Hello and welcome back to practicing human the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life

I'm your host Corey mascara and in today's episode

We're going to talk about the concept of self-loathing and I'll give you some thoughts on it more to come on that in a bit first

Let's settle in together with the sound of the bells

when you really start to think about it the concept of self-loathing is quite interesting because it requires a self to be loathed

It begs a question then who is doing the loathing and who is being loathed

So there's this great story by the meditation teacher Sharon Salisberg who writes about when she once asked the Dalai Lama what his thoughts were on self-hatred

acknowledging that this was a pervasive thing in the West and

He didn't understand the question his translator tried to explain it

But he was still confused he didn't get the meaning finally they saw that he didn't actually understand what self-hatred meant

And she explained it to him and then he just looked confused asking how could a person think of themselves that way

And the Sharon found it fascinating and and somewhat freeing to see how far in this

Negative way of relating to the oneself was to the Dalai Lama and yet self-loathing is very common in our culture

And then I think it's

Much more pervasive around the world now

It's a form of tyranny against oneself and leads to great anxiety depression and an overall suffering and in my work as a mindfulness teacher

I see this all the time on retreats and workshops

Through emails and then feedback from people

So if you notice this arising for yourself this quality of self-hatred self-loathing in

addition to continuing to practice

Self-compassion which we've talked a lot about in this podcast

It may also be helpful to ask the question who is loathing whom

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