A Prayer to Release Judgment

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What often blocks us from love is judgment. When things feel uncertain, we can fall into the form of worry that is judgment.

There was a phase of my life in which judgment reared its ugly head in conversations with friends and family. I noticed a lot of people I talked to often making comments about others. My friend explained that she had run into someone we hadn’t seen in years and told me how much weight she had gained and how she had let herself go. I found myself feeling defensive and mad at my friend for judging our childhood friend based on her looks.

As time passed, I began to notice how common these types of judgments were in my conversations, and then I realized that I too was judging them—for judging others’ physical appearance. Every time a friend had an opinion based on someone else’s physical appearance, I would get frustrated and triggered because when I look at people, I don’t define them by their physical attributes or what society deems faults. I look for their truth and see their inner light. But with each friend or family member who made comments and judgments about others, I would secretly judge them myself (which meant just more of the same because I was participating in the problem).

But when I held up the energetic mirror and asked, “How is this a reflection of my internal state?” it became clear that most of my judgment was actually at myself. When I realized this pattern was keeping me away from love, I relinquished it. Lesson 352 in A Course in Miracles says, “Judgment and love are opposites. From one comes all the sorrows of the world, but from the other comes the peace of God Himself.”

In the face of judgment, I created a mini prayer to reestablish my connection to love.

A Prayer to Release Judgment

I see my judgment.

I recognize this as an imbalance of my true self.

I realign with love and see all as the same.

I stand firm in my truth.

When we align with the love within us, we feel better and we are more grounded. We aren’t hung up on projections or insecurities because we are connected to a source of infinite Divine power.

Excerpted from Return to You: 11 Spiritual Lessons for Unshakable Inner Peace by Shannon Kaiser.