The practice of non-judgement has many great aspects to it including the ability to help you become closer to others as they feel more open to engaging with you. It can be hard to adopt as we often feel value is having these strong opinions, but as Alberto Villoldo explains in "The Four Insights", it can bring you personal freemdom. Great book. I highly recommend it.
To practice nonjudgment we must transcend our limited beliefs, even the ones about what we think is right and wrong. The South teaches us to be amoral, to let go of these sorts of judgments and maintain the ability to discern.
When you practice nonjudgment, you refuse to automatically go along with others' opinions of any situation. In doing so you begin to acquire a sense of ethics that transcends the morals of our times. This is important today when the images of the media have become more convincing than reality, and our values – liberty, freedom, love, and the like — are reduced to soundbites and empty platitudes.
When you refuse to collude with the consensual, you have a different perspective. You find what freedom means to you personally, not what was delivered to you by a politician in a well rehearsed speech.
Our judgments are assumptions that are based on what we've learned and been told. For example, most of us collude in the belief that cancer is a deadly disease, so if our doctor says we have it, we immediately become terrified of that "c word." Yet when we practice nonjudgment, we reject the automatic belief that this means we are going to have to battle for life. We may agree to undergo the treatment our physician recommends, but we don't accept that we have a 99% or 1% chance of recovery, we don't label our chances of survival good or bad or place a number on them, because that would be turning our faith over to statistics. Instead, we deal with the problem at hand, not just from the literal level of our body, but at the highest level of perception we can. We allow ourselves to embrace the unknown, along with its unlimited possibilities.
When we practice nonjudgment, we no longer have illness — we have opportunities for healing and growth. We no longer have past traumas — we have events that sharpened our edges and shaped who we are today. We don't reject the facts — we reject the negative interpretation of them in the traumatic story we're tempted to weave around them. We can then create a story of strength and compassion based on these facts.
The South is called the way of the hero because the most effective healers recognize that they were once deeply wounded themselves, and as a result of their own healing, they've developed compassion for others who are hurting. Eventually, their wounds were transformed into gifts that allow them to feel more deeply and show more compassion.
