Why Self-Love Feels So Hard: Metta and Self-Hatred

Spring Washam's 28-minute video, "How to Love Yourself & Overcome Self-Hatred," takes metta, the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness, and points it at the one person most of us find hardest to send it to: ourselves. Washam, a teacher who spent years leading metta retreats at Spirit Rock, argues that the resistance people feel when they try to wish themselves well is not a failure of the practice. It is the practice doing its job, bringing buried material to the surface so it can be purified. Her larger claim is that self-love is not a feeling to manufacture but a ground to build on, and that once that ground is steady, meditation, mindfulness and even the way we set boundaries begin to change. This piece draws on the opening portion of the video's transcript, and on the framing in its description.

What happens when a loving-kindness practice turns into hatred?

The video opens in a scene that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to sit still with a heart practice. Washam was leading a weekend retreat with a group of activists, people who pour themselves into service and care for the world, and many of them were struggling. "They're like I hate metta," she recalls. Her response was not alarm. "Meta is a powerful purification practice," she tells viewers, describing how a meditator can be silently repeating phrases of goodwill and suddenly find the mind turning toward hatred, anger or fear, or sliding into numbness and sadness.

What she noticed in the room was a pattern. Many people with big hearts, she says, spend their energy outward. They love their animals, the people across the world, the causes they have invested in. But when they sit down and try to offer the same warmth to themselves, they meet what she calls "the real walls." For some, the simple act of wishing oneself well is enough to produce frustration, pain, or a physical urge to leave the body altogether.

— Spring Washam, video, 0:31

Why do obstacles show up as a sign the practice is working?

Washam's most provocative move is to reframe the discomfort. When restlessness, anxiety, or the wish to be done arises mid-practice, she suggests, those are not signs that you are doing it wrong. They are "aspects of the practice really working for you." Her reasoning is that anything in the mind that is not metta is coming up to be purified, and that the process of seeing it is itself valuable. "We see where we have some limitation," she says, or where parts of ourselves are not integrated, even when we believed we were already rooted in compassion. Seeing those places gives clarity about what you are actually working with.

She puts it in a line that is worth keeping: "the harder the practice the bigger the payoff." She is candid that the intensity can be dramatic. For years, she says, the retreat managers at Spirit Rock would greet a metta retreat with a kind of dread, because participants were often fiery, emotional and physically distressed. Some coughed, some felt sick, some demanded to be taken to the emergency room, others reported heart palpitations or vomiting, and a few had what she calls full shamanic breakdowns. Nothing about the instructions looked dramatic from the outside, she points out. Eyes closed, mantras repeated. Yet the practice was working with what she describes as universal life force energy, and it was evocative because it reached deep material.

— Spring Washam, video, 2:22 and 3:39

Why is unconditional love so hard to receive from ourselves?

Washam locates the core difficulty in the conditions we attach to love. Most of us, she says, love ourselves conditionally: if I clean the house, clear my inbox, finish the task, then I'm allowed to feel okay. We also love each other conditionally, which means few of us grew up knowing what unconditional love and acceptance feel like. She connects this to a cultural irony. Our society is full of romance and romantic comedies, a longing everyone seems to share, yet it rarely teaches anyone how to offer that acceptance without strings.

Metta, in her telling, is the practice of that unconditional quality. The traditional frame she draws on is the Brahma viharas, the four "divine abodes" of love, compassion, joy and equanimity, which she describes as the frequency of an enlightened mind. Her claim is that when we are rooted in self-love, the thirst for an external source begins to dissipate. Instead of reaching outward for proof that we are acceptable, we begin to feel a contented steadiness in our own bodies and spirits.

She is also honest about the family background that shapes this thirst. She describes many people as "hungry ghosts," especially those who grew up with trauma and with caregivers who did not know how to love themselves, their children, or each other. She speaks from her own experience of growing up in a house marked by violence, and says she is still sorting through that chaos. The point is not to blame. It is to recognize that the capacity to love oneself is often something we must learn late, with patience.

— Spring Washam, video, 5:07

Why does healing begin with the individual rather than the world?

One of the most useful passages in the video is Washam's refusal to wait for the world to change. It is tempting, especially for activists, to want the powerful to open their hearts. She does not dismiss that impulse, but she calls it hopeless as a starting point, because we cannot control other people's hearts. What we can control is whether we "go first." That means rooting down, understanding what unconditional love is, and learning how to work with it in our own lives. She calls this "heart medicine," the first step before any wider work.

The payoff, she argues, is that as we send metta more clearly, and begin to recognize ourselves in it, we start to see ourselves "through the eyes of Quan Yin." That image is her shorthand for seeing with compassion. From there a particular contentment builds, which she describes as solidity and resiliency. It is not a euphoric state. It is ground you can stand on when the next wave of difficulty arrives.

— Spring Washam, video, 7:28

How does metta become a foundation for concentration?

Washam makes a sequence that is worth following step by step. Metta leads to more mindfulness. Mindfulness leads to more concentration. Concentration leads to deeper settling and deeper wisdom. She ties this to the Buddhist teaching of dependent origination, the idea that experiences arise in conditioned relationship to one another, and says that love, joy and happiness are actually the foundations of concentration.

Her observation about meditators who want to sit for hours is practical. The usual approach is to force presence. Her approach is to make the mind feel at home first. When we have a mind that is violent and attacking itself, she says, we are filled with anxiety, and she suggests that a great deal of anxiety is simply the mind turned against itself. When the mind is easier to warm up with metta, the nervous system begins to regulate, and presence becomes natural rather than effortful.

She also takes on the common alternative of avoidance. Some of the activists in her retreat joked that they could just smoke weed and listen to music. Washam found the conversation useful, because it sharpened her own sense of why one would sit with pain at all. Her answer was that what we are actually looking for is lasting refuge, and that the other options do not last. Eventually, she says, you have to face yourself, because you are the only one in your mind all day, every day. Metta is the work of building a refuge you can actually rest in.

— Spring Washam, video, 9:56

Can self-love shape healthy boundaries without guilt?

The video's description promises a segment on setting loving boundaries without guilt, and the transcript excerpt touches on it. Washam frames boundaries as something that arises naturally from a heart that is warm toward itself, rather than something you assemble out of fear or resentment. The implication is that people who are at war with themselves tend to set boundaries either too rigidly, out of defensiveness, or not at all, out of a need to be liked. A mind that has been steadied by metta has less need to prove itself, and so the limits it sets can be clear without being punitive. The full treatment of this idea is in the video's later passages, which this piece does not cover in detail.

— Spring Washam, video, 12:16

Where to go from here

Washam's central teaching is simple to state and hard to live: self-love is not perfection, and it is not a switch you flip after the chores are done. It is an ongoing practice of acceptance, of seeing the obstacles that come up as information, and of letting go of the narratives that keep you suffering. If you want to explore it yourself, start small. Choose one phrase of goodwill, offered to yourself, and notice what arises without judging it. If anger, numbness or grief appears, treat it as the practice revealing what needs attention, and stay with it for a short time rather than pushing through.

From there, the video points toward her broader body of work. She teaches a weekly class she calls Heart Medicine Practice, shares teachings through her website, springwasham.com, and has written books including The Spirit of Harriet Tubman: Awakening from the Underground and A Fierce Heart. Watch the full 28-minute video to hear the rest of her guidance on boundaries and on resting in the heart, and bring your own answer to her closing question: what helps you embrace self-love?