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/1cl1qp1]

Excellent comment!

Being gentle/compassionate toward yourself is very important at a fundamental level.

Are you a Dzogchen practitioner?

[u/liljonnythegod → u/1cl1qp1]

Thanks. It really is.

My practice is somewhat disorganised as I've read and studied quite a few different traditions but I started out with mainly Theravada (shamatha, noting and body scanning) and then found myself more inclined to Mahamudra a few years into practice.

I tried Dzogchen before but it didn't bring any results and Mahamudra lead to progress so I stuck with that

It might be time for me to look into Dzogchen as perhaps I might find it more accessible now

[u/1cl1qp1 → u/liljonnythegod]

I've tried some Theravada, too. My main practice is Zen. What do you notice to be the difference between Mahamudra and Dzogchen?

[u/liljonnythegod → u/1cl1qp1]

I read somewhere before that mahamudra works with appearances so you're basically peeling away delusions in a step wise manner until empty awareness is left but then dzogchen works with awareness itself from the beginning and resting as that which will clear away delusions

Mahamudra to me felt more active and required analysis of experience which suited me better. It was like I was solving a problem to reach a goal where as dzogchen was recognising the goal and letting the problem solve itself.

[u/1cl1qp1 → u/liljonnythegod]

Thank you!