“Out beyond ideas of wrondoing and rightdoing, there is a meadow. I’ll meet you there.”
—Rumi
Safety. Establish a safe context. “I’m not here to judge your judging; we all do it at times. My job is to help you explore and understand your experience of judging more deeply and in more detail, and offer you some alternative choices to try out. I also want to respect your values completely, while you learn more about them. I am not asking you to commit to doing anything different, only to explore some alternatives, and try them out in your mind.”
Judgement. Pick an experience of judging another person, preferably one that is problematic to you in some way—either it makes you feel bad, or others object to it, or it gets you into difficulty in some way.“X is bad.”
Values Endangered. “Which of your values are involved in this judgement, and what danger to those values does the judged person pose?”
Physical or Mental danger? Examine the endangered values, and determine:
If the danger is actual material physical or economic, etc. danger, or
Danger to your self-concept or “ego,” as in disrespect or loss of status, without actual physical or economic harm.
Now or Later? In either case, is the danger immediate and certain, or a future possibility, so that you have some space to prepare for it?
Preference. Pick an experience of very strong preference.
“I really prefer Y to X.” When possible, choose an experience in which the same, or very similar values are expressed with about the same strength.
Contrastive Analysis. Make a list of all the submodality differences you notice between Judgement and Preference, in all three modalities (VAK).
Recover Content Deletions. Pick a specific event that is judged, and recover all the experiential deletions listed under in the “Judgement Chart Commentary” under “# 2. Preference.”
Map Across any remaining submodality differences, to make the judgement even more fully into preference.
Take “Other” Position for understanding and compassion for the other person, and to notice how they are limited in their choices and abilities. (Aligning perceptual positions can make this even more effective.)
Problem-Solving. Maintaining this state of preference, imagine how you could problem-solve about your differences with this other person, while fully maintaining the strength and importance of your values. Notice how the imagined interaction with this person goes, and whether or not it works better for your goals and outcomes than judging them.
