The other day I came across a post. Surely not by chance, just as nothing is by chance when it comes to `personalized experience` (read: algorithms).
I was tempted to post it, but I didn’t, because I felt it was missing something. I would so much like to add something to it. A perspective. Something to reflect upon. And I found it the next day. So, in the following I want to mix three elements. A social media post, a passage from the book I keep reading (where the last paragraph made me cry), along with a video recording of Lee Harris. Who knows what it might become. Maybe something.
First, we have the post
Written by Elisabeth Gimsøy. The post is seen here (1) Facebook
(Tragically, I believe this text is of great relevance for a lot of people living now)
There is a strange thing in our culture that family is always supposed to tolerate everything, no matter how destructive the dynamics are.
That ‘blood is thicker than water.’
But the truth is simple: Some family ties suffocate you. Some relationships don’t give you love, they give you anxiety. Some people can’t handle boundaries; they can only handle control.
And they come back again and again, not to fix anything, but to drag you back into the drama they themselves can’t live without.
When you leave, they don’t lose you. They lose access.
There’s a big difference.
The pattern is always the same:
• There is calmness for a while
• Then an «attempt to contact» appears
• The smiling facade cracks
• Manipulation comes
• Guilt
• Drama
• And finally: «you are the crazy one»
This is not love. It is unregulated emotional dynamics disguised as family.
Children are often used as a means of entry.
The day I realized that certain adults were willing to pull our child into old conflicts, put him under loyalty pressure, and even ask him to keep secrets…
Then it was no longer a choice.
It was a duty.
The role of a parent is not to be polite.
It is to protect.
I stand in that with calm and a straight back.
No-contact is not cold.
It is never a sign of weakness to walk away.
It is a sign that you have seen enough.
No-contact does not mean hate.
It means:
I choose peace over loyalty to chaos.
It means that you take responsibility for your home,
your energy,
and your children.
If you recognize yourself
You owe no explanation.
You do not owe anyone giving it another try for the 10th time.
You do not owe anyone defending your experience.
You are allowed to say stop.
You are allowed to protect your child.
You are allowed to choose a family you can actually breathe in.
Freedom is not selfishness.
It is healing.
Points for reflection
• Does this contact give me peace or unrest?
• Am I actually allowed to feel safe, or do I believe I have to endure everything?
• What am I teaching my child if I let in people who create pain?
• Who do I become when I choose myself?
To those of you going through this
You are not tough/hard.
You are not selfish.
You are not ‘the difficult one.’
You are someone who broke a pattern that generations before you could not break.
And that is love in its purest form.
Then, we have the chapter from the book
From the book «Finding Awareness: The Journey of Self-discovery» by Amit Pagedar.
The chapter «Labels and Judgements»
Judging helps us pretend that we understand.
What is a label? When we pick out something to purchase in a store, we know what it is by looking at the label on the product. When we have a cold, we go to the cabinet and look for the right medicine that will help us feel better. We want to make sure we don’t accidentally take the wrong medicine. We carefully read what the label says. Without it, there would be no reliable way to distinguish one object from another. As such, labels are useful and necessary for everyday existence. They help us organize our world. From our science to religion, everything in human society requires labels. Without them, it’s hard to distinguish, identity and, therefore, manipulate our reality in any meaningful way.
Though, why do we use labels in our inner world? It appears we do so for the same reason – to differentiate our emotions and feelings. For instance, how would we know what kind of an emotion we were feeling, if we couldn’t use a word to identify it? If the word fear didn’t exist, we wouldn’t communicate to our loved ones that a certain thing was concerning us. If they had no labels of their own, they wouldn’t know what we meant unless they had a common definition of the word fear too.
In this way, labels are essential. They allow us to define our outer and inner world. The more accurate they are, the better they describe natural phenomena. For instance, we have hundreds of dog breeds in the world. Unless we could differentiate between them, we wouldn’t know which breed makes a good shepherd and which one a retriever. Labels in that way are neutral in nature. What happens when they have a meaning or a quality associated with them? Then they become what we refer to as judgments. For instance, you can say, “This is a pitbull” and that is just a label. However, if you believe, “Pitbulls are dangerous,” then that’s a judgment.
A label is like a noun and a judgment is like an adjective. Judgments (or adjectives) too play an important role in describing our world. For example, take the case of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. How could they tell each other whether certain parts of the forest were dangerous or safe? Or whether some animals were docile or dangerous? Whether some flowers or snakes were beautiful, yet poisonous? How could they describe other tribes as friends or enemies, as kind or cruel? Whether they used verbal cues or physical gestures, they had to describe their environment in some way.
Judging also helped them make split-second decisions, which often would be the difference between life and death. It was better to misjudge danger than to misjudge safety. It was better to err on the side of caution. This has been going on for millenia, and there is no reason for it to stop now. That’s why we judge everything even today. Judgments – such as good, bad, beautiful, ugly, dangerous, safe, kind, friendly, hostile, or cruel – are indispensable to human communication. Without them, we would struggle to get through a simple sentence. Therefore, the act of judging isn’t wrong or right, it just is.
Yet, the most common advice we get is to be less judgmental. How do we reconcile this with the fact that we judge a restaurant based on the quality of its food, a movie based on the awards it won, the quality of someone’s art based on their popularity, or a book based on its reviews?
Most of us advocate a religion, a political party, a philosophy, or a spiritual teacher over the other. We prefer one musician, actor, athlete or a sports team over the other. All our life choices have implicit judgments behind them. This contradiction has a good reason. Judgments offer an immediate comfort in a world full of uncertainties. Judging helps us pretend that we understand. Once we say, “That person is cruel,” it gives us a feeling of certainty and completion. Our job is done. Now we feel as if we can predict the future and that gives us security. We don’t have to do any work the next time we interact with them, since we have already put them in a bucket and formed an image about them. Even if this image is wrong, it makes our life easier for the moment. Therefore, throwing caution to the wind, we judge.
Does this mean that there are no cruel or evil people in the world? Perhaps some of us prefer to use softer words, such as unconscious, misguided or brainwashed. Yet, regardless of the words we use, we are still judging them, aren’t we? And we must. It is obvious that if we don’t judge those who are indeed cruel, to be cruel, then we are allowing their malice to spread in the world. One look at the wars of the past century makes it clear that calling out destructive forces in the world is essential in order to stop them from becoming powerful. So then, we have reached a point of conflict.
How can we identify cruel or unconscious behaviors while making sure we aren’t judging people unfairly in the process? So how do we solve this problem? Should we judge or should we not?
Perhaps, a better way to look at this is asking whether the judgment itself is correct or incorrect, and more importantly, whether it is temporary or permanent. Let’s look at both of these. Evaluating our judgments, instead of the act of judging, helps us to resolve this internal conflict.
Correct judgments deepen our understanding of the world, and reduce our collective suffering, while incorrect judgments do the opposite. An incorrect judgment brings us into conflict with our reality. When we incorrectly judge another human being for being rude, stupid, intelligent or kind we take misguided actions based on that understanding. We avoid the right people from our lives and gravitate towards the wrong ones. We seek superficial experiences and avoid the ones that lead to growth and learning. We take up a job that is wrong for us, invest in a poor business idea, or enter an unhealthy relationship, all because of incorrect judgments. Correct judgments bring us into alignment with our reality, and therefore help us make the right choices. They may be difficult in the short term but in the long run they reduce our suffering, because they are fundamentally correct based on a given situation.
This is why the correctness of a judgment is not based on our (or someone else’s) opinion, but on our experience and observation of how it aligns with our own personal life and its challenges.
A correct judgment happens spontaneously when we learn to put all mental chatter aside and simply look, feel and observe our life situation. The more deeply we observe, the more precise our judgments and decisions become and the more peace and clarity they bring to our lives. Why do our judgments, both about ourselves and others, also need to be temporary?
Understanding something is like climbing a never-ending ladder. Every correct judgment is the next step on such a ladder. If we stop at a step, believing that it is the end, we have formed a conclusion. If we become comfortable and stop here, we become blind to any new information about the things we have judged. We get stuck with our beliefs, dogmas and limitations. This place becomes a reason for conflict, because the world and the people around us are always in flux. Our understanding of them soon becomes obsolete, stale and incorrect. If we don’t change and adapt, we harbor rigid and outdated views about people and our life. Such a fixed outlook breeds contempt and fear of those we have judged.
Having temporary judgments allows us to constantly absorb new information coming from others. This way we can understand people in real time, never forming any permanent opinion of them. We have already seen how to do this through the arts of listening and seeing. These skills assist us in dissolving our current judgments and enter a state of constant watching and learning. They keep us moving on that ladder and flowing with the present moment. When we hear and see with intensity, we begin to notice hidden aspects of people’s personalities and behavior. We spot the occasional kindness in someone we thought of as cruel. We notice sparks of brilliance in those we thought of as dull. We perceive hints of selflessness in the midst of all the self-seeking. We begin to understand their past and how it may be playing a role in their actions. We inch closer to knowing who they are as human beings.
We develop a more holistic understanding of the people in our lives. Sometimes we realize that those who deeply hurt us were hurting too. Now, instead of condemning their actions we begin to ponder the reasons behind them. Our anger begins to transmute into compassion and it invites us towards forgiveness. We will see more about how this happens in the next chapter.
So as we intensify our capacity to listen to and observe others, our judgments become increasingly accurate and temporary in nature. We become more open-minded, curious and forgiving. We begin to see people and the world not as fixed points on a canvas, but as a part of a large and colorful painting that is evolving, transforming and reshaping itself.
NOTE: As we saw in this chapter, a judgment stands in for real understanding and brings short-term comfort. Why does it do so? Why does a judgment have this power to make us feel that it must be true? For instance, no one ever believes that their judgments are false, do they? They feel as if their evaluations are capturing the truth of the matter, especially our judgments about ourselves. To understand this, we have to find out where our judgments come from. We are entering the depths of our ego.
And last but not least, Lee;
Two minute excerpt from channeler Lee Harris` latest “Energy Update”, from November 2025. Click below;
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/17UZUq3pf3/?mibextid=wwXIfr