The Problem With Saying "I Don't Judge"

The video above is from the Heart Summit in 2012. I came across it again recently and was struck by how directly it still speaks. Fourteen years on, the teaching has held up. I've expanded the substance into the writing that follows, for those who want to read rather than watch.

People tell me they don't judge. I can feel them judging me as they say it.

You hear the same script in spiritual circles often enough that it becomes recognisable. They went to a retreat at some point, gave up their judgments, and now they love everyone, accept everyone, see the divine in all beings. The work is done. Whole and complete.

And you can feel them judging you the whole time.

This is one of the more common forms of self-deception in spiritual culture, and it costs the people who claim it more than they realise. The cost doesn't show up in their words, which are well-intentioned. It shows up in the relational field around them, which carries something they refuse to acknowledge. Let me unpack what's actually going on.

Judgment Is Not the Problem

Judgment is a vital faculty. It's how I assess distance when I drive, how I decide whether food has gone off, and the way I read a room when I walk in. We say someone has good judgment because we recognise that the ability to discern accurately is something we want around us. Judgment keeps us safe. It helps us navigate. It allows us to make decisions that protect us and the people we care about.

The very word judgment comes from the act of making a judgement, which is to discern. A judge in a courtroom listens to evidence and renders a decision. A jury weighs the facts and reaches a verdict. We hold this faculty in high regard when it's used well.

What gets called bad in spiritual culture is actually something different. It's prejudgment. Prejudice. The act of forming a conclusion ahead of the information.

The Mind Is a Pattern Generator

The reason prejudgment is so easy to fall into is that the mind is built to do it.

The mind is a pattern generator and it's brilliant at the job. It takes 5% of available data, often the most surface things like body shape or skin colour or accent, and constructs a full picture from that fragment. Then it mistakes the picture for the person. That's where the harm lives. In treating an incomplete judgment as if it were complete.

This is not a moral failing. It's a feature of how human cognition works. The mind sees a partial pattern and fills in the rest based on past experience and stored associations. The problem isn't the filling-in itself. The problem is forgetting that the filled-in picture is a construction.

Even prejudgment serves a function. It prepares us for what might be coming. It allows us to anticipate and ready ourselves. The skill isn't to stop doing it. The skill is to recognise we're doing it, and to hold the result loosely.

Awareness Is What Frees You

Here's what I've come to understand after years of working with this material.

I judge all the time. But the moment I become aware that I'm judging, I'm no longer at the effect of the judgment. The judging continues. The being-driven-by-it stops. I can give people a chance in spite of my judgment, not because I have transcended it.

Awareness of the judging is what frees you. The absence of judgment isn't available to us, and pretending otherwise is what creates the problem in the first place.

What I Repress, You Express

When someone tells me they don't judge, two things become clear. They're judging. And they can't feel themselves doing it.

Which means I'll feel it for them.

This is one of the foundational dynamics I teach in Heart iQ work. Whatever I repress in myself, you will express on my behalf. Whatever I deny in myself, the people around me will feel as a quiet pressure, an aloofness, a superiority they can't quite name.

You've felt that. Walking into a room where some people open you up and others drain you. It's rarely about who is being explicit about their feelings. It's about who is owning what they actually feel, and who is asking the room to carry it for them.

The person who claims they don't judge is asking everyone around them to do the judging on their behalf, energetically. Their suppressed judgment becomes the relational atmosphere, and other people register it as a kind of tax on the connection. They can't put a finger on what's off. They just know they feel slightly drained after the encounter.

The Practice

So what's the move?

It isn't to stop judging, because that's not available to you. And it isn't to feel guilty about judging, because guilt creates more suppression and the cycle continues.

The first move is to notice. When a judgment arises, register it. "I'm judging this person's clothes." "I'm prejudging this person's intelligence." Let the noticing be neutral, not loaded with shame.

From there, the move is to name it inwardly. Acknowledge it to yourself in plain language. The naming itself is what creates the small distance between you and the judgment. Once you've named it, you're no longer being driven by it unconsciously.

And then let it become information. Sometimes the judgment is telling you something useful about your own conditioning. Sometimes it's showing you something accurate about the person. Either way, it's data, not destiny.

The crucial piece, and the one most people miss, is to stay light with the whole thing. Don't make this another spiritual seriousness. Don't turn the noticing into a new form of self-monitoring or self-criticism. The lightness is what keeps the practice alive. The lightness is what stops it from becoming yet another shape of repression.

Over time, this practice changes how you show up in rooms. People around you stop having to carry your suppressed material. The relational field clarifies. And paradoxically, you become someone people actually want to be around, because you're not asking them to do your unconscious work for you.

A Final Note

The people who say they don't judge are usually the people who most need to start.

There's no shame in this. The spiritual culture that taught this kind of language was well-meaning. It pointed at something real, which is that prejudice causes harm. But it offered the wrong solution. We can't escape judgment. We can only become aware of it, hold it lightly, and let the awareness do the work.