Guided Meditation: Dedicating our practice; Working with Self-Hatred

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation w M Brensilver: Dedicating Our Practice; Short Talk: Working with Self-Hatred. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 26, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Dedicating our practice

Welcome to all. It's good to be with you. Find your posture; we'll practice together. It's just arriving.

What does it mean for body, mind, heart, head, chest, and belly to arrive here? Whatever friction or tension can be put down, put it down. Like we become unbraced, undefended against phenomena.

Maybe we begin by dedicating our practice. For whom do you practice? As our own welfare and the welfare of those whose lives we touch becomes more poignant, practice becomes more serious. Not tight, not pressurized, but we know this is not a dress rehearsal^[1]. We really have to practice.

That doesn't mean that the forces of self have to become more active, more willful, or more frenzied. It just means that there's a palpable sense of this great matter of birth and death. We just breathe with that.

And true^[2], our love will almost always feel bigger than our power. But there's still love. Love does not demand that samsara^[3] obeys. There's a softening and a kind of boldness, strength, a kind of potency of this love. Maybe that love just gathers quietly in the background as we breathe and honor this moment, honor the path, or wish to be at peace.

Our fear is begging for our love. And so we give it. We give it even knowing that there are things to fear. But the whole world looks different when fear has been embraced with kindness. The whole world looks different when our love has come to grips with finitude.

Working with Self-Hatred

A question was submitted, and I read all submissions, only getting to some, but it's helpful to hear what's on your mind. So this is the question:

"Some of the standard techniques of practicing self-compassion, like soft belly practice or holding one's negative self-talk like your own injured child, while very likely wise medicine, those approaches don't land naturally for me. The sister concept of self-forgiveness falls under the same category. While I would love, but don't expect, a quick start to self-compassion for the self-flagellating egomaniac that I can sometimes be, might you speak to best wise practices for self-compassion and self-forgiveness? Thank you for all the teachings and wisdom."

In all of practice, but maybe the heart realm especially, we need to improvise and find our own way. The line between beautiful, potent, skillful means and super cheesy Hallmark-card love is very thin. That line is very thin, and so we have to patrol that line, and find things that feel natural.

It's a provocative first question, but the questioner, whoever they are, sounds very much like they can handle it. A question would be something like: What do you love about your self-hatred? You love something about it. What psychological functions does it have? What ways does it serve to soothe yourself? Actually, self-hatred can be self-soothing. What regulatory function does it have in the moment? The self-harshness may be genuinely painful—no doubt it is genuinely painful—but actually, it might be less painful than the alternative. And what alternative is actually more painful for you? That would be the investigation.

Self-hatred may be sometimes easier than the recognition: "Oh, I have limitations, foibles, things I don't do well." Maybe it's easier than just the unadulterated pain of the First Noble Truth^[4]. Self-hatred is sometimes easier than the recognition of anicca^[5]. This is not governable by will. Grandiosity and self-hatred are sometimes two sides of the same coin. This is not a way of compounding the self-harshness, blaming yourself for the harshness, but investigating what the soothing underbelly of some of these habits is.

The encouragement is to find your ordinariness. Find your ordinariness. I wonder if maybe you're glancing off the experience of suffering. Generally, we meditators know, "Okay, dukkha^[6], dukkha, dukkha, get it. Yeah. Yeah." But we don't linger long enough with dukkha, and we touch it and we realize, "Okay, that's not good." We encourage ourselves to be allowing, and then we get out of town. We hear, "Well, this path is about freedom from suffering, right?" So that can kind of aid and abet our aversion. We have to soak into the suffering. Really soak into it. I have a lot of trust that if we meet the First Noble Truth fully^[7], the last three truths become self-evident. Carol Wilson^[8] said, "If the First Noble Truth sounds depressing, you're not understanding it." And so linger, stay, stay. Notice all the energies that shoot out of the mind as you linger. Kind of like a malfunctioning fire hose, shooting everywhere. We just practice staying.

The Buddha says faith has a supporting condition. It does not lack a supporting condition. And what is the supporting condition for faith? The answer is suffering. So maybe your heart needs to break more before the rest of you can fall in.

The tricky part about self-compassion is that it can keep us in the self game, and everyone loses in that game. Live by the ego, die by it. To enter a debate about self-worth is already to lose. The nature of self is doubt. Doubt is not ground to stand on. There can always be new evidence, and that new evidence can require a rewrite of the story of self. So it's a precarious position. It's an unstable ground from which to build a life.

Megan Cowan^[9] says the deeper facets of conditioning do not surrender easily. You cannot simply presence them to death. They are waiting to be educated by true nature. This requires inner communication, not spiritual battles. If you fight, you will lose. You know that already.

What story of the self is most in need of equanimity, and is most in need of being educated by goodness? Deepen your confidence in love. When you develop a kind of faith in love, the self is just details. Who cares, really? You really don't have to believe in anything else. Faith in love doesn't mean some fantasy that everything works out fine; it means that love will give meaning no matter what unfolds.

The Dharma path, as I often say, is characterized by a growing sensitivity to goodness. Progressive sensitization to goodness. We detect goodness in all sorts of places—inside us, outside us, everywhere. When you develop faith in love, you begin to partake in that love. Know its blessing. The self becomes kind of beside the point.

Don't hole up in the house of self and try to do surgery on yourself. You have to maybe try something new, be something new, relinquish something new. The riddle of the stuck place, Ajahn Sucitto^[10] said, is that it's something we can't negotiate in our ordinary mode of operating. If it could be done by me, it wouldn't be that which goes beyond me. What's required is a change in direction and a change in energy. There can be an opening into something larger, more kindly, more boundless than the self-mechanisms. We get beyond attachment to the ups and downs of our personality, beyond attachment to systems and techniques of the Dharma. We get clear of the doubt that measuring Dharma in these terms will always bring us. As we move past these inevitable attachments, we become spacious and at peace.

Sometimes you need a big emotional wave to get the process going. You may need to take some significant risk or conduct some significant behavioral experiment that shakes up the self-system. Part of how I think retreat works is that it creates conditions for huge emotional events, often unpleasant. But the force of all of that emotion then becomes channeled towards goodness. The silence of practice, of solitude, of retreat practice induces a measure of chaos in the self-system. And in that kind of fluid, chaotic soup, the emergence of a very different self-view becomes possible.

Find your gateway into deep feeling. For me, the entryway to love is usually something like mortality. In order for me to really sense the necessity of love, I need to palpably know that we're living in the briefest interlude between the two halves of time. So find that gateway of deep feeling, whatever the feeling is, and then stitch that feeling to care for yourself. So that's what came to me. I hope it's of some use.

Thank you all. I'll be away next week. We'll start back the following week. I appreciate our time together. Maybe I'll see some of you in the streets this weekend at some protest or other. I'll probably just be kind of on the periphery crying. My usual spot at these events. [Laughter] Anyway, sending my love.^[11]