Try living by this. Print this out on 8½x11 paper and tape it around your life. Put it on your desk, your bathroom mirror, in your kitchen. Every time the impulse to decide whether something is good, bad, right, wrong, ugly or pretty arises, stop and say, “Today I will judge nothing that occurs.” Everytime you see someone and think “they should” or “they shouldn’t”, “that’s good” or “that’s bad”, “she’s right” or “she’s wrong”, instead just observe and don’t comment to yourself or others. Go cold turkey and stop judging totally for a period of time. Do a judgment detox.

A judgment detox means giving up judgment of all things. Judgment of self, others, the world, things that happen or don’t happen. This means giving up positive judgments as well. I suggested a judgment detox to a client and she said, “What will I do with all my extra time?” How much of your time and energy is taken up judging what is right, wrong, good or bad for everybody and everything? How much of your time today do you spend trying to predict the future? “That would just be terrible” or “If I do this, then I’ll be miserable.” Or “If I do this it will make me happy”.

How would your life be different if you stopped judging and evaluating everyone and everything? Think about it. We evaluate everything. We put a value on everything. Our addiction to judging has become a defense mechanism rather than a useful life design tool. We spend a lot of time analyzing, criticizing, and pretending we know what’s good/bad, right/wrong, and on and on and on because it makes us feel better, smarter, wiser, more in control. It also has become our number one strategy to keep ourselves from having to look at ourselves and change. Instead, we spend precious time looking at others. We spend precious time judging celebrities relentlessly and we don’t know them at all.

The real danger lies in becoming attached to our judgments. Believing you really know what’s right or wrong, especially for someone else, can be very hurtful and damaging. We use our own personal evaluations to condemn and make other people wrong or bad. Our judgments have ruined many a good relationship. In marriage counseling, a common question is “Do you want to be right or married?” How much time do we spend making others the bad one or the enemy?

How much time do we spend judging what happens? Who really knows what is ultimately terrible or wonderful, a good thing or a bad thing? In the big picture, you never know. I love this old Chinese parable that tells the tale.

Once upon a time, a poor farmer was dismayed to learn his horse had died during the night. All the neighbors exclaimed, “Oh, that’s terrible, that’s terrible.” To which the farmer responded, “Maybe, maybe not.” Meanwhile, a rich man in the village heard of the poor farmer’s plight and gave him one of his horses. The neighbors exclaimed, “That’s wonderful, how marvelous.” To which the farmer nonchalantly replied, “Maybe, maybe not.” The farmer’s son was riding the new horse and was thrown and severely injured. The neighbors said, “Oh, that’s terrible, terrible.” And the farmer said, “Maybe, maybe not.” In the spring, war broke out in the land. Because the son was in a cast, he was unable to go off to war where all the other young men were dying.

You get the point. This parable goes on for 500 verses. So does life. How many times in our life have things happened to us and in that moment we believed it to be truly terrible? Have you ever had a break-up with someone only to find out later that it was truly a good thing. Maybe it freed you to meet your true soul mate. Or maybe you just missed an appointment and thought it was a terrible thing, only to be instead at just the place you needed to be for an opportunity.

After 20 years of being a personal counselor to hundreds of people, I learned that while sometimes I thought I knew what would be right or good for a client, over and over again I could see that “you never really know”. I had a young girl as a client who had decided to drop out of school. Against all my social conditioning (and judgment), I supported her in this decision. As you can guess, while her parents and others predicted it would be the most awful thing in the world for her, later on it turned out to be exactly the right thing for her. Later, when she was more emotionally stable, she returned to school and excelled. You never know.

The problem is we think we do know. Then we become limited by our perceptions and beliefs. We become bound by what we think we know and may be missing some of the greatest opportunities and lessons of our lives. What I am suggesting is that we be more open. That we be more willing to trust and wait and see what happens rather than having to know, predict, and control. Again, think of the time and energy that would be available to you if you gave up this practice.

But how does one design a life without making judgments, without deciding what’s good or bad or what’s right or wrong? We do need to be able to make choices for our lives, but maybe we need some new strategies for making these decisions. We can recognize and admit that all we really have are our preferences, our desires, our opinions, and our best guesses. With this information we discern what would be our best choice for today giving credence to the reality that “you never really know” how it will turn out. It’s a subtle yet powerful shift to change our language from what is right or wrong, good or bad to simply stating what we prefer.

Try going one full day judging nothing that occurs. No more judging what is good or what is bad. See what happens to your energy and your attitude. When you notice that you are shaming, blaming, evaluating someone else, yourself, or events, realize it and say, “Today I choose to judge nothing that occurs.” “Today I choose to accept all that is for what it is – nothing more, nothing less.” Chant daily “Judging serves no purpose”. Then wait to see what happens. You may be very surprised. You may find that you will have more peace. You may find that you feel less anxious because you are not having to figure everything out. You may find that you start observing life more and trusting more.

This is one of the highest spiritual practices for our lives – Judge Not– not others or yourself or what happens to you or doesn’t – be accepting of all and all that happens. Trust life, flow with life, expect life to work without you having to be the judge and jury for the world. How then might your life be different?