Hatred or aversion is the flip side of greed. It too arises from our unexamined attachment to our desire — only now it is the desire that things be different from how they are.
Aversion arises from anything you don’t want or don’t like, that you want to run away from, that you recoil from, that you wish to push away or have disappear. Anything unwanted is lumped under this one category: aversion. Aversion lies at the heart of many big emotions — anger, hatred, rage, fear — and also smaller emotions such as irritability, resentment, grumpiness, annoyance.
It can be enormously revealing to experiment with noticing in yourself how many times during the day aversion rears its head in one way or another: a twinge of annoyance at how someone says something, or loads the dishwasher in a way that is not your way, or stores a tool upside down that obviously, at least to your way of thinking, needs to be cared for in the exact opposite way; or when the weather is not to your liking; or when somebody accuses you of doing something (even something minor or trivial) that you actually didn’t do, or of not taking care of something that you actually did take care of; or when you are not given credit by people whose opinions you care about for something meritorious that you did.
Occasions that reliably trigger aversive contraction in us are manna from heaven if you are ready for them. They afford infinite, if humbling, occasions for seeing how much what we think is our true well-being depends on having our own way, for seeing how strongly and unconsciously attached we are to wanting things to unfold as we want them to unfold, and for wanting to be treated as if everybody in the world knew exactly how we wanted and needed to be treated.
You can feel the seething tide of selfing in these examples and how toxic the internal narrative can become. And no doubt you can feel it in those myriad examples that are probably flooding into your own mind as you reflect on how you are in relationship to the arising of anything and everything you don’t like, however trivial, and how very personally you take it all.
In this way, mindfulness of aversion is profoundly healing, because it offers us a way to at least momentarily dissolve the self-imposed but unconscious straightjacket of such automatic and unconscious reactions. A modicum of awareness, even after the fact, allows us to see that we have very real choices in such moments. It reminds us that we do not have to be a perpetual prisoner of aversion if we reflect on what just unfolded and whether we really are better off for our emotional reaction. It also signals us that at the next opportunity, which is usually right around the corner, we can remember to see more clearly and let ourselves feel in the body the contractive energies arising from not having things happen as we would like them to. In this way, we can consciously choose to let the turbulent energies of that moment arise, do their complex thing, and pass away much like the smoke patterns ascending from an extinguished candle, without taking any of it personally or having to control what is unfolding through forcing of any kind.
That does not mean that we will not act forcefully in the face of harmful and threatening circumstances. Taking principled and brave stands in the face of harmful and threatening circumstances is an intimate part of living a life of integrity, wakefulness, and caring. Indeed, depending on the circumstances, it might be a necessary enactment and an embodiment of our clarity, our wisdom, and our compassion.
But then it would no longer be personal in any small sense. Instead, it becomes a manifestation of our wholeness and a natural extension of our practice of no separation.