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Coming Together to Love, Heal & Empower

Inspiring Stories of Love, Healing, & Empowerment

Inspirations

April 2002
Issue Number 6

Welcome to Inspirations! Global Community For All sends out this e-zine filled with short, inspiring stories of love, healing, and empowerment once every three months. We share these wonderfully inspiring stories to encourage and inspire each other to be the best we can be each day of our lives. Thanks for joining us, and may these words inspire us to ever deepen our commitment to love, heal, and empower; to open to divine guidance; and to choose what's best for all.


Transforming Judgment into Love

Fred Burks


I am very blessed to have come to a place where it is fairly easy for me to feel acceptance and love for almost everyone I meet. As arrogance has been the biggest challenge in myself throughout my life, the few times I find myself having difficulty accepting and loving another person now, it is usually because I see and judge in them unbridled arrogance.

In this last month, I had a most amazing opportunity which challenged me to be able to accept arrogance in another and find love for him in a very profound way. George is an instructor who I interpreted for almost two years ago in a two-week course for Indonesian investigative police. George had the nasty habit of criticizing and belittling almost everything everyone did in the course. He believed being harsh and critical was the best way to make the students try harder. Though the students did learn, he did a very good job of making every participant feel inferior to him by the end of the course. One woman even cried at one point as George called her everything but stupid in how she performed an exercise.

By the end of that two weeks, I couldn't wait to get away from George. I had never encountered someone so arrogant and insensitive. I was very aware at the time that I had failed to find acceptance and love for him, yet I just hoped I wouldn't have to work with him again.

Last month at another two-week training, I didn't realize until it was already too late that I would be working with George again. But I have grown a lot in the last two years, so I was able to see this training clearly as a powerful challenge and opportunity for me to try my best to accept George for who he is.

So this time, from the very first day I consciously choose to look past my judgment. I chose instead to focus on opening to the deeper part of George, to his divine light within. I chose to do my best not to try to change him, but rather to try to accept and understand him for who he is. As I opened to that deeper part of him, I was able to feel his pain and woundedness. I had a sense that somehow he had been severely criticized and belittled as a child–just as I had. I felt his deep need to compensate for this by proving both to himself and others that he was better than everyone else. This may well have led to the arrogance I saw in him, the same arrogance I dealt with so much early in my life. I realized that it was my own righteousness about having overcome my arrogance which made me judge George so harshly. That which I had come from is what triggered me most and what I judged most severely.

With these realizations, I was for the first time able to open to seeing George for all that he is. During breaks we had a number of rich conversations about his personal life. He told me meaningful things like how much he loved being a father and how his daughter so loved him. He told me how important it was for him to be very strict with this daughter as a way of loving her.

During one lunch break, I gathered my courage and shared with him how difficult the previous course had been for me as I had felt he was excessively critical with the students. I told him I still felt this, but that now I wanted to get to know him and understand why he did what he did. He heard me and clearly respected my deep desire to be honest and open with me. He shared very deeply about why he acts the way he does. He even acknowledged that he is overly harsh at times. We shared in a number of deep, meaningful talks. By the end of the course, we left feeling a sincere bond of friendship and trust. I had found not only acceptance and understanding, but even a sincere love for George and for what he is trying to do.

Amazingly, throughout this course, George was significantly less critical and belittling than he had been two years earlier. He even praised people a number of times–something he had almost never done before. My own unresolved arrogance led to the thought that my openness had caused this change. Yet as soon as this thought arose, I recognized its source and quickly corrected myself. Yes, my openness and acceptance of George in these two weeks may have inspired him in some small way to be more open and less critical. Yet I also recognize that like me, he is learning and growing as he grows older, too. He is learning to be more supportive, and I am learning to be less judgmental and more loving.

What a powerful lesson for me! What a wonderful change!!! Now, when I see people with unbridled arrogance and my judgment kicks in, I feel inspired to more easily recognize what's happening. I am inspired to look deeper to find acceptance and love of even people with a lot of arrogance, for we are all sacred creations of God. Now, I can recognize my own weakness. I can more easily recognize my own judgment which keeps me from accepting others as they are. After this empowering experience, I am inspired even more to support every person, arrogant or not, to be the best they can be. Thank you so much George, and thank you Spirit and my GCA friends, for helping me so beautifully to transform judgment into love.


Any judgment I have of others is on some level a reflection of myself. -- Fred Burks

The more I confront my fears, the more fearless I become. -- Paz Vizcarra


The Serenity Prayer

Reinhold Neibuhr

God grant that I might have

the courage to change the things I can,

the serenity to accept the things I cannot,

and the wisdom to know the difference


Thanks for sharing in these inspiring stories with us. We wish you lots of inspiration and all the very best in the coming month.


Explore the mind and heart expanding websites managed by the nonprofit PEERS network:
www.peerservice.org - PEERS websites: Spreading inspiration, education, & empowerment
www.momentoflove.org - Every person in the world has a heart
www.personalgrowthcourses.net - Dynamic online courses powerfully expand your horizons
www.WantToKnow.info - Reliable, verifiable information on major cover-ups
www.weboflove.org - Strengthening the Web of Love that interconnects us all

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