Be gentle with yourself

[u/liljonnythegod]

Hope everyone is doing well. First a short update on where my practice is before I get into the gist of this post. Rigpa is stabilising and awareness is now unhooked from being within my head to now being no where with no location. It's not even that it unhooked and went from being within my head to nonlocal but instead was always nonlocal. It's also obvious that it is nontemporal as well.

I haven't made a post in a while and I tend to only do so when I arrive at something that leads to a significant change so I'm making a post about being gentle and an insight I arrived at this morning that has me in an ecstasy deeper and more worthy than any jhana I have accessed before.

Earlier I was walking in the park and I saw a child crossing a road and I had a flashback to when I was a child and had a traumatic experience with crossing a road with my mother. Suddenly a sense of warmth for myself as a child arose, in the same way metta has always arisen for any other child I see in day to day life. This hasn't happened before and so I was intrigued to go into it more. I thought perhaps I should see if I can main generating metta towards myself as a child but to go up in the years until I reach myself now and direct the metta towards myself now.

I reached a certain age it became obvious that there was a blockage like I couldn't give it to myself. I probed into why and it now makes sense why I have always gone from relationship to relationship seeking out love. When I was young, I never felt or received the love I should have, so I internalised that I would only be worthy of love once it was received from someone external.

This then resulted in not being able to give it to myself and is why I've always been so hard on myself. I thought that perhaps I should reconcile this by realising I am worthy of love regardless if someone is giving it to me right now or not but this didn't resolve the blockage.

So I probed into how I give love to others and it then it became obvious. Being gentle and being soft comes with giving love and this is how I have been towards others that I've felt love towards. So then I thought, have I ever given myself that same gentleness/softness and it's obvious I haven't. It took a single second from that insight, to be able to be gentle with myself and now it hasn't gone away and it doesn't require me to think about. The phrase you can't love someone until you love yourself really is true haha I always thought it was just a dumb cliche.

It feels like I'm now drunk in love, that is similar to when I've taken ecstasy or being in in deep romantic love but it's much stronger. The ending of tension in the body is great and for a while I thought that was all that would be needed. Once that's done and dusted, I'll have got what I wanted. But I was wrong, this love that comes without a condition, has been missing from my life and I never knew that it was missing because I didn't give it to myself.

As soon as I have became gentle and soft with myself, it is here and now will not go anywhere.

In a nutshell, be gentle towards yourself. Be soft with yourself. Growth is good and necessary but don't be hard on yourself. You don't need to be anything in order to be loved. I would hear statements like this before and think it was just philosophical jargon but it's not. Once you become gentle and soft towards yourself this love will overflow. It now feels like a great amount of metta that wants to flow outwards towards others.

🫶🏽

[u/hypercosm_dot_net]

What is directing the love? Or what is loving?

I have a hard time reconciling the concept of emptiness with love.

Related to the concept of no-self, I keep reading everything is love/awareness/consciousness. But don't understand how that squares with emptiness.

If "everything is empty", why is there love?

[u/liljonnythegod → u/hypercosm_dot_net]

Yeah I used to think the same but this way of thinking is actually clinging to nothingness without realising and not fully comprehending emptiness

Just because there is no self here or no thing anywhere and life is with zero separation, doesn't mean there aren't things. It's just that these apparent things are empty of inherent existence. They exist interdependently not independently. When we focus too hard on seeing the emptiness of things and ourselves, we can fall into the thinking there are no things at all and then we can bypass compassion by thinking there is nothing so then there is nothing that can give love and nothing that can receive love

"Everything is empty" is a partial truth which relates to phenomena and the relative world and it's specifically about phenomena being empty of self, i.e empty of inherent existence

But there is something, which isn't a thing, which isn't empty of self but is instead empty of other. This means it does inherently exist since it's uncaused and non-arising. It's empty of other, because it is all there is. There is nothing outside of it and so there isn't inside of it either. It's not a thing. A singularity is not a thing because where there is a thing there is always "not the thing" which is required to define the thing, which means there are two things. It's for this reason the term non-dual is used.

It is cognizant/luminous, emptiness (since not a thing) but it is also energy and all appearances (including us) don't arise as separate from it. This appearance that is me can be gentle and soft towards this appearance that is me and likewise this appearance that is me can be gentle and soft towards all other appearances.

There came a point in my practice where I experientially knew that I am a non-arising appearance, inseparable from reality, with senses that can sense and experience reality. I cannot step outside of reality so there is no need for me to try to know it. What else is there to do then? Just here sensing, breathing, eating, sleeping, playing. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. Was there ever anything that was required of me? Yes I needed to clean up the delusions and gain wisdom but really there was never anything required of me to do. In that way, I was always free from the very beginning.

What is unconditional love besides love that gives and requires nothing in return? Conditional love is not really love it's a transaction so all love is only ever unconditional or it isn't love.

Here I am for no reason with nothing to do and no requirement of me to do anything in return for life. Such love I feel!

[u/hypercosm_dot_net → u/liljonnythegod]

Beautiful. Thank you so much!

This is something I couldn't wrap my mind around, but I have a better understanding now.

This should open things up for me so I can have better practice.

Your original post really resonated with me, so I wanted to know how I could also accomplish this. Thanks again. <3

[u/liljonnythegod → u/hypercosm_dot_net]

Thank you. No worries at all. Glad I could be of help with your practice.

I was the same for a while as well, I think the emptiness stuff can be taken far in one way but then make us a bit detached from life instead of non-attached