You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and wool-gathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

Pay Attention to Your Thoughts

The first step is to become aware of the VOJ. People who have lived with this chapter’s credo are amazed at the number of negative and judgmental statements they’ve made throughout the day. One student counted eighty-seven negative judgmental thoughts on a particular Saturday and a hundred on Sunday. Usually the ratio of negative to positive thoughts is quite high - four to one, even eight to one. Several of our students used the metaphor of rodents to describe these thoughts, calling them mice, rats, or weasels.

So start noticing that the judgment is present. Tally your judgmental thoughts when that is feasible: during meetings and conversations, while driving, or when you are part of an audience and not really participating. Be especially alert to the VOJ’s presence when you have difficulty, feel fear, or feel depressed. Look to your body for clues; it will tell you when judgment is lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce. You might feel a heaviness in your cheat or an overall body tension. You might develop an upset stomach or a headache. Or you might feel blue…

Attack the Judgment

Once you’ve identified what your VOJ is saying, turn to it and yell. Keep the message short. A classic one is “Get the hell out of my life!” At this point, if the VOJ feels threatened, it might come back with a rational-sounding statement such as, “Yes, but you do know that jobs are hard to find.” This is simply a more subtle form of judgment at work. It pretends to be reality; it’s judgment in disguise. Yell at it, too - out loud if necessary…

Make the Judgment Look Ridiculous

Some people find that it is effective to take an especially bothersome statement of judgment and blow it up like a balloon until it bursts.

To do this, shut your eyes and imagine that you can hear and see a VOJ statement - maybe, “People don’t like me” - in its normal tone. Then begin to intensify and enlarge it, making it more and more strident, perhaps flashing in brilliant neon lights. Then make the voice scream out in a tremendous echo chamber, with mile-high letters in view of thousands of people.

If this works for you, you will find your own creative ways to intensify, enlarge, amplify, and explode the judgment. And you are likely to laugh out loud as you realize how significant and puny the VOJ really is - or would be without your attention to support it.

Our minds are like children, and mindfulness, like a good therapist or a good-enough parent, “holds” them so that they can grow up and come to their senses. With enough practice, and enough patience, breakthroughs occur. These take many idiosyncratic forms but they are

generally of two types.

On the one hand, there is a loosening of identification with the known self; people see their self-concepts as just concepts that have arisen and accumulated in response to the particular challenges and conditions of their lives but that have no ultimate stigmatizing reality. On the other hand, there is a return to simply “being.” This is set in motion when awareness becomes dominant, when the observing mind becomes stronger than that which is being observed. As this observational capacity develops, a change sometimes occurs. Instead of one part of the mind observing another—“me” watching “myself”—the whole thing collapses and just “is.

A person, because of their own stupid behavior, has broken a marriage, been fired from a job, lost a friend, hurt their children, suffered a public humiliation. Their world has crumbled. In theory, it should be possible to repair yourself alone. In theory, it should be possible to understand yourself, especially the deep broken parts of yourself, through

introspection. But the research clearly shows that introspection is overrated. That’s in part because what’s going on in your mind is not only more complicated than you understand, it is more complicated than you can understand. Your mind hides most of your thinking so you can get on with life. Furthermore, you’re too close to yourself. You can’t see the

models you use to perceive the world because you’re seeing with them. Finally, when people are trying to see themselves by themselves, they tend to bend off in one of two unhelpful directions. Sometimes they settle for the easy insight. They tell themselves they’ve just had a great epiphany. In actuality, they’ve done nothing more than come up with a make-believe story that will help them feel good about themselves. Or else they spiral into rumination. They revisit the same flaws and traumatic experiences over and over again, reinforcing their bad mental habits, making themselves miserable. Introspection isn’t the best way to repair your models; communication is. People trying to grapple with the adult legacies of their childhood wounds need friends who will prod them to see their situation accurately. They need friends who can provide the outside view of them, the one they can’t see from within. They need friends who will remind them, “The most important part of your life is ahead of you, not behind you. I’m proud to know you and proud of everything you’ve accomplished and will accomplish.” They need people who will practice empathy.

And watch what happens to you. The more deeply you understand other people, the more you will appreciate them, the more reverent you will feel about them. To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.