You have to learn how to judge your actions and not come down on yourself for being really bad when you see that you’re making poor judgments or you’ve done something unskillful.

"You have to learn how to judge your actions and not come down on yourself for being really bad when you see that you’re making poor judgments or you’ve done something unskillful.

You’ve got to develop the attitude of a craftsperson. You’re sitting at your bench, working on building a piece of furniture, and you just realized that you planed the wood a little bit too deeply. So what do you do? Do you throw the wood away? That would be a waste. Do you start yelling at yourself? That wouldn’t accomplish anything. You figure out how to correct for the mistake. And then you move on. Perhaps it’s because we have so few manual skills nowadays that we haven’t developed this faculty of judging a work in progress.

But here’s your opportunity to develop it. Remember the basic principles. You’re judging the actions, not yourself as a good or bad person. And the purpose of the judgment is so that you can apply what you’ve learned the next time around. If you’re going to be noticing how other people are behaving around you, and you can’t help judging them, learn how to do it in a skillful way as well. If they do something that’s really obnoxious or harmful, ask yourself, “Am I doing the same sort of thing myself?” This is what it looks like when someone acts or speaks in that way. Take a good long look at it, telling yourself, “This is what I look like when I misbehave.” If you see someone doing something well, take it on. This is a habit you can develop, too.

In other words, the purpose of the judgment is to bring it back to the next time you meditate, the next time you breathe in and breathe out. As for all the other unskillful narratives that we tend to build up around judgment, you can just let them go, like so much sawdust. Or Ajaan Lee’s image of the person plowing a field: The things you’ve done in the past are like the dirt falling off the plow. You don’t gather the dirt up in a bag and carry it around. You learn your lesson and then leave the recrimination behind."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Bases of Success"