“Whatever the distortions of your personality or dysfunctions of your physical, mental, or emotional life, the ground is the same consciousness, radiant in itself.”

The Great Discovery Inside Self-Hatred

When I invite people to trust themselves, often what gets touched upon is self-hatred. People feel that because they have failed themselves or failed others, they cannot therefore be trustworthy.

In the past when I would look into myself, I didn’t like what I saw. What I was looking into was really my personality, and it was a mess. There were wounds and concrete blocks, and all kinds of ugly stuff in there. It was like, “Oh my God.” The thrust for me was to try to escape that or fix it, to get help for it. I spent years learning many different ways to escape and fix. But in whatever way I fixed it, it seemed there would always be something bubbling up from the depths to destroy my efforts.

Finally, I had to recognize that it was my own self-hatred. For me, the particular form of self-hatred was about my body and its limitations, its seeming inherent ugliness and filth. For others, the object of self-hatred may be different. Maybe we feel ashamed of our actions, or we are afraid that we have failed others, or we suspect that deep down we are stupid, or just not enough.

Like the fear of death or non-existence, self-hatred can be a horrific gift, one that seems to come with most humans who were raised by most parents. It gets inbred in us: bad girl, wicked girl, stupid girl, mean girl, selfish girl. And we think, “Well, that must be right.”

When you trust yourself, you have to be willing to penetrate self-hatred and discover what is underneath it. We have tried to deny it, to get rid of it, or to dress it up. But until it is fully met, it remains in the shadows. The by-product of that meeting is the liberation of this wicked, ugly, filthy bad seed, this throwback. That is what gets liberated. Trust is opening to what is underneath. But to get underneath, you have to discover what the barrier is: the disbelief, fear, self-hatred, horror, and all the proof that the worst is true.

When I was finally able to penetrate self-hatred, I was aware of a dark, murky energy. I had already met the frantic, hysterical energy that was an attempt to escape the dark, murky stuff. When I saw it, I thought, “Oh my God, not that! Anything but that.” But here it was. I had spent much of my life avoiding it, circling it, dramatizing it, fixing it, and hating it. But blessedly, I finally just opened, and I invite you to open too. I experienced it. I felt it move through my body, like some kind of energy moving through me, and then it was gone.

Opening is Trustworthy

Can you open to self-hatred? We mostly just want to bypass that part and get straight to love. Love is the refuge. From that refuge, you can simply open to whatever else is here. If there is self-hatred or if there is dark, murky energy, can you simply open? If not, perhaps there is some kind of internal discussion that gets in the way of opening: “What will happen if I open? What will be the result? Yes, but… I opened already, so why is it still here?” Recognize the complications of the discussion and the simplicity of opening. And you will see, opening is trustworthy.

It is not that I am recommending walking through parts of downtown or the prison yard and just opening to whatever dark and murky energy may be out there. I don’t advise that. You don’t have to go around being “open,” saying “Oh, hi!” to everyone you meet. I tried that. But that’s another form of escape. I thought if I could make enough friends, make enough allies, get enough people to love me, then that would cleanse the murkiness. Then I would be rescued. Jesus would save me, or a teacher would save me.

When I met my teacher, Papaji, he said, “Stop searching.” I heard that as, “Stop running away, stop running toward, stop running against, stop hiding.” So I stopped. It is a sober moment when you are willing to actually turn and open to what it is you have been running from. It is not child’s play. It is for an adult. It is ruthless. It is rigorous. And it is simple. In the core of self-hatred, there is love, and that love is trustworthy.

The Heart Can Bear It All

I can’t even begin to describe the by-product of the heart opening: the self-confidence that naturally follows. I don’t have confidence in my body, or my personality, or my ability to speak what can’t be spoken. But I have absolute, total confidence in the truth of who I am. And that is available for you, because it is the same I Am. Whatever the distortions of your personality or dysfunctions of your physical, mental, or emotional life, the ground is the same consciousness, radiant in itself.

The heart can bear it all because the heart is the living expression of this consciousness, naturally imbued with the capacity to bear anything and everything. It is possible for all that arises to be met and embraced in each one of us, in an embrace that is always deeper, always closer, always unexpected. It is the endless discovery of the love that is naturally alive within you.