Drop the Judgments

“The mirror wasn’t judging me, I was judging me. In front of the mirror, I came face to face with my judgments about myself… Who is the ‘I’ that judges that ‘I am not good enough,’ that fears that ‘I am unlovable’ and that whispers ‘I hate myself? It’s not your unconditional self.”

Robert Holden, Loveability

How comfortable are you standing in front of a mirror and looking intently at yourself? If you’re like me, you don’t look anymore intently than you have to. I look at myself just long enough to make sure my hair is in place and that my clothes aren’t “making me look fat.”

I put “making me look fat” in quotations because those aren’t my words. They belong to someone else. They belong to someone who years and years ago told me I was fat and that I needed to make sure that my clothes didn’t enhance the fact.

In other words, when I look in the mirror every day, I don’t see me. I see the judgments that have been placed on me by other people. And, unfortunately, these are judgments that I chose to accept and believe about myself. They are constantly on repeat-play in my subconscious mind and they make me feel miserable about myself.

What judgments do you have on repeat-play? When you look in the mirror do you see your true self? Do you see the unique reflection of the image and likeness of God that you are? Do you see the beauty of a one-of-a-kind individual? Or do you see the person that someone else said is “too fat”? Do you see the person that someone once told you is “too lazy”?

It’s tragic that so many of us go through life seeing the person in the mirror that other people shaped and defined instead of seeing our true selves. I remember seeing a photograph recently of a person covered from head to toe in stickers. Each sticker represented a judgment made against that person by others: “ugly,” “fat,” “incompetent,” “lazy,” “unlovable,” “fag,” “putrid,” “bitch,” “heretic,” “maggot,” “stupid,” “irresponsible,” etc.

Well, today is the day that we stop accepting judgments about ourselves that other people try to place on us. Today is the day we look in the mirror and say “Enough is enough. I don’t give a rat's ass about what other people think.” And today is the day that we start pealing-away all of the old labels and beliefs about ourselves that are not true. In other words, today is the day that we take our lives back from the judgments of others so we can begin to clearly and truthfully see ourselves as we honestly are when we look in a mirror.

In order to do this, we’re going to have to get into our subconscious minds. It’s the subconscious judgments against ourselves that cause us the most harm. They are often hard to get in touch with and yet, they always have a way of surfacing into the conscious mind.

So start by noticing how you talk to yourself or what habits you have, such as looking in the mirror to see if your clothes are making you look fat. That pattern of behavior speaks volumes about what’s going on inside of us subconsciously. If we are checking our clothes, then there’s an underlying reason and most likely that reason is that someone told us we need to cover up any body fat to be acceptable and OK in the eyes of the rest of the world. By believing this, we have given the rest of the world full power over ourselves. We are allowing them to tell us we are great or we are shit. We need to take our power back by accepting ourselves, and our bellies, just the way we are.

So go stand in front of that mirror today and see what judgments you make against yourself. Write them all down. Do you want to own these judgments for the rest of your life? Are they actually your thoughts and judgments or are they someone else’s—like say mom’s, or dad’s, or an old boyfriend’s, or an advertiser’s on TV? Now that you have begun the process of identifying them, you have the option of taking your personal power back from these judgments.

Hopefully today we will all take those judgments that were made against us and we will start erasing them from our subconscious minds as we replace them with our own life-giving judgments about who we really are, like “child of God,” “beauty beyond compare,” “pleasingly, perfectly imperfect,” “intelligent enough to own my own life,” “wise and wonderful,” “awesome in the eyes of the Universe,” “adorable in every way,” and “valuable in every way.”

Start taking your power back right now. This is how we begin to become comfortable in our skin. And the more comfortable we are in our skin-- the more radiant we feel about ourselves from inside-out-- the less need we will have to act-out in old addictive ways. We can start breaking the grip of addiction by facing that mirror and honestly seeing—finally—the truly beautiful person who is looking back at us.

If you would like to learn more about the mirror-exercise, i suggest reading You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. She created the concept.