Sunday, March 27, 2016

Hating Hatred

it's Easter Sunday. And I feel this morning like I have a whole new heart.

A few weeks back I had a meditation that was a tipping point away from the self-hatred that I've fallen victim to again and again in my life. This doesn't mean that hatred evaporated from my heart forever.  Far from it. In many ways it has merely been the start of truly being aware of the shape and texture of this hatred that has lived in my heart like so many years like a psychic tumour.

I've continued to struggle with the kind of petty obsessions, resentment and contempt that rises from heart that is locked into the habit of hatred. But I did figure out something interesting a couple of days ago.

Mattheu Ricard recommends one antidote to hatred, shifting the focus of our hatred away from people and ourselves, and toward the hatred itself.  Make hatred the object of our hatred.

When I do this here's what happens: My focus shifts away from the story that I'm telling to myself, or to the "other" person who I'm hating (who, let's face it, is often a stand in for myself), and towards the place in my heart that hatred comes from.

Hatred it turns out, it a de-iterative emotion.  Anxiety about anxiety increases anxiety.  But hatred of hatred, if you do it right, if you really wrap your hatred in itself, serves to dismantle itself.  In time the hatred disintegrates and what is left in the heart is equanimity.

Equanimity is still strange to me, and believing in the power of equanimity is still not a belief that is solid in my heart. Spend some time with this equanimity and soon enough, I'm feeling anxiety.

A trick I learned this week is that it's easier to turn anxiety into excitement than it is to turn it into calm. So when I've been playing around with feeling excited about peace.  What I feel when I do this, is very close to joy. I'm not sure yet why I hesitate to call it joy. Maybe because I want joy to be something that arises naturally in my heart, not simply a conceptual tweak.

But I know I'm close.  And it's easter.  So I will rejoice.

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Immediate Pain

Pain is a great, maybe our greatest teacher.  I know that joy is the reward and the goal of meditation. But the reward and the goal is only achievable to the degree that we are able and willing to experience the pulses of pain that our nervous system has been designed to send out to us a million different ways every day.

Suffering, if I remember my Shinzen Young equation correctly is pain multiplied by resistance. The path of reducing our resistance to suffering is our way to peace, and to natural joy. But paradoxically, we can't get there is we're not open to pain.

Life wants us to feel a lot of different kinds of pain because our brain is also designed to reward diversity and complexity. And most importantly, it rewards the discovery of the true and most immediate source of pain.

For instance when I'm running and I feel pain or exhaustion, I might tell myself that the source of this pain is the running, when really the source might be poor posture, poor fitness, bad alignment.  If I persist and get to the source to correct it, my reward is the tremendous joy and freedom of having a fit oxygen absorbing body. As I know, the rewards of that level of fitness are massive. New brain cells, a stronger heart, a sense of power and vitality. Endorphins!

I have to know that pain has a cause, each variety of pain has a cause, and I have to know that it is discoverable.  And that because it's discoverable, I can be happy and happier than I am now.




Monday, March 14, 2016

Immediate Joy

Meditation has changed my sense of self.  I wouldn't say yet that it has stabilized it, but I'm not as prone to accept this tiny self that seems to live in a prison somewhere in my frontal cortex.  There's this bigger, more fluid, more magnetic and powerful self that lives and travels throughout my entire nervous system. Pure awareness, not just a glimmer, but an increasingly present energy.

This week started out with a greater consciousness of the self-hatred that is beginning to break up in my heart, like that piece of ice from the Snow Queen. Now I find my self wanting to know what this more powerful self wants. What is this consciousness feeling in and through my heart?

One thing is wants is to run more. To feel that pure joy that comes after a long run.  I've put the picture of myself and Ben that I took at the end of the 10K, to remind myself throughout the day how important that vitality is to my life. It's spring, so the nice fresh weather helps.

My higher self, if that's what we want to call it, wants to feel healthy joy. The healthy joy that comes from creativity, exercise, and useful, meaningful work. The healthy joy that comes from having a lot of love in my life and in my home.

Not overexcitement or grandiosity.  Just that mild sustainable joy that comes from a life well lived.

Monday, March 7, 2016

Absolute Love

A few years back I wrote a post about a pivotal moment in my practice, the night my depression died. This morning I write about another such moment. The morning my self-hatred healed.

The process started last night, in much the same way, with insomnia. To try to nudge myself asleep I listend to a Tergar meditation on essence love, a meditation where we forget about lovingkindness and compassion, and practice being, without concept, without cognition with whatever suffering we're feeling in its rawest, most present energy. Only there is transformation possible.

I followed that up with a Rob Bell podcast on grace and peace. Grace is that energy that allows us to receive the gifts of life, and its abundant rewards that are always available to us, whether we deserve them or not. I usually fall asleep half way through a Robcast, but not this night.

Finally, tired of every virtuous option available to me,  I watched the last episode of Downton Abbey on Netflix, until eventually I drifted off.

This morning I was too dull in my brain to read or think much, so I meditated during the hour that I've been trying to devote to tidying. During this meditation, the completion of the triad I started two weeks ago with Absolute Joy and Absolute Self emerged.  Absolute Love, the love that is always there, whether we see it or not, regardless of what we have done in our lives.

Then it came to me that before I assimilate this sense of Absolute Love, I need to deal with the deep block, such a strong part of me, so persistent a presence, I'm not even aware it's there.  Self hatred.  My legacy of years of rage, frustration, unkindness. That self hatred is like this lump of carbon in my heart.  But it  is also  in its way the gem like flame that Walter Pater writes about in his famous essay on the Renaissance. It is love gone hard. But it is love.

My parents successfully maintained their hatred for over 50 years. And I wonder if this has been a great gift to me in a way, because al I need to do is turn it into love.  I have the maintenance part down, I just need the antidote.

That night my depression died, did not mean the end of depression, but it did mean the end of depression having a death grip on me.  It still visits from time to time, but it's never been as strong in me again.  This has happened now with my hatred.  I don't expect it to leave me, but it will never rule me in the way it once did. And for that I am deeply grateful.