Positivity is my mantra and motto in life. It is one thing I am always striving for and trying to bring in each and every aspect of my life. Why? Because positivity brings in light in absolute darkness; opens a door when you cannot see any; and gives you hope of a rainbow when the sky is full of dark clouds. Not only that but the good thing about positivity is that it makes you accept everything that you usually perceive as negative and allows you to be more open to them. So when there is darkness, you don’t feel upset about it because you know it is not permanent and when there is despair, you know if you try, you can turn it into happiness.
To live a good, meaningful life, it is important to stay positive and make positive contributions to the society which is precisely what @ecoTrain is doing. This week it has done the same by asking this meaningful question: What one thing can any person do to make a positive impact on humanity? While there are countless ways to positively impact humanity, one thing that is extremely close to my heart and has helped me positively change myself as well as those around me is to cultivate a mindful and nonjudgmental attitude.
How Being Mindful and Nonjudgmental can Positively Impact Humanity?
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Before I dig deeper into why I believe each one of us should try to be mindful of ourselves and nonjudgmental to positively impact humanity and the society, I’d like to explain what we go through every day because of a lack of these elements.
Sadly, most of us have the habit of putting labels on everything and setting our own criteria and standards for defining things. Take the area of beauty for example. Instead of letting people be who they are and who they want to be, we (when I say we, I mean the general society) have set certain standards to be identified as beautiful. If a girl has a slender physique, a fair complexion (criterion for beauty in the South Asian countries), is tall, has a small face and reasonably sized features with big eyes, we would label her as beautiful.But what about someone who has a plus-size figure?Or a girl who does not pluck her eyebrows? What we normally do is we label these people as not-so-beautiful or some people would even go to lengths to call them ugly.
While we don’t realize the impact of our words and the practice of putting labels on others, these things actually hurt people. Our labels and harsh words often cut through the hearts of others and leave them wounded for a long time.Imagine someone calling you ugly. How would you feel? Bad, right! If you keep focusing on that comment, you are quite likely to doubt that you are good looking and if you keep pondering on it for long, your self-opinion would become affected too. Before you realize it, you would feel bad deep down and soon your confidence levels would start dropping low as well.
If that’s how we feel when someone puts a label on us, why do we do the same to others? Why do we have the need to label everything as good or bad, beautiful or ugly, nice or unpleasant? Being judgmental does no good and if we stop doing that, we can actually change the society for the better and for that to happen, we need to be more mindful of ourselves and our environment.
Being mindful means to be aware of yourself, your feelings, your emotions and everything that goes inside you and it also refers to be more aware of your surroundings and everything it entails. When you are mindful, you accept each moment as it occurs without being judgmental of it.So if you feel angry, you don’t label your anger as an unhealthy emotion but something you are feeling because of a certain event or experience. So when you accept it as just an emotion, the need to react to it violently or aggressively diminishes as well and you let it subside on its own. This helps you slowly assuage all the pain you were feeling a little while ago by just being non-judgmental of it and patient with it.
If you start being nonjudgmental of the many emotions and feelings you go experience every single day, you stop labeling things as bad, negative or unhealthy. When we stop being judgmental of ourselves, we can find in ourselves the peace, patience and strength to be accepting towards others and be nonjudgmental with them too.One of the major reasons we are judgmental towards others is because we aren’t peace with ourselves. Because people label us, we feel the need to put labels on others too. This is quite likely to diminish to a great extent if not end completely if we start being accepting and mindful of ourselves. Because when we’ll be more accepting and nonjudgmental with ourselves, we will soon start to realize the pain others go through by being judged. When we feel peaceful after being more patient with ourselves, we’ll start to feel the trauma of others too.
When we become more aware of the pain and feelings of others, we are likely to become more empathetic towards them and empathy breeds compassion which helps settle the differences and issues many of us have and when issues end, we become united. So in my opinion, by simply nurturing mindfulness and becoming nonjudgmental, we can bring quite a huge and positive impact in the society. We will stop body shaming people; we would stop labeling certain professions as mediocre or not good; and we would stop criticizing people based on what they think, their cast or creed or theirlifestyle.We will become more accepting of others and would live and let others live too. How wonderful would that be, right!
I am trying to bring that change on an individual basis currently by becoming more nonjudgmental towards others and I hope to keep inspiring others in my social circle and then on a bigger level to do the same.