How To Be Less Judgmental (Of Other People – and Yourself) | La Sarmiento
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2024
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Can mindfulness really pull you out of a spiral of self-judgment? Don’t you need to be judgmental sometimes? What’s the difference between being discerning and judgmental?
Description:
Meditation and mindfulness doesn’t uproot your capacity to be judgmental, but it can help you see the value in being judgmental by learning how to work with the judging mind.
La Sarmiento has been practicing Vipassana meditation since 1998. La is a mentor for the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, a teacher with Cloud Sangha, and a contributor to the Happier Meditation app.
In this episode we talk about:
- How mindfulness can help us identify when we’re being judgmental
- The difference between discernment and judgment
- How it can be so delicious to be judgmental of others – but why it’s actually harmful to ourselves and others
- The four questions to ask when we notice ourselves going into judgment mode
- How to operationalize the phrase “am I suffering right now?”
- Investigating the motivations behind striving for success
- Why owning up to being a jerk is sometimes the exact right answer
Full Shownotes: www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/la-sarmiento-rerun-2024
Where to find La Sarmiento online:
Website: www.lasarmiento.com
Additional Resources:
Download the Happier Meditation app today.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:19.5 | Hey, hey, how we doing, everybody? I have this vivid memory of being on a beach vacation |
| 0:24.0 | with a bunch of friends many years ago when I was first getting interested in meditation. |
| 0:27.8 | I was lounging and reading a book about Buddhism. And one of my friends spotted it and remarked |
| 0:33.4 | that he could never do Buddhism or meditation because he was a comedy writer, still is actually, |
| 0:39.8 | and he needs to retain his capacity to be judgmental. |
| 0:43.7 | There's so much to unpack in that comment. |
| 0:45.7 | I mean, I wish that meditation uprooted my own capacity to be judgmental. |
| 0:50.9 | I wish the technology was that effective. |
| 0:53.2 | But anyway, I think the real misunderstanding here is that there's somehow a lot of value to being judgmental. I wish the technology was that effective. But anyway, I think the real misunderstanding here |
| 0:55.3 | is that there's somehow a lot of value to being judgmental. I think that confuses discernment |
| 1:01.3 | with judgmentalism. And if anything, I think mindfulness or clear seeing or self-awareness, |
| 1:07.2 | that makes you better able to discern the kind of details that might make good comedy or help you make better decisions instead of being judgmental, which I think is a state of mind that is, in my experience, quite painful. If you're mindful, you might see that judgmentalism carries a valence of ill will or hatred or superiority, none of which actually feel good, again, if you're paying attention. |
| 1:29.8 | And of course, many, if not most of us, spend most of our judgmental energy not on other people, |
| 1:35.0 | but on ourselves, nitpicking every decision, second guessing compulsively. |
| 1:39.5 | As a friend of mine once joked, if anybody said to him the kinds of things his inner narrator said to him, |
| 1:45.4 | he would punch that other person in the face. And yet many of us deeply believe that we need to |
| 1:50.7 | liberally apply the inner cattle prod in order to get anything done. I am still working on this myself. |
| 1:57.4 | So today we're going to talk about how to work with the judging mind. And my guest is La Sarmiento, |
| 2:03.0 | who's been practicing Vipasana meditation since 1998. La is a mentor for the mindfulness |
| 2:08.5 | meditation teacher certification program and a teacher with cloud sangha. In this conversation, |
| 2:14.1 | we talk about how mindfulness can help us identify when we're being |
... |
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