When you dwell in stillness, the judging mind can come through like a foghorn.
I don’t like the pain in my knee. . . . This is boring. … I like this feeling of stillness; I had a good meditation yesterday, but today I’m having a bad meditation. . . . It’s not working for me. I’m no good at this. I’m no good, period.
This type of thinking dominates the mind and weighs it down. It’s like carrying around a suitcase full of rocks on your head. It feels good to put it down. Imagine how it might feci to suspend all your judging and instead to let each moment be just as it is, without attempting to evaluate it as “good” or “bad.”
This would be a true stillness, a true liberation. Meditation means cultivating a non-judging attitude toward what comes up in the mind, come what may. Without it, you are not practicing meditation. That doesn’t mean judging won’t be going on. Of course it will, because it is in the very nature of the mind to compare and judge and evaluate. When it occurs, we don’t try to stop it or ignore it, any more than we would try to stop any other thoughts that might come through our mind. The tack we take in meditation is simply to witness whatever comes up in the mind or the body and to recognize it without condemning it or pursuing it, knowing that our judgments are unavoidable and necessarily limiting thoughts about experience. What we are interested in in meditation is direct contact with the experience itself — whether it is of an inbreath, an outbreath, a sensation or feeling, a sound, an impulse, a thought, a perception, or a judgment. And we remain attentive to the possibility of getting caught up in judging the judging itself, or in labeling some judgments good and others bad.
— Wherever You Go There You Are (Jon Kabat-Zinn), Loc. 518–30