On Hate

Reading companion · the transmission in full

The first word I received was hate. And it arrived like a current — not a concept, but a movement. Something passing through.

To me, in the mind's eye, it reminds me of how quickly we can move between love and hate. And when I sat with that, I understood it: hate is a grasping. It is what happens when something loved is lost, and the loss is still unnamed. Sadness and unmet expectation wearing a more forceful costume.

I once had a teacher who would not say the word. She was teaching about the messages in water — the experiments comparing what happens to water crystal formation when the words I love you and I hate you are spoken to it. She would lower her voice almost to a whisper whenever she had to say the word, as though speaking it too fully would invite in more of what it carries.

I began to notice that in myself. When I said the word, something closed. Actually in the chest. A contraction. A shutting down of what had been open. And I began to understand that the word was carrying more freight than I wanted to take on. It felt like signing a contract that I did not intend to honour — an intensity of permanence that did not actually reflect what was alive in me.

So I removed it. As a genuine response. Simply because at a vibrational level, the word was not true to what I was actually experiencing, and speaking it was doing something I did not want done.

I notice people use it to intensify. To give potency to a story. I hate this. I hate when that happens. It is meant to convey strong feeling. But what it actually does is close the very organ through which strong feeling is most accurately perceived. The heart.

That is usually what is actually present. Disappointment that something did not arrive as hoped. Frustration that it still has not. Those two, together, create the sensation we then bundle under a word that is too blunt an instrument for what we are genuinely feeling.

The more honest words require more of us. They require that we name the specific sadness, the specific unmet expectation, the specific longing that went unanswered. That is more vulnerable and more accurate. The word we avoid naming here does not ask that of us. It allows us to close down and stay closed.

I share this not as a prescription. I live it by example rather than instruction, and I mention it gently when it feels appropriate. What I offer is this: if a word closes your heart when you speak it, that is information. The body deserves words that serve the truth of what you are feeling.

More precise words available. Use them.