The Dalai Lama swathed in yellow
When the Dalai Lama first visited the United States, he was asked by an American Buddhist teacher about how to work with self-hatred.
Looking startled, he [the Dalai Lama] turned to his translator and asked pointedly in Tibetan again and again for an explanation. Finally, turning back to me, the Dalai Lama tilted his head, his eyes narrowed in confusion. "Self-hatred?" he repeated in English. "What is that?” 1
Self-hatred is a powerful experience of separation or alienation from our true nature. Not everyone feels self-hatred, but we all feel some form of this separation until we recognize that our real condition is continuity with all of life.
In my home spiritual tradition—Trika Shaivism—this root experience of feeling separate is called anavamala. All other tensions flow from anavamala: all defensiveness, all aggression, all loneliness, all sadness, all anger, all jealousy, all pride, and all compulsions to define ourselves in limited ways.
Forgetting our continuity with life and believing we are separate objects is the root cause of suffering.
Get back together with life
Direct realization traditions such as Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen encourage us to open the gates of perception and rediscover connection and immediacy. This can be done through health cultivation, working with accomplished teachers, and spiritual practices and ritual.
A person is not a discrete individual. The experience of individuality is a real experience, but individuality in the way we normally think of it is not our actual condition.
Spiritual practitioners in direct realization traditions eventually discover that there is only one continuous awareness and its energy. This one body of consciousness and energy creates infinite styles of individualized experiencings like waves in an ocean.
Waves are a quasi-individualized style of ocean, but they are not separate from ocean.
Suffering arises when we mistake the experience of individuality for our primordial condition. The aim of direct realization practice is to be able to enjoy life’s wild diversity from a base experience of continuity rather than separation.
Ghee and Flowers
Here are two beautiful, simple meditations that will help you to begin to draw nourishment from your environment and experience more continuity with life.
What is ghee?
Indian ghee, a.k.a. clarified butter, is cooked somewhat longer than the European variety. Every trace of water and milk protein is removed, and only the pure butter oil remains. When made and stored correctly, ghee glows with warm yellow goodness and is perfectly clear. It can last for more than 100 years without going rancid.
Ghee can be eaten both medicinally and in everyday food. It can be burned in ritual lamps, used as a supreme moisturizer, and gazed at as a form of meditation. Ghee gazing is a traditional Ayurvedic treatment for depression.
Ghee invokes mainly earth and water elements. When we engage with ghee in any of the ways listed above, we can feel grounded, nourished, and experience the abundance, generosity, and continuity of life.
Meditation on ghee
Use homemade ghee. You can find complete instructions for making ghee here.
Gently heat up some ghee.
Pour a few inches of the luminous, yellow liquid into a clean glass or white ceramic bowl.
Gaze at the ghee steadily, but in a relaxed way, for 20 minutes. It’s okay to blink!
As you are gazing, be sure to enjoy the smell of the ghee and its warmth.
See what happens!
Flower meditation
You can do a similar meditation with a beautiful fresh flower. Flowers invoke mainly space element.
While gazing at a flower, you can experience your mind as it is when not disturbed by conceptualizations, intellectualization, and habitual thought patterns in general. The experience of continuity then arises naturally. This simple yet profound meditation comes directly from the tradition of Trika Shaivism.
Choose any beautifully fresh flower.
Place it on your altar or a table, preferably at the height of your natural gaze.
Sit about one foot away from the flower and gaze at it in a relaxed manner for 20 minutes. Again, it’s okay to blink.
Try this daily for a month and see what happens!
Esteem for Self
The source of lasting self-esteem is to begin to relax and de-identify with any stories and concepts you are carrying around about yourself and others. Then you can begin the process of re-identifying with the magnificence of the creation and the continuity of all beings and things.
These two meditations will help you to get started in a direct and simple way.
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
Sharon Salzberg, “Everything you always wanted to know about meditation
but were too tense to ask", https://www.sharonsalzberg.com/sit/, July 28, 2014, originally published in O Magazine, Nov 1, 2002, accessed Sept 16, 2022.