I used to hate myself ferociously, but was helped by meditation. I found a new perspective, and I now live with peace in my mind. I can accept myself in a way I didn’t think was possible before.

The trick is to not avoid the self-hatred. It can’t be avoided because it resides in our mind. Any attempt to avoid what we have inside our mind is fruitless and self-deception.

In order to be free from self-hatred, we need to cleanse the mind. This can be done with meditation. A cleansed mind is a naturally accepting and loving mind, both towards ourselves and others.

What is self-hatred?

Even though it was extremely painful to go around hating myself, there was a part of me that found something noble or humble about the hatred.

I could always resort to self-hatred when I made a mistake, said something stupid, or when things didn’t go according to plan. It became a way for me to pity myself without thinking of it as self-victimization or self-pity. Self-hatred became a way to avoid dealing with the problem, similarly to what drinking or binge eating could be for others.

After practicing meditation I came to realize that my behavior was derived from inferiority and hurt pride. The reason I hated myself was because I couldn’t live up to the standards I had set for myself, and I couldn’t stand seeing myself as a failure.

Even though the patterns and circumstances may vary, I believe that there is truth to this for most people who hate themselves. There is inferiority and pride at play here:

(i) deeply within we don’t think that we are good enough the way we are so

(ii) we tell ourselves that we need to be better (or the best), but

(iii) we can’t handle the truth (that we are not as good as we want to/’should’ be) so we hate and blame ourselves instead.

In order to get rid of self-hatred, we need to see our mind honestly and understand its mechanisms.

Don’t try to avoid self-hatred

Logically, we understand that self-hatred is useless and bad for us. There are so many better things we could do with our time. However, our mind is not logical, and telling ourselves that we shouldn’t hate ourselves is no solution. If we have the tendency to hate, it will happen anyway. Trying to stop it or avoid it will only make us suppress our feelings and put additional burden on our shoulders since we will feel guilty or disappointed in ourselves when we fail to avoid the hateful thoughts.

Hatred (both towards ourselves and others) can be difficult to get a grip on. The reason is that our mind is attached to it in a quite sneaky way. Although hatred is painful, and although we say we don’t like it, we subconsciously love to hate because it gives our mind an excuse and even a sense of purpose.

We usually don’t see this mechanism, and instead we simply label the hateful feelings as ‘wrong’, and try to suppress them. In the world of the mind, this means that we hold the feelings even tighter and embed them even deeper within us. This is not the path to liberation.

So forget the word ‘avoid’. Avoidance just means that we push our feelings down, which makes us sick and heavy inside.

Release – the power of meditation

What we need to do is to accept and allow the feelings of hatred. This way, we can cleanse them out, release them, with help of meditation.

When we meditate, we see ourselves from a new, more objective, perspective. This makes it easy to acknowledge and accept everything we have in our mind. You could say that meditation is the complete opposite of avoiding negative thoughts and feelings. Instead it is a process of accepting, allowing, and releasing.

We release everything we have embedded in our minds during our lifetime. After some practice, we can even release deeply-rooted stuff we have inherited from our ancestors. As we do this, our mind returns to its original form, its true form. It naturally becomes a mind of acceptance both towards ourselves and others. This happens to anyone who puts in the effort of emptying the mind. It is natural because such a state is every person’s true nature.

Thank you for reading. Check out the video below; it talks about the power of meditation and it is very inspiring.