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.

Why I love hatred

In meditation yesterday I hit a vein of hatred in my heart that revealed just how attached to it I really am. All that punk rock energy, all that anger, all that jouissance that was the intense, but ultimately unfulfilling consolation prize of growing up with parents who despised themselves and each other.

All that cre-hate-ivity of the 90s. All that contempt for vulnerability. All that need to be cool. How I with I could go back and truly see how crippled I was by it.  And how vulnerable I was to people who were driven by hatred, not love.

The way out, however, is not to hate the love that I have for hatred.  The only way out is to accept it. and accept however long it will take for that hatred to dissolve, a day, a decade, a lifetime. Not nearly that long if I can learn how to rest in that sea of equanimity.

Decomposing

So my innovative theory last week was that I might get somewhere by finding the pleasure in my hatred. But at a certain point I lost my willingness. I think that exploring the pleasure in hatred should be something brief, not a day long project.  It’s not the magical art of being tidy.

This morning my intentions shifted from “finding” towards “accepting. In decomposing my emotions, I’m resting more in what is, allowing the pleasure to emerge when it is ready.  Allowing the flow between calm, pleasure, arousal, displeasure to develop the force of the ocean.

I’m also becoming more aware of touch. It is the pleasure and pain sense, the one we take the most for granted, the one that can have the most impact if recovered.

That said, the biggest challenge this week is decomposing my exhaustion.  I’m not sleeping well or long enough and the exhaustion is draining my joy and wellbeing.  The pain of exhaustion is in my forehead and my face, my shoulders, my upper body.  Less T.V. more body scanning.  

Refuge

I have made a religion of writing. And this, I suspect, is not a good practice. Editors, publishers, the book industry is not a refuge.

Or, not a wise refuge. And neither is the world of technology.

Take refuge in the things that have lasted, and will continue to last. The pith instructions of the great religions, love, surrender, be kind and compassionate and find, build and maintain communities dedicated to true peace and true wisdom.

This spot in Maine where I have vacationed with my family for 50 years has been both a refuge and a hell.  I have had my most mystical moments here, and my most violent.

I have treated every summer here in the last few years as my last, knowing that when I leave, I say goodbye to an intimate, healing relationship with the sea, the sky, the falling stars. But I also say goodbye to what still feels like a hopeless cycle of emotional discord.

This summer has been better than most. I've been less reactive and have been able, for the most part, to protect myself better than I ever have, which means that I've made progress in my emotional stability.

And I leave with a beautiful picture of the dawn.

But I now prepare to grieve this place.  Because nothing lasts. Nothing. Not beach houses, or books.  Not bodies, not the people we love most, or the people who love us most.

What I learned from the place though, the space, the grandeur, the smell that I will never forget. That will last deep in me to my last breath.  Because that is the awareness that is no different with breath. I am one with tis place until I am gone, and after.

Interdependence of Body

This week I've been investigating the various ways that my happiness, productivity, sense of self and sense of time is dependent on my body.
  The insight I come to again and again is how when my attention is brought down to my gut brain I immediately feel more present. In general being conscious of the body brings us immediately into the present moment. To be caught up in the tangled relationship between the present and future inevitably means a disconnect from the mind and the body.  And a disconnect from the mind and the body sends us evermore spinning into the invented world.
  As a result of this investigation I've been paying more attention to the seven points of meditation posture: The anchor, my hands, my spine, my shoulders, my neck, my mouth, and my eyes. Attention to all of these points grounds me and grounds my mind. Paying attention to the eyes has been an especially important investigation this week. I have developed the tendency of closing my eyes in meditation, which is pleasant, but it does allow me more room to get lost.  I'f I'm really committed to the present, I need to keep my eyes open.
  It all comes down to that, doesn't it? Commitment. Developing habits not because you feel like it, but because you've made a decision to become stronger, wiser, happier and you do what has to be done to re-direct your energy. The challenge lies in redirecting the energy incrementally so that you don't throw the whole system off balance.
  That means working as much on accepting your body and mind as you do trying to change it.

Acceptance

It's been almost a month since my birthday.  For the record my life is not being propelled effortlessly by the will of the cosmos liked I'd kind of hoped it would be by now.
  On the plus side, after the Joy of Living course, and six months of running, I am feeling it easier to access what feels like a higher frequency of energy in my life. It's clearer, more powerful, more solid. But it's far from the default mode of my brain. Default  mode continues to be concerns about career and money and economic health and a general mixture of resentment, compulsions, etc.  If anything, I'm feeling this power wane.
  Usually this happens when I'm about to make a career move. Getting close to success in some way. I let my formal meditation habit go. Enthusiasm becomes over excitement, and I burn up all the joy.  I think this might also be happening because I'm getting to the point of mastery in my Tergar course, and there's a strong force in me that wants to undermine that mastery.  I could be really internalizing this wisdom now. Instead I'm suddenly career focussed.

Maybe instead of making running my most important habit for September, I need to really keep to my formal meditation and look out for the subtle ways in which I may be undermining this fundamental habit in my life. I need to recognize that I'm not as enthusiastic as I was with all the peer support around me.  But that I need to do this with acceptance if it's going to become a core part of my life.

Standing or Writing

For the last many years now, I've struggling with a choice between two loves.  Standing and writing.  If I could only do one upon waking.  If I should only do one upon waking, which should it be.  And also, why do I think it's a choice. A do or die choice?
It's like my life has always been set up as a double bind choice.  Which parent do I choose mother or father.  Which path do I choose artistic, or economically satisfying.  I've believed all my life I had to choose, but I did I?
 In the end, I never really had to choose between my parents.
 Do I have to choose between standing and writing? Can they be different forms of meditation that I use depending on what I'm cultivating at the moment. The core loop is meditation. Or rather the core loop is awareness, whether I achieve it through writing or standing isn't as important as keeping to the core loop.
  All the rest is background.

Can I accept my present as it is right now?

Messy kitchen. Economic uncertainty. My mother ill. Dripping toilet. Court case pending. Can I accept this?

I don't want to. I want instead to drift off into fantasies about starting a coding camp for kids, becoming a local celebrity on French radio, or how much better things might be if I changed my colour palette. I want to escape into nostalgia about Whitney Houston who died two days ago, at 48. She was born a week and a day after me. To think you can have beauty, talent, skill, wealth beyond your wildest dreams. You can sing the American anthem with such joy and freedom, better than anyone ever has and probably ever will. And still you can be so miserable and self destructive.

I have only a fraction of the things I wanted when I was twenty and Whitney Houston was just becoming a star. But today I'm alive. I have food. I am reasonaby healthy. I'm addicted to misery, maybe, but not really anymore to the things that cause misery. And today I have the wisdom to sit with this misery and watch it shift into peace, if I can keep my commitment to mindfulness.

As for the circumstances in my life. I can accept everything, except the debt. I can live with being forced to move, if it comes to that. My parents will die. As will I. I know I can get the kitchen together. But the debt. What am I going to do about that? That's something I need to sit with a bit.