Judgement Day!

I faced quite a challenge this past week. I was asked to be a judge in the Miss Calgary pageant and said yes! After saying yes, I realized that while I teach and practice yoga this is the one thing I avoid and try to teach others to avoid. "Don't judge yourself, just do the best you can." This sentence is usually followed by, "Don't compare yourself to the person beside you, do what works for you and your body." And then there I was; sitting front row watching all of these beautiful, courageous girls strutting there stuff in hopes to be crowned the next "Miss Calgary." My job was to judge these girls? I wanted to give them all equal scores and give them all a crown and a banner for just having the courage and vulnerability to do it. They were all winners in my mind. But, I had a task at hand and very quickly had to decide how I was going to judge these brave souls. So I put on my game face, and tried to find imperfections,compare one girl to the next and found it quite stressful. Their future was in my hands....crazy. I was fortunate enough to have done a yoga workshop with most of the competitors in previous months, so I started to pull some memories from these workshops and tried to remember how the girls responded to me, the workshop and how they interacted with each other. This thought process made the evening so much easier. I was now judging on a real life experiece where in most cases, I got to witness the girls being themselves. Now I was making judging decisions based on how these girls treated each other, themselves and their competitors; intead of how they looked in a bikini or a fashion that perhaps was not suitable. This added more of a human element to my task at hand and got me through evening. The lesson? You never know in your day to day life why you meet the people you do, but you do for a reason and they are there to teach you something....so if you treat every human with the same respect and integrity that you like to be treated with, you won't care who is judging...you have already won.