How easy it is for us to find people around us a burden. As I fly out to Hong Kong, the elderly woman sitting next to me is being escorted by her daughter who clearly finds the whole experience a massive ordeal. To the daughter, the mother is obviously a liability who seems incapable of the simplest task and yet to me the mother seems totally present. She is healthy with full use of her limbs, in fact much healthier than her younger daughter who certainly needs a break from the stress.

Witnessing this interaction takes my mind to places where I feel my relationships with others are a burden or have the potential to become a burden. Then I remember that what creates others becoming a burden to us is our judgments of them. We have run this pattern most of our lives, since it began when we first moved off our centres as children and went into sacrifice in our families. This could only have happened because we judged significant people in our lives. And every judgment is an attack on others about what we think they can or can’t do.

Our judgment locks us into this cycle of sacrifice and burden. It makes our lives heavy and our tasks difficult. It also freeze-frames our lives, and we experience every day with very little flow and only glacial change. We are all being asked to learn forgiveness and to give up our judgments, for forgiveness is of love and judgement is attack and we do need to choose. Our judgments put us in jail, with every day the same, but they also put our brothers and sisters in jail as we lock the world into a product of our attack thoughts.

We cannot escape the effects of our judgments. The only way out is to give them up, learn to forgive ourselves and learn to extend ourselves in giving and love. This is the only way to change our world and make it a place of joy and lightness. If your world is not filled with light and joy today then you could start by asking, “who am I judging as a burden in my life right now?” Whoever comes to mind, would you instead extend yourself in love, kindness, sharing, service and generosity? You know when this is complete when it feels easy and without any sense of burden.

Love, Jeff