Self-hatred is grief turned in on oneself.

It is grief calcified into an identity that becomes the mean voice of despair.

This is a specific kind of grief felt in response to a lack of love that had no way of being named.

When grief has no way of being named, it has nowhere to go except in.

The mind makes this grief mean something about us, because that is the mind’s job.

This was a necessary survival skill when we sensed there were parameters to how we could receive care, belonging, and some sense of safety. The first time we realized there was a transaction required for love.

I will be “good” so you will love me.

We become the neglectful parent to ourselves. The harsh voice takes on a shape of our own, but it is not ours.

It’s arising from our internal environment formed through a lack of attuned love because this is what we learned; it was the embryonic psyche in which we developed.

This grief sits inside the ache in our hearts that longs for God, that longs for Love. It’s the consciousness of this ache that reaches for what is familiar, the lack of love.

These two—grief of lack of love and the longing for the Divine—got intertwined and confused because we got used to living in a frozen kind of longing that didn’t transform us or bring us closer to anything.

We end up projecting our longing for God onto people and our parental wounds onto God.

It’s longing stuck in a loop.

This grief has hardened into a quality of consciousness that we now call scarcity.

It’s not something we can find our way out of through transactions, no matter how much money we have, how much we do for others, things we buy, or likes we get—because it’s all evolved out of a foundation of a lack of love, the most precious resource of all.

This lack of love is perpetuated in our modern consumer-driven culture that makes money trying to feed the hungry ghost.

Scarcity is not a mindset but a condition of the heart. A heart broken by love that was never there.

Because this grief could never be named, it could never be felt, and it’s been passed down through our lineage, through our ancestral lines.

Slowly, we evolved into being loyal to this pain as a form of love.

It’s vitally important to cultivate the safety needed to be able to soften into the naming of these losses, to allow ourselves to mourn the love that was not there when we really needed it, that we longed for the most.

So many of us have grown up this way.

But, because “nothing happened,” we can’t see that it is precisely this—the nothing that happened—that is actually the loss that hangs in the shadows that we turn in on ourselves.

Grieving this honors our hearts. For it is in grieving this that we are loving and honoring ourselves.

This love brings healing to the generational transmission of unmetabolized grief and opens pathways to receive love in a truer, more healing way.

This grieving liberates us and unlocks the cycles of codependence woven into our human ancestry through the progressive separation we’ve created from the natural, living and loving ecosystem of all of life.

The more we tend to this grief we’ve turned in ourselves, the less likely we are to look for love where there isn’t any because we will be free from the need to keep recreating suffering and calling it love.

More love.

Not less.

~

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