While in the throes of leadership, I found it necessary to make decisions, judgments if you will. I had to choose this way over that, this person over the other. My struggle in finding peace between making judgments and being judgmental eventually became an invitation into contemplative wholeness.
Making distinctions between discerning judgments and being judgmental seems simple enough, until you add people with differing personalities, contrary values, personal agendas, deep wounds and beyond. Setting aside time to reflect, on behalf of those I was leading, created space for deep compassion.
I moved back and forth from initiating masculine to responding feminine and from the creative right side of my brain to the analytical left. I moved up and down, pulling my head and heart together and I journeyed inward, sitting in silence until the quiet gathered up my outwardly dispersed parts.
The prayerful rhythms of back and forth, up and down, and in and out gently rocked me into wholeness and away from making decisions that came solely from my personal biases.
Only in doing my inner work with Spirit Counselor could I let go of the angst of how some of the tougher decisions affected others. I began living into a trust of both/and, moving away from either/or. At times, others saw the situation differently, but often they did not know all of the realities. Shouldering leadership responsibility and bearing the consequences of the more paradoxical decisions led me deeper and deeper into contemplation with compassion for the other.
I remember depending on my routine of sitting with the pieces of an issue until I sensed Spirit there with me, but once I observed sacredness reverberating through the fallout of a decision, my trust grew exponentially and so did my understanding of God.
Everything about the sitting became sacred as I took a situation deeper in prayer. The circle’s edge that I had drawn around my persona widened, and then like the ocean’s tide, receded back with the whole of me into the peaceful center.
For too long, I was preoccupied with knowing God’s will so that I would make a wise decision. Later, I settled into contemplative wholeness, trusting that the Sacred within was not only at the quiet core, but also filled the circle I had drawn, and oozed out beyond.