels pain in response to XYZ IS bad, needs to be corrected, taught, punished, or gotten rid of.

SHUTDOWN ...	Attempts are made to stop the pain. Since the deepest, most primal belief is that "if you can't see it, it's not there", attempts are made to stop the EXPRESSION of pain, or to get rid of the part that is feeling the pain.

FROZEN PAIN ...	Soul essence feeling the pain freezes and becomes stuck if not allowed to express and move with full acceptance of WHATEVER the feelings are. Essence holding pain is drawn together, layered and frozen in time.

BELIEFS ...	A belief system (B.S.) is formed about self and the world, including both emotional and mental judgments, and the original event or reason for the judgment is often forgotten.

DECISIONS & ACTIONS ...	Decisions and actions, which should flow freely, become rigid and fixed, locked into repeating patterns of behavior. We lose the ability to respond to each situation in new, creative, and totally spontaneous ways.

Heal the Pain

Our actions and decisions flow out into our lives, like ripples on a pond. At the center of the ripples, however, is the pain we felt in response to something. We may not even remember the something. The unmoving pain surrounds the memory of it, frozen in time.

Feelings are the bedrock of both our judgments and decisions.

You can make a conscious choice to change your mind, and to change your decisions. You can even make conscious choices to change your behavior. But you can't force a change or think-change your feelings. And until the pain is healed and all the frozen essence is unfrozen, any changes made will not be lasting. At best, the new "positive" reality you attempt to create will last a short while and then slowly revert to whatever is being held in your subconscious. At worst, your attempts to force changes will cause parts of yourself to fragment out of you.

The truth is, we do create our reality. But true and lasting creative power is not an activity of the mind. Healing the pain which is the foundation of our B.S. is the only way to make lasting changes, the only way for the whole self to evolve.

Mind has to take the first step.

The judgments made by mind against emotions moving and expressing is the first thing that must shift. If mind continues to hold the judgment that crying is bad, expressing feelings is dumb, stupid, a waste of time, doesn't heal anything, only makes things worse, is self-indulgent, weak, detrimental to survival, or any other judgment against the emotions, the emotions cannot feel safe enough or accepted enough to move and heal. Mind must take a step back. Mind must realize that emotions have a unique way of healing and evolving, a way that perhaps mind doesn't understand and has inhibited by its dominance.

MELTING THE FOUNDATION (Working from the bottom up)

In my process, once I'm done crying through a pocket of rage/grief/terror/whatever, there is spontaneous re-evaluation of everything I believed to be true. All the thoughts and judgments surrounding the pain spontaneously and naturally shift and evolve. The bedrock foundation of my judgments has crumbled with my tears, and both judgments and wrong beliefs naturally melt away or grow and change. True, this takes time, and sometimes it's like peeling an onion layer after layer after layer, getting to ever-deeper levels of pain and the judgments built on them. The deeper the healing, the more my belief system shifts and evolves. Both emotions and mind are then able to grow together.

SHATTERING THE STRUCTURE (Working from the top down)

Sometimes we find that the belief system and early judgments made on the emotions are so rigid and restrictive that they don't allow the emotions to move that would bring them healing.

If mind is holding emotions hostage, something needs to be done to break down the structures holding everything frozen. Healing from the foundation upward isn't possible in this case, because the movement needed is being prevented. This would be something like laying a concrete floor over an old foundation. You have to break up the concrete before you can shift what is beneath it.

One method is to make a formal statement that is in direct opposition to the old beliefs and judgments in order to set your emotions free.

For example: A belief system that says I am stupid, can't learn, etc. may keep me from pursuing all kinds of avenues in life. The belief is based on a judgment, based on a feeling of pain. If the pain can be cried, then the judgment will melt. I will no longer feel stupid, therefore I will no longer believe I am stupid and can't learn. However, if the judgment restricts me to the point where I can't cry, if I find myself spinning around in mental circles, beating myself up with litany after litany, then I need to take steps to interrupt the pattern and break through the judgment. I may state formally, as an example, I forgive myself for believing that I am stupid. I no longer believe it. I am not stupid. I am bright and smart and able to learn anything I want. This kind of formal statement shakes up the beliefs and judgments held in place by mind, and allows (hopefully) the pain underneath to come to the surface and cry.

There is only one reason to do this kind of affirmation or formal judgment release, and that is to loosen frozen pain and allow the emotional movement needed to heal.

Stop the actions, and often your feelings will bubble up and you'll cry.
Change the decisions, and often your pain will come forward and you'll cry.
Reverse the judgments, and your frozen pain will burst out and you'll cry.

Another example would be the way a judgment against terror keeps me from feeling how afraid I am. Rage may be a more "acceptable" feeling to my judgments, and so I spin around and around, feeling and expressing rage, but never seeming to get done with it. It's possible my judgments are encouraging the rage, keeping it spinning, so I never have to feel the terror (or whatever) is underneath the rage. If I stop for a minute, and look at whatever judgments rage is spouting, I will probably see a shadow of what's really underneath. Then I can allow the other feelings to cry.

The goal always is to get the tears flowing. Once the tears are flowing, everything else will fall into place. If the judgment release doesn't eventually bring pain to the surface, it's not working, and some other method is needed.

Working "UP" vs. Working "DOWN"

Where to start and when to use any of these tools depends largely on your primary orientation.

My primary orientation is not in my mind. If you originate there or are more oriented toward mental processing, then perhaps formal judgment release is the place for you to start. It's one way to direct point of consciousness and express intent and desire to heal and accept your emotional body.

But for those whose primary orientation is emotional, whose first and most natural response to the world is emotional, requiring that they follow a rigid structure of word-rituals intended for mental processing is ... painful. Restrictive. And entirely unnecessary.

For me, emotional work comes first, and mental constructs shift and change as a result of the emotional movement. For some others, the mental constructs may need to be shifted and jostled, IN ORDER to get the emotional movement.

For the best healing, you must determine which starting point works best for you. Whether you start at the "top" - breaking the concrete and the rigid structures of mind and judgment - or the "bottom" - melting the foundation underlying - depends on your preference, your primary orientation, your desire, and what you find works best along the way. Start the healing process at the top or bottom, whichever end is most comfortable and natural to you ... but always work toward balancing both.