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If you've ever judged yourself harshly and thought, "What's wrong with me?" Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do. What if the brain's instinct to judge isn't helping you, though? What if it's actually hijacking you? And what if the thing you think is the problem in your life isn't actually the problem at all? What if it's your judgment of it? Let's talk about it. You're listening to Relish, the podcast for people ready to stop chasing self-improvement and start savoring their lives. If you're tired of the hamster wheel of healing and hungry for more joy, presence, and meaning, you're in the right place.
Hey friends, it's Alysia and welcome back to Relish, where we reclaim joy, presence, and authenticity in the middle of being fully and beautifully human. A big focus for me with this podcast is to spread the word about how focusing so much on fixing ourselves prevents joy. And today we're going to dive into the roots of that desire to fix. This word called judgment. We typically hear the word judgment and think about it as I'm judging other people, which we all do to some extent. But today we're going to in particular narrow in on a kind of judgment, self judgment. the inner critic, the shoods, the subtle voice that whispers, "You should be better, you should be different, you should have figured this
out by now." I think this voice can be especially loud this time of year as the new year approaches. So, in this episode, we are going to explore what judgment actually is psychologically and neurologically. We're going to look at how judgment hijacks your mind and your nervous system. I will share a personal story and I'll teach you my raise method which is a powerful embodied way to work with judgment instead of being held hostage by it. I'm also releasing a dessert meditation alongside this episode that will take you through this method. So after you listen here, you can go and give that a go. But before we dive in, if you have been enjoying the show, I have to kindly ask please
follow, subscribe, download, and leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcast and Spotify, especially downloading. That is really super important for helping us grow, and I am so grateful for your support. And if this resonates, please share it with someone else who's hard on themselves. Maybe that'll help soften something in them. I also want to acknowledge that this is a Monday. We typically launch single entre on Wednesday, but since the holiday was this week, I decided it might be better to give you a little bit more time beforehand. So, there will not be a Wednesday episode this week, but I will be back again next Monday. And moving forward in 2026, I've decided Monday is going to be our primary
posting day. So, I will still, if I do two per week, post Monday, Wednesday. But if it's a week where there's only one episode, it will be live on Monday. All right, let's get into it. What is judgment? Most people think judgment is a personality flaw or a bad habit or something they shouldn't do. And what I've learned is it's really a part of being human neurologically. It is what our brains are designed to do. It's kind of how the brain functions actually. That predictive processing we've talked about is a mechanism where your brain is making a judgment call. It's a best guess about what's happening. Judgment,
by definition, is the ability to make decisions or come to sensible conclusions. It's a way of choosing this or that. So, our brain is having to make those determinations all the time. It perceives something and then it categorizes it into a box, a category. This is big or small, good or bad, black or white, healthy or unhealthy. These are simply the brain making a judgment call. So that's judgment in the barest sense of the word. Judgment is your brain trying to make a call to know what's happening. The brain does not like the unknown. Judgment is a way that your brain is trying to find knowing. It's trying to find control. And when the brain senses something might be off, it's scanning for danger.
And that includes danger that could be within yourself. So judgment is the brain's way of trying to spot problems, maintain control, protect you from rejection, and it's trying to prevent shame. With that self-judgment, this kind of maladaptive attempt to protect, it might sound like you should know better, you should be calmer, you should be more productive, you should be over this. The shoulds, all those shoulds are micro judgments. The brain's attempt to fix, manage, and prevent future pain. You might have heard the phrase, are you shuing on yourself? Judging yourself. We all have parts of ourselves that we want to fix. Now, before we go any further, I want to get into a little embodiment. You may know by now, I believe there is no
transformation in information. us talking about this is not really going to integrate change. It's experiencing it that leads to change. So, I'm going to invite you to bring something to mind that you would like to fix about yourself. We're going to work with it a little bit in this episode. So, take a breath and bring to mind something you've been judging about yourself, trying to fix. It could be something about your body, your productivity. It could be a pattern like people pleasing or procrastination. And whatever it is, this thing you want to fix, bring it to mind and notice what happens in your body as you do.
Notice what you feel the sensations. Is there any tightness or clenching changes in your breath? There's no right experience. Just notice for you. And when I'm with people live and facilitating this, most people can tune into some kind of contraction. So notice if you can feel that any kind of tightness somewhere in your body. That is the energy of resistance. That tension, that tightness is what judgment feels like in the body. So try something with me. I know if you're just listening and not watching, you can't see the video. You can't see me on the video, but I'm going to talk you through this. So take your left hand. Okay? Take your left hand and put it into a tight fist.
So your left hand is in a really tight fist. And then I want you to use your right hand to try to pry open that left fist. Okay? Just try to pry it open and notice what happens for you. Notice does anything happen? Not much is happening for me. Actually, it's just breeding more resistance, more tension. So, pause for a moment. You might imagine that this tight fist of your left hand represents the aspect of yourself that you want to fix your body or the pattern or whatever it is. And you trying to pry it open is all the ways we tend to meet oursel. You know, are you hard on yourself? Trying to fix yourself? This is the thing that you judge that's wrong with you. Can you feel that energy?
Okay, so shake out your hands. We're going to come back to that later. We live in a culture that is obsessed with fixing. We are taught that if we just work hard enough, meditate enough, achieve enough, then one day we'll finally be enough. And what I have found in my own journey and working with clients is that this is a trap. It's a setup. The more we chase enoughness, the further we get from feeling it. That's the hamster wheel that I've talked about. The more we try to fix ourselves, judging that we need to be fixed, we are reinforcing the belief subconsciously that I must be broken. Now that belief, that shame is the root of judgment.
It's that quiet voice or sometimes not so quiet for some of us that says something's wrong with me. I know this voice very well. Do you know this voice? And I appreciate your honesty if you can admit that to yourself. I have never met a person that doesn't have that voice. Coaching hundreds of people, working with thousands of people at the Hoffman process, even people who seem to have everything. Wealth, power, fame, everyone. I've worked with, even celebrities, carry a feeling there's something wrong with me. This is shame. And I'm going to do an entire episode on shame at some point. It's one of my favorite topics, but it is related to judgment. Shame ultimately narrows in on the belief that there's something wrong with me. It's a
thought that we believe to be true. It's a judgment that we make that in some way I'm flawed, I'm broken, I'm not enough. Judgment is also the behavior that follows that thought. So because there's something wrong with me, because I'm not enough, I should change, I should fix this, I should be different. So shame is the root initiator. Judgment is the shame in motion. And it's the behavior, the action, the way that the belief shows up in your thoughts and your self-t talk and your behavior.
Shame comes with a sense of not wanting to be found out. And that self-criticism is the protective mechanism to try to control. Okay, if you change or if you fix that part of you, no one will know. No one will know that I'm not enough, that I'm up. This is happening subconsciously by the way. Judgment is how shame tries to regain control, but it keeps us suffering. There's a story from Buddhism about a man who's walking out in the forest and suddenly struck by an arrow. And that arrow represents pain. The unavoidable pain of being human. We all get hit sometimes. failure, loss, disappointment, heartbreak, grief. But then the story goes on. The man picks up a second arrow and shoots
himself with it. That second arrow is his reaction, his judgment, his resistance to what's happened. This shouldn't have happened. I should handle this better. I shouldn't feel this way. There's something wrong with me. We can't always prevent the first arrows that happen in life, but we can stop firing the second. The second arrow can be optional. And yet, it's the one we fire so often. So, I'll share a personal story about a first arrow I experienced growing up. I really struggled with reading. I was a very slow reader. It was really hard for me. I felt stupid and I always needed tutoring and summer school programs even though I was in the gifted
classes which actually made me feel even more stupid. And I had all kinds of issues. I had eye issues and headaches and um it was like sometimes at the eye doctor my eyes would register as perfect like 2020 vision and sometimes they were a disaster. And that combined with these sort of weird pains and fatigue, the doctors just could not figure me out. And I'd go in for a checkup every year. And I remember one year a doctor saying, you know, kind of frustratingly that diagnosing me was like throwing darts at a dart board. And I went on to internalize that belief that there must be something wrong with me. And I carried that shame for 26 years. I limited myself in college. I felt I was too stupid to study something like
science, which I had always loved. Uh I limited myself professionally. I could look back and see, you know, basically everything I did was held back because of that shame belief, that belief that I'm stupid. And then one day at 26 years old during a routine eye exam, a doctor said, "You have something called convergence insufficiency." And I had no idea what that was, but he explained, "Your eyes work basically perfectly separately, but they do not work together." And the diagnosis hadn't existed 20 years before, so there's no way I could have known. But he told me he was shocked I'd even graduated high school. And I felt a lot of things in that moment. But the overarching emotion was relief.
I felt validated. So much of my life and my challenges now made sense and it opened me to the possibility for the first time. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn't stupid. Maybe I just had this difference that needed support. And after that diagnosis, I got that support. I got these special glasses. I got some tools for reading. And for the first time in my life, reading wasn't painful. I was still slow, but it became quite joyful. And that year, I read over a hundred books on what became my most special interest. and passion in life which many of you know is mindfulness. Now with that diagnosis you know that day nothing about me changed. My eyes were the same. They'll
always be the same. And yet, in nearly an instant, once I was no longer caught up in that judgment and convinced the shame was true and could be curious about my differences and validate them and actually accept myself as I was, the shame was dismantled and that changed the whole trajectory of my life. I went back to grad school then. I never thought I'd go back to school. I wrote a thesis on neuroscience. My career path totally changed. I mean, I really believe I wouldn't be here sharing this with you right now in this podcast if that hadn't happened. I spent 26 years with that fist, that left fist so tight. So if you remember when you had that left fist in your hand earlier, it was like I was trying to pry it open always with this
intense subconscious and also sometimes conscious self-criticism of like you're so stupid. There's something wrong with you. Don't let anyone find out. Now something I often see in coaching is someone will come to a session and say I'm struggling with whatever it is procrastination. I'm not disciplined. I'm too emotional. I'm I'm not confident. And as we process the issue and peel it back, what we discover is that the procrastination is not actually the issue. The emotion, the confidence, whatever is not actually the issue. The issue is the judgment about the issue. The shame, the meaning that they've attached to what it says about me, the intention behind it. It's not I
procrastinate, it's I procrastinate because I'm lazy and broken. It's not I'm anxious. It's I shouldn't be anxious and because I am there must be something wrong with me. Most of the time that shaming judgment hurts far more than the problem. Judgment is the second arrow. It makes everything harder and it blocks your ability to respond from presence and truth not in just a theoretical sense but neurologically. Let's come back for a moment to what's happening in the brain when you judge yourself. One, the amygdala is activated. The self-judgment is perceived as a threat. The brain thinks that you're in danger, not from
the outside, but from yourself. The second thing is that your default mode network lights up. This is the rumination center, overthinking, self-referencing, looping. And then the dorsal anterior singulate cortex monitors errors. So this is a part of the brain that's trying to detect what's wrong. But shame makes it scan you. You become the error. The prefrontal cortex is the part responsible for choice. That goes offline. So that means you literally lose access to responding. You can only react. And this is why judgment feels like a trap. It is a trap. But thankfully there's a way out and it's not through fixing. So before we talk about it, take back out your hand, your left hand, and just like before, put it into a really tight
fist. And actually, if it's possible, I know if you're driving, maybe you can't do this, but if it's safe, do this with me so you can feel it for yourself. And even though you are listening, if you can't see me, I'm going to walk you through it. So your left hand is in a super tight fist. Super tight. And then take your right hand out and open it up. And I want you in that right hand to just embody curiosity, kindness, okay? A loving energy. Put that in your right hand. You might even imagine someone that you love comes to you for support. How do you want to meet them? Put that in your right hand. Opening this embodying energy. And with that loving intention in the right hand, take that right hand with your palm facing up.
And then place that tight left fist into the palm of your loving right hand. And just kind of cradle that left fist. Gently in the palm of your right hand. Just allowing it to be. And just notice what happens to the left fist if you are embodying love with that right hand and cradling it. Does it soften at all? For me, it's almost like it could open up on its own if I allowed it without me needing to do anything.
Not forcing, not control, just allowing. The part of you that you want to fix is rooted in some pain. Being human is hard. It's hard enough as it is. What if you weren't shooting yourself with second arrows? What if you were to meet this part of you with curiosity and kindness? What could that feel like if you were not judging yourself? What would be possible? not fixing, just being. And this is the energy of mindfulness, by the way. Mindfulness is being aware of what's here without judging it. And in that awareness, when we can pause long enough to notice, the body relaxes, the mind opens, and we can respond rather than react.
Awareness calms the neurological alarm system and it reactivates the part that's responsible for choice. So the next time you feel that clenching inside your body's a cue. Remember you don't have to pry it open. And you don't even need to force a new thought. Just notice, soften, maybe even cradle it. And I wanted to share a specific tool with you that you can use next time you're noticing that you're judging yourself or maybe spiraling in that. If you're familiar with western mindfulness circles, you might have heard of Tara Brock. She created a rain practice. It's a mindfulness and compassion practice. So I have modified it and I'm going to share it with you here. It's called the
raise method. So it's adapted from that rain practice but with a kind of relish lens. I always found myself sort of adding to that practice on my own. So this version has a bit more sematic integration and is aligned with responding rather than reacting. But I will link Tara's original practice below as well. So raise R a S E stands for recognize, allow, inquire, soften, embody. This is not a mindset hack. This is a nervous system tool. So I'm going to walk you through each step here briefly, but the real change will come from trying it out, which is in the dessert practice that launched alongside this
one today. So R is recognize. recognize what's happening with clarity but without merging with it. So seeing it separate. Oh, this is judgment. This is the second arrow. This is the protector. That awareness turns the light on in a dark room. A is allow. Allow the feeling to be here. And you might not like it, not because you like it. You're allowing it because the fighting creates more contraction. So allowing means acknowledging the reality of what's here without adding resistance to it. That's you putting down the second arrow. I is inquire. So gently, curiously ask, what does this part of me need? What is this part of me afraid of? What is this contraction trying to protect?
Curious inquiry turns judgment into information. S is soften. This is where that fist gesture comes back. Instead of prying, you just cradle it. You soften around the part, not inside the part. You create a spaciousness around it. Softening lowers the nervous system threat signal. And this is where you'll probably feel a physiological shift. The final step, E. Embody. This is about pivoting back into presence. You embody kindness, curiosity, openness, the qualities that your light and your authenticity naturally carry. You embody the energy that allows the fist to open. Not because you forced it, but because you changed how you're relating to it. So, you allow your body to actually
shift. That's embodiment. responding rather than reacting. And this non-judgment, this acceptance is what heals judgment. So I do hope you'll try that out after this or in the future as well whenever a moment comes up. So download it so that you can access it later. I also want to say mindfulness meditation has been my primary tool for a decade and I think that has shifted the way that my mind relates to judgment more than anything. A very basic mindfulness meditation. I've posted a free one as a dessert practice before, so I'll link it below if you want to try. But with a basic mindfulness practice, you stop, you notice the breath or whatever your anchor is, and you let your attention
rest there. And at some point, the mind will probably wander away. A lot of people believe that they can't meditate because their mind wanders too much. No, no, no. This is not a problem. The mind wandering is the point. The mind wanders and your job, the practice is to bring your attention back and to do it without judgment. So, it's not the mind wanders away and then you, you know, from this clenched judgmental space are like, "Oh, you're so stupid. You're a bad meditator. Stop wandering." No, it's the energy of like, "Oh, look, look at that. The mind wandered away. Notice it. No problem. Come on back." And you're doing that again and again, maybe even hundreds of times in a short 5 to 10
minute practice. Okay? Every time the mind wanders away, it's like a rep, a chance for you to rewire that relationship to judgment, to train your brain to soften and release the judging pattern in real time. It's so powerful. So, please try it out for yourself and know that your judgment is not proof that you're broken. Your judgment is rooted in some kind of pain and it's really just proof that you're human. Your mind learned to judge you because it thought it was protecting you. But you don't have to shoot the second arrow. You can raise above it instead. You can meet yourself with curiosity and compassion and presence. And in that meeting, something softens. And when you stop focusing on fixing, it
makes space to remember that you were never broken to begin with. There's nothing wrong with you. I know that and I want more than anything for you to know that. Okay. So, thank you for being here. If this episode resonated, please follow the show, download, leave the five star rating and reviews all the things. And if there's someone in your life who you know judges themselves really harshly, maybe share this with them. That could open a new doorway for them. Please give that dessert meditation a go where I guide you through the full raise practice. I'll also link the mindfulness meditation that I've shared in the past below. And if you want to share any thoughts, please email me or call the hotline. I would love to hear from you.
So, thank you for being here. I will see you next week. Go relish your beautiful life without judging.
