What to Do With the Hate You're Not Supposed to Admit You Feel

In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the cartoon series that draws on a braid of traditions (Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Inuit) and wraps it in a good story, there’s a character in the show named Katara. Katara is a waterbender, meaning she can bend the element of water to her will and move it how she wants—to hurt, defend, or protect, or build. She is a good at heart and wants to help her people. She’s also very protective of her friends.

In one episode, Katara faces a confrontation with an old woman named Hama who is also a waterbender but has gone bad (you can watch it here). She uses her power to bend blood, for what is blood but liquid? The power of bloodbending gives Hama the power to control people against their will.

Hama wants Katara to know how to bend blood too, because she sees in Katara the prodigy she once was. She wants to teach Katara, but Katara refuses the opportunity to learn and wants nothing to do with the gruesome ability to bloodbend because of the power she would have over others.

Enraged, Hama attacks Katara and they battle. Katara holds her own for a while, but gradually Hama begins to bend Katara’s blood to her own will. Then she goes a step further, putting Katara’s friends in danger. Katara begins to realize that it’s only through bloodbending that she can save her friends. She is forced to overcome Hama using the very skill she doesn’t want. Then when Hama is taken away to be arrested, she looks back at Katara and laughs, saying, “Congratulations, Katara. Now you know how to bloodbend.”

In the end, Hama succeeded in her original goal to teach Katara, even though she lost the battle.

I was reminded of this scene as I read the words of a particular American government official, one we won’t name and won’t quote directly because the one thing men like this reliably want is their name repeated, and I'm not feeding it. The speech made waves because of its similarity to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and his rhetoric. The speech encapsulated this current administration’s clear hatred toward an imagined political foe, broadcasting their intent to pursue.

What you need to know for the purposes of this article that you’re patiently reading now, is that the rhetoric was filled with hate dressed up as logic. It dehumanized the political enemy, made them unfeeling, unthinking, and unworthy of redemption.

The rhetoric is scary because of where it leads. Knowing anything of the history of WWII gives you a clear trajectory of where this is going. First you dehumanize. Then you cast blame for all of the country’s problems. Then you suggest that if they were just “gone” we wouldn’t have those problems. He did all that in one speech.

But here’s the rub. As I sat there and read, and as I mulled over that man and his speech long after I was done reading, I felt… hate. In that moment, I could honestly say: I hate the man who said this. I think he is vile, unthinking, beyond redemption. And in a fleeting moment, I had the shadow of the thought: if these people were just “gone,” we wouldn’t have these problems.

His darkness had called up mine. Something in him had found an answer in me. Shadow calls to shadow. I had just completed, in miniature, the same three steps I'd diagnosed.

But what are we to do? I sat on my back porch with my gluten free alcohol free hop water, in the boiling summer heat, staring at my garden and the three maple trees in the backyard, listening to the cicadas and the bees and the wind rustling, wondering how you get out of it. Feeling the frustrating circularity of it. This idiot spews hateful drivel, and now I am filled with hateful drivel toward him and people who think the way he does. What are we to do, indeed.

The truth is that my hate is not any different than his. We could say the hate I felt was a righteous reaction to his actions and words, but I’m sure he thinks the opinion and policy at which he’s arrived are perfectly “logical” and “reasonable” responses to some input he sees. We have all sorts of “reasons.” But hate is an emotion, an energy, and not in the realm of intellect, logic, or reason, despite how hard we dress it up with intellectual justification.

We can say “Let’s not engage with hate,” and yet we have horrifically stunning examples in our history that show what happens when we don’t take this seriously. We could talk about love and meditate and send good vibes, and yet there is a distinct flavor of “non-action” to that too. Maybe we say this is not a fight I want to fight. Or maybe like Katara we try to go the high road first, but eventually we may be drawn in or feel forced to use skills, tools, or energies that we find repulsive, that mirror those of the aggressor. People like to say “We have to fight fire with fire” but does that always work? No.

In my healing tradition (Andean mysticism, specifically of the Qanchi Machu tribe), emotions like anger, hate, and sorrow create hucha. Hucha is dense and heavy energy. When we do healing work for a client, this is a major part of what we’re doing: removing hucha and healing the after-effects of it. Too much hucha makes a person feel heavy, sad, and eventually they begin to feel stuck or get sick.

What’s hard about this energy is that hucha begets hucha, meaning the more you generate (or accidentally pick up by being around people or spaces with a lot of hucha), the more you’re going to get because it builds on itself.

So hate begets hate, in yourself and in other people. It’s a rebounding reaction that spurs on more of itself.

It would be easy to call hucha “bad”… except… it’s not that simple. It’s just not good for us. Hucha has a place—that place should just not be in our energy bodies or minds. Likewise, is it helpful to call hate bad? Maybe not. But just like hucha, hate is not good for us.

While we don’t have to label the emotion as “bad,” we can look at the results of hate— of the actions people take when they feel hate, especially for prolonged periods of time, and especially when surrounded by other people’s hate that eggs them on to worsening acts. Hateful actions typically have horrible and disastrous effects on people, on families, on a culture. And on a democracy.

So we don’t have to react to our own hateful moments in shame or guilt or fear. We have to clock it, and know that it’s a feedback loop. If we keep feeding it, it will grow.

When we remove hucha from someone in a healing, we give it to Mother Earth, or to the elements. They take the hucha and, essentially, transmute it (because it is food for nature spirits). Transmutation sounds very lofty and spiritual, but it really is just this:

… Composting scraps from your garden or your dinner table to rot and disintegrate, making new (and nutrient dense) dirt.

… Oysters wrapping a small coat, layer by layer, around a single piece of sand to form a pearl. The grit is never expelled but becomes the center of the thing.

… Forest fires that certain pines require — lodgepole and jack pine cones are sealed with resin and only open in heat, so destruction is literally the germination mechanism.

… Fungi doing mycoremediation — oyster mushrooms digesting oil spills and breaking down toxins into soil.

… Nurse logs: a dead tree becomes the seedbed for the next generation, and decay becomes the infrastructure.

The body itself is constantly transmuting energy: you eat, you break the food down. Your body keeps what it needs and releases what it doesn’t. It’s the same with respiration. You are constantly transmuting.

You transmute emotions, too. Grief work is a way of transmuting. The blues are an entire art form, suffering metabolized into something that makes other people feel less alone rather than more afraid.

A lot of the transmutation I just described happens naturally. You don’t have to think about it. The transmutation of strong emotions, however, has to be done consciously and takes effort (just like tending takes effort). It’s often not easy. But it does have to happen, that work of seeing the shadow arise within us and transmuting it.

Katara was forced into handling the energy/teaching she didn’t want to touch. That’s not the scary part of the story, though; touching it once doesn’t corrupt you. What corrupts you is thinking and ruminating and expanding on it, nursing it, teaching it forward, spreading it, acting on it. Hama laughed because she believed that what she’d forced onto her unwitting student would calcify instead of compost. But she failed in that; Katara did not become a bloodbender the way Hama hoped she would.

I don’t know yet what I do with the energy this man gave me. But it was never true that the difference between him and me is that one of us hates and the other doesn’t. We both hate. It’s whether I let it calcify into something that begets more hate, or let it compost into something that nourishes life.

Author’s note on AI: This was 100% human generated. I used Claude to check my memory of the episode described above, and to help me identify holes in thinking or writing.

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