I hate myself

This week Dan Harris interviewed Mingyur Rinpoche on 10% happier.  At the end of the interview Rinpoche led a guided meditation in just being what you are. "When you know you don't need to change. That's when you change." 

I put a lot of energy into trying to stop hating myself, but it occurs to me this morning, that maybe I don't need to change this part of my mind. Self-hatred can be that lump of coal in my heart that is really a diamond.  It bring me right to the source of my vulnerability. 

What would happen if I truly believed that I didn't need to change this?

And what if my meditation going forward was truly about accepting what was, the conceptual mind, the confusion, the striving, despite all my effort a non-striving? 

I had a vision of myself this morning, like if I were one of those people so rich that they just have a bank account that builds wealth without work.

Could I get to the point where I saw many times, everyday, that I am this rich? That I will be until my last breath.  

When I can greet this statement "I hate myself" like a lifetime loving companion, with the love I would feel to  a long lost friend who just walked through the door, I will know I am here.

The Secret to the Direct Approach

I'm already doing it. 

I've always been doing it. 

Trying to practice the three vital points, and reading a book by Byron Katie, about her experience living in non-dual awareness, and definitely having some good meditations. 

I came across a book this morning that seemed appropriate to my journey "Standing As Awareness" by Greg Goode.  Published the same year that I started this blog, his approach is to simply make intuitive the belief that Awareness is always aware of itself, with or without our striving.  We need to gradually fall in love with that expansive awareness and feel it as an expanded self that is too big to ever be an object of awareness. In this approach there is no need for "self" improvement, because the self is the totality of everything, the thinking, not the thinker. Just be what is. 

I've also been reading Byron Katie's "A Mind At Home With Itself," her version of the Diamond Sutra (the oldest book in the world).  I've been practicing Katie's The Work to see if it can bring my closer to the non-dual awareness that she lives in.  And I've been applying Dzogchen to my most pernicious thought "I hate myself."  Katie suggest questioning this thought. "Is it true?" and then pondering what it would feel like if I didn't believe it.  The closer I am to believing that I am actually this bigger process of awareness, rather than this abstract object of awareness (my self), the harder is to belief this thought "I hate myself."  It doesn't make sense because if I am Awareness, not the object, or even the witness, just the big expansive process of consciousness, then there can't be an "I" to hate with this other "I."   

And if I'm not an I that can hate myself, then others can't be objects of my hatred.