Unconditional Friendliness Toward Oneself

Also known as Mettā (Pali) or maitrī (Sanskrit), translated variously as compassion, loving-kindness, benevolence, amity. Pema Chödrön calls it "unconditional friendliness." 

Cultivating this attitude is some current work for me. But I repeatedly find that I have been running into a fence. I went to dinner with a friend of mine last night who also has been living with depression. I asked her to tell me what was driving her feelings of overwhelm, sadness, incapacity and shadow-life and she unhesitatingly said "I fucking hate myself, 100%. When I look at myself, I cringe. I feel like I am looking at a leper or a burn victim. I can easily feel compassion and acceptance for other people, even people who have fucked me over, but toward myself, I just feel almost total aversion."

If pity is this corrosive, reflect for a minute on the disfiguring power of self-pity. I continue to learn more and more about exactly what self-pity feels like and looks like. My emotional lexicon has some blurry typography and shitty indexing, for example, which allow me to confuse self-pity with a variety of other proportional emotional reactions to events (grief, anger, longing, nostalgia, fear). This is delicate and tender work, involving unanaesthetized contact with extremely sore, infected and abraded places in myself. More on all of that another time. 

Anyway, when we have an attitude of aversion and pity toward ourselves, no matter how much we may have cultivated compassion for others, we will always run up against a boundary of conditionality. Our ability to open to unconditional friendliness will always fall short until we clearly see ourselves as worthy of the same unconditional friendliness as others.

At least, that's the theory behind a lot of "self-help" lit. I'm not sure I buy it completely. I think emerging into unconditional friendliness toward oneself is a dynamic, simultaneously reflective and action-oriented process. I know with certainty that, regardless of how I see myself or feel about myself, when I turn my attention to being useful and helping others, those experiences begin to erase my self-aversion. It may well be that the path to unconditional friendliness toward oneself is to forget about yourself entirely and lose yourself in practice and in effective service to others. 

Or at least, that this path of service is at least as efficacious toward self-compassion as any path that has one focus on oneself and make an attempt to "cultivate" love for oneself. In particular, the movement toward service is enhanced by meditation, starting from a place of paying attention. Asking how one can be of service and then listening for a response. And committing to showing up for the action, without regard to how one feels. 

"Self-esteem comes from esteemable action," many old timers in AA say, and they ought to know. 

These threads remind me of the Three Tenets of the Zen Peacemaker:

Taking refuge and entering the stream of Engaged Spirituality, I vow to live a life of:

Not knowing, thereby giving up fixed ideas about myself and the universe.
Bearing witness to the joy and suffering of the world.
Healing myself and others.