A theme I have encountered a lot among those who are spiritual or otherwise into personal development is this idea of feeling “way behind the ball.” Regardless of how much progress you’ve made or what point you’re at in your path, relatively speaking, you feel like you aren’t where you should be. Many of us feel at some time or another that we’re performing for someone, we compare our progress to other people, we feel pressure to earn someone else’s approval. Maybe we even feel inadequate in the eyes of the divine. Not uncommonly, we may not even know we’re doing this on a conscious level – there’s just this source of unspecified frustration trying to tell us that we aren’t good enough. I myself spent a lot of my time and energy worrying about where I was at in relation to this ball. This was until I realized, to yoink a page from The Matrix (how cliché, right? Shut up, I’m going somewhere with this!)
There is no spoon ball. There is only YOU.
One I seriously started contemplating this issue, questions I soon started asking were – what IS this standard, who sets it, and who says that I have to measure myself by it? And I looked, and behold… I was the only one sitting there. 
The whole issue boils down to two things: choices and experience. The choice to treat any aspect of your development like a race, or slack off entirely, are both perfectly valid choices in that they each lead to a certain experience. The important question is what kind of experience you’d really like to be having. If you don’t like the experience your choices have produced, make a few different ones. Allowing judgement into the equation is another choice you can make consciously now that I’ve brought your attention to it, if that hasn’t already happened. 
That’s a choice whose outcome I can tell you all about from experience – it’s a great way to kill your motivation, but not good for much else. Another thing I can tell you about judgment and criticism is that its only true source is internal. That’s right, the only one who is really criticizing you, is YOU.
I learned a lot about this concept from a past relationship of mine. Over time, in my perception my partner had been growing increasingly critical. Before long this developed from the occasional gripe, to an ongoing picking apart and tearing down of all things me-related, often in a very “I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried” way. The important thing about this was that eventually, this all got to be so constant and over-the-top, to the point of being comical, that I was forced to recognize it for what it was – a direct reflection of my own internal self-criticism! Once I realized this and changed my thought process about myself, my partner’s criticism seemed to evaporate almost immediately, the relationship shortly ended in an unexpectedly smooth way, and this individual drifted out of my life without incident soon after. It’s interesting that we’ll say things about ourselves that we would never tolerate coming from another person – but sometimes that external reflection is the only thing that will draw our attention to our own destructive mental habits. In my case I not only learned something about how internal-reflects-external, but also developed much higher standards about what kind of treatment I will and will not accept from another person.
Another experience with self-criticism from a spiritual perspective happened when I discovered what I call “the Judge.” This judge was a subconscious mental construct that had a wider ranging influence over my life than I ever realized, because it was operating somewhere below the surface of my conscious mind. The gist of it was that there was some part of myself masquerading as a nebulous sort of authority figure “out there” who was holding me to an impossible standard, and usually judging me negatively, without offering any sort of support or guidance. For me the jury is still out on the subject of spiritual “guides,” but I also had the nagging suspicion that if I had any sort of guidance, they were probably completely disappointed in me most of the time, and usually about two seconds from finding themselves a new subject. Obviously when you’ve got part of yourself operating this way all the time, and trying to exercise power over the rest of the self, it’s going to cause problems!
I’m still not entirely sure where all that came from, because my parents were never that way, and my concept of the divine has no room for any sort of authoritarianism… thats why it took so long to uproot. Nonetheless, at some point I realized just how much this “figure” permeated my life; how much I would concern myself with offending something I couldn’t even put my finger on; didn’t even realize this was happening consciously until I had this revelation. So, I did the internal work to get rid of the construct, and whoa, big difference. My belief for a long time has been that we are our only judge in any way that matters, but it’s like it has finally “taken” on more than just an intellectual level. I no longer feel like I’m “performing” for anyone but myself, and this shift has marked a big jump in my development.
It’s your choice as to how much of your personal power you give away to anything or anyone external by letting them influence your opinion of yourself. This applies to spiritual belief systems as well – where’s the sense in letting a belief, which is unproven by definition, make you feel inadequate? Until a belief is proven (and ceases to be a belief) you’re still just living according to someone else’s standard, and making a deity out of your own insecurity. When it comes down to it, nobody physical or nonphysical has any real authority to judge us for our choices, because they’re not the ones living our lives.
Note: the sort of methods I use to repattern self-aspects like “the Judge” quickly, completely and permanently will be the subject of another post in the near future. Keep yer eyes peeled.
–Palehorse
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