Hello, welcome to Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host, Thomas Mocke. Thank you for spending time with us today.

Each week, I pick a new topic related to mindfulness and hopefully something that is relevant

to your practice and very easy to apply immediately to your life.

Hopefully today is no exception.

I want to talk about a perception when we talk about mindfulness, when we think about what mindfulness is,

a perception that mindfulness is about being non-judgmental.

My experience is that most definitions of mindfulness include something like this about not being judgmental.

And I want to talk about this because I wholeheartedly agree if, but, with a caveat,

which is that when we talk about being non-judgmental,

we need to make a distinction because when we really look closely at our experience,

what we find inevitably is that we're extremely judgmental, that the mind is constantly evaluating the

environment, analyzing, assessing, judging. Do I like this? Do I not like it? Is it interesting? Is it not interesting? Is this

situation dangerous? Is it safe?

And there's no end to it.

What I've found after years of practice is that we can potentially run into a pretty significant pitfall.

And it goes something like this.

We notice when we sit still and really observe our own minds, our own experience, that we're incredibly judgmental.

But we know, we suppose that mindfulness is all about not being judgmental.

So what we do really naturally, and with the best of of intentions is we notice the judgment and we do

our best to mask it and we start to speak in really soft tones and talk about how mindfulness is

all about being in the present moment and being really happy. But sometimes we're really pissed off.

Sometimes we're really stirred up. Sometimes the waters are really muddy.

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