Category 1: Correcting

"Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." - Matthew 18:3

A half-correction - softening your tone after a cutting remark without naming what you did - is better than nothing, but it isn't a 3. A full correction names it: 'That came out harsher than I meant, let me say it differently.' The discomfort of naming it out loud is part of the practice, not an optional extra.

"Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them." - Matthew 6:1

There's a version of "full correction" that quietly serves the same self-centered orientation this stage exists to interrupt: the elaborate apology that's really aimed at making you feel like a good person again, not at repairing what happened to the other person. Over-correcting - the long speech, the excessive self-criticism, the apology that keeps going until they comfort you - puts the attention back on you. It's a subtler version of the same category, just wearing a different outfit. A full correction is brief, specific, and then it stops.

"The precepts are not a cage. They are a riverbank. Without them, the water has no direction." - Thich Nhat Hanh, paraphrase

This category is easy to manage on an ordinary day. The real test is what happens when you're tired, or under pressure, or in a context that normally triggers your pattern. The stressed state reveals what's still running on autopilot - not because you should be harder on yourself when stressed, but because that's precisely when the tracking matters most.

"If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?" - Luke 6:32

Most people's pattern in this category isn't evenly distributed. There's usually someone - a boss, a parent, someone whose opinion costs you something - with whom you never quite manage the full correction, even once you've gotten good at it everywhere else. A full correction that only happens with people it's safe to correct isn't yet a full correction. It's a correction with a loophole, and the loophole is exactly where this pattern keeps living.

"When a person abandons all desires and acts free from longing, without any sense of mine-ness and ego, they attain peace." - Bhagavad Gita 2:71

If your streak resets - a day dropped below criterion and the count started over - here is what that means: it's information, not failure. Maybe a high-stress situation revealed the pattern is still running on autopilot under pressure. Maybe a social dynamic overrode the tracking. Maybe it was just a hard day. All of these are accurate data about where the shift hasn't fully taken hold yet. The student who catastrophizes a reset and stops tracking has let the ego protect itself from accurate information. Score honestly, restart the count, continue.

"If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall." - 1 Corinthians 10:12

If your scores have been strong this week, watch for a new version of the old trap: pride in the number itself. A clean run of 3s and 4s can start to feel like evidence that you've arrived - and that feeling is, itself, a small return of the self-centered orientation this stage exists to interrupt, just wearing the tracking instead of the original behavior. The goal was never a good scoreboard. Stay as suspicious of a streak that feels good as you were of a record that looked too clean back in Week 1.

"Straighten the crooked things within you, then straighten the crooked things that are between you and others." - Talmud, Bava Metzia 107b (paraphrase)

Seven consecutive days at 3.0 or higher doesn't mean the category is gone. It means it's no longer your default - you can see it forming and interrupt it, reliably, under whatever conditions the last seven days happened to bring. That's the entire bar. When you reach it, move to Category 2 and carry the sitting practice and the weekly question forward unchanged. Keep noticing Violence and Harm as you go - you're not required to score it daily anymore, but the awareness you built here doesn't switch off. Nothing later in this stage re-checks it; the honesty that keeps it running is now yours to carry, the same way it will be for the rest of this path.