Mother Siluana: How can we learn to love ourselves?
God loves us, God forgives us, God doesn’t count our mistakes or our falls. God only counts the times we get up. I am guilty only when I don’t get up.
Question:
How can we love ourselves? How can we learn to love ourselves so we can love others?
Mother Siluana:
We love other people, or we think we love them, or they think they are loved when we tell them: “How cute you are, mwah, mwah!” But I don’t wake up in the morning and say, “Mwah, mwah, how cute you are, Siluana!” No! On the contrary, I have started to make faces at her in the mirror lately. The nuns tell me I am beautiful - I believe them, but I have a different opinion when I see myself.
So, I am not infatuated with myself, but when I am sleepy, I simply go to sleep lovingly and rest. When I am hungry, I give myself something to eat, and even something I like, if possible. If it’s not possible, I say, “If that’s all we have to eat, then that’s all we will eat.” If I make mistakes, I immediately forgive myself: “We are only human, I understand you; only the one who doesn’t work doesn’t make mistakes!”
What else do I do? I offer myself good music, I pray, I take Holy Communion, I look at flowers. When I get angry, I get angry. And I do all these things because I love myself. I fulfill my needs. So this is the first thing: I pay attention to myself, and I am happy that I am. It is a joy that you are. When something hurts, you pay attention to the pain and say: “Ah! What should I do now?”
Interestingly, when I was young, I strived to make friends with psychological pain. And it used to hurt! And now I make friends with physical pain. It is not as interesting, because from psychological pain you could write a novel, you could tell stories, people would listen to you. But how can you tell someone that something bothers you in your body? And if it’s in a place that doesn’t smell nice, nobody will listen to you. But I need to love myself in this situation, too, isn’t it? What else can we do? We proceed with tenderness, like when you take care of a baby, you clean it, you don’t get mad at it - you also need to clean yourself, take care of yourself, psychologically, physically, and spiritually.
But to reach this point, we need two things.
One: to go and meet the One Who loves us unconditionally, just as we are. God loves us. We need to ask Him: “Lord, I want to feel that You love me!” When we feel God’s love, we can’t despise anymore what God values. When I felt for the first time that God loves me, I looked behind me to see if that love was directed to someone else.
Then, we need to do things that place us correctly before our conscience. When I accuse myself, when my conscience is reproaching something to me, I do it with hate, with contempt, because that is how my parents taught me: “You are good for nothing, you will starve, you are wasting your potential” and all sorts of similar things that have left patterns on my brain and that lead me to sanction myself, to judge myself, to slander myself.
To judge ourselves, as the Savior is asking, doesn’t mean to say all these things about ourselves, to accuse ourselves; it means to go to the Judge and say: “Forgive me! Have mercy on me!” When we go to a judge at a trial, we don’t tell him: “Put me in prison for 30 years because I made a big mistake!” No! We ask for mercy. This is what it means to judge yourself: to see yourself, to understand yourself, and to ask for healing. When you go to the doctor, you ask for healing.
To do this, we must discard the patterns we received from our parents. Parents and teachers, especially in kindergarten, are extremely important in this respect. They can hit and wound us, and then we take the side of the abuser. What was I looking for from my mother? To forgive me, to comfort me, and not, after I fell, to beat me up because I fell. And if she didn’t do what I needed then, I will punish myself now and repeat what she did.
But even more than this, there are children who are gravely abused and take the side of the abuser. For example, if children suffer sexual abuse, rape, then they hate themselves. You see 3-, 4-, or 5-year-old children mistreated by others and hating themselves. What is this but taking the side of the abuser?
And so, we are not allowed to do this. God loves us, God forgives us, God doesn’t count our mistakes or our falls. God only counts the times we get up. I am guilty only when I don’t get up. Think about it: I fell in a ditch, and I stayed there, and now I tell you that five years ago, I fell into this miserable ditch and I have had a horrible life. Who will have compassion on me? Nobody. And so I need to get up again and again. And then I will learn to love myself.
Then, ask Him: “Lord, teach me how to love myself! Teach me to love myself in a healthy way!” Because when I start loving myself as a person, I will start hating evil and sin. And I definitely need to make a distinction between sin and sinner. I am human, I am a person. What I do is not final. And so I can repair, I can correct, I can change something.
Translated from:
I've been working through Mother Siluana's Forgiveness Seminar (English translation from her monastery's website). Do you know if there is anyone who does this in the US as an event?
Finally, a clarification of the most painful search of our lives-love!
Yes, "all I need is love", but what kind of love?
As I am not allowed to abuse anyone, I am not allowed to abuse myself. Many of us take self-hatred for repentance and thought self-flagellation for ascetic, God-pleasing life. And this is not the Orthodox way, but a projection of the wounds inflicted on us by others like us and a twisted understanding of God-the God of Love and Resurrection!
How could I pave my way with nasty thoughts (about myself) and expect to not stumble?
How could I feel love in the temple of a body filled with stress & survival hormones?
How could I expect to thrive on a self-hate diet?
Biologically it is impossible! God designed systems in our bodies to defend us automatically from injuries, so that we will protect His greatest gift to us, our life. The Fathers tell us to not accept thoughts, and look at us, how we keep creating and feeding them in our bodies, just because we think we should be better on our own powers! Thank you, mother Siluana, for reminding us that the power comes only from Him who molds us in His likeness when we open our thoughts and the feelings created by our thoughts to Him, the Way, theTruth, and the Life.