“Judge Not” … A Wonderful Way to Live

     Two years ago, in the summer after I moved into a new home, I decided I had to do something about an old abandoned bird’s nest above my entryway door. Although there were some finches around the house several months earlier and this was definitely a finch nest, since then I hadn’t seen or heard any birds around. Hatching season was over, and let’s face it, bird droppings aren’t particularly attractive. So, I cleaned and scrubbed and finally cleaned up the mess that seemed like it must have been there for years. 

     About a month later, I found a small cracked blue colored bird’s egg on my front porch that had obviously been dropped from on high. I immediately judged myself as a baby bird killer. Obviously, I had upset the balance of nature and interfered with the bird’s habitat so that it was an unfit place to nest. I imagined the momma bird flying to the nest she thought was there, finding it gone, and in an act of anxious desperation, dropping her egg on the ground. Guilt and self-blame consumed me. I rationalized, made excuses and battled with an inner critic that had me by the throat.

     That autumn a strange thing happened. The finches returned to rebuild the nest. In the fall? That seemed odd. But I made sure not to touch it or disturb it in any way. The next spring, I was hoping to be redeemed and forgiven for my foolishness of the previous year. And yet, even though I did nothing, I found another cracked blue egg on the front porch. There were no bird chicks that year, but I had begun to question whether I had anything to do with the cracked bird eggs or if they were even finch eggs at all. Perhaps, I had judged myself too harshly. 

     This year, after much finch activity and the sound of chirping from above my door, I climbed up to see three baby birds sleeping in the nest. Off to the side, out of the nest was a discarded egg that apparently hadn’t hatched, so I got to see what a finch egg looks like. It was soft cream with brown speckles and much smaller than the blue robin sized eggs that I had found on the ground in previous years. They were not finch eggs. Evidently, I had perceived things incorrectly.   

     All this brings up how ridiculous our own self-perceptions and judgments can be. You may have even had the experience of complaining about a situation that you thought was bad for you and then later found it had a positive result you had not foreseen. If you are looking to indulge in the misery of self-criticism, the universe will probably oblige you with the circumstances to accommodate such an experience. However, if you go through life without judging in this way, you will stop creating more of the type of experience you are negatively focused on and find an inner peace you have never known before.      

     A Taoist story by Liu An illustrates this point. An old man lived with his son on a hillside in a dwelling that was an abandoned fortress. Their one possession of value was a horse and one day, it ran away. All the neighbors came by to offer sympathy to the man expressing what a terrible thing it was saying, “That’s really bad!” The old man simply said, “How do you know?” The next day, the horse returned and brought with it several wild horses, which the old man and his son put inside their gate. The neighbors hurried over to congratulate the man saying, “That’s really good!” Once again, the old man asked, “How do you know?” The following day, the man’s son tried to ride one of the wild horses and fell off and broke his leg. As soon as they heard what had happened, the neighbors came by and said, “That’s really bad!” “How do you know?” the old man repeated. The day after that, the army came through the area forcing all the local young men into service to fight a faraway battle against the northern barbarians. Many of them would never return. However, because the old man’s son had broken his leg, he couldn’t go…. You get the point. The truth is that we never fully know what is happening from a divine perspective. However, if you refrain from judging at all, you can experience freedom from the chains of the thinking mind and the material existence that binds you.   
     As the joyful chirping of life and rebirth blesses the doorway of my home, I feel grateful for this entire experience. Bird chicks above my door. This has got to be good Feng Shui.. or not!  For more help with transforming patterns of self-criticalness and judgment, visit my website. www.soultranceformations.com