Tuesday 2 August 2011

Rule 19: Self Love Turns Thorns into Roses

If you want to change the way others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Unless you learn to fully love yourself, fully and sincerely, there is no way you can be loved. Once you achieve that stage, however be thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It is a sign that you will soon be showered in roses.

To the degree we learn to love ourselves our dependency from what we get is diminished. We become less needy and demanding in respect to our environment. Instead, we become open for unconditional giving and being present with other people. So it is a noble task to enforce the love to ourselves.

How should this work? There are so many things which are not okay with us, how should we love us with these shortcomings? Again we have forgotten someone’s birthday – should we love us for this carelessness? Again our temperament has overridden us and we have hurt someone. Again we have wasted our time uselessly. Again we have forgotten to turn off the stove, and the whole meal, the pots included have turned to coal. And so on and on. An endless list of errors, weaknesses, failures heap up day by day and shows us our imperfection. And even more, the lists of our daily lists, way back all the days and years and decades…

In the presence of these conclusive proofs brought to court against us – where it there a place for self love? Exactly these misfortunes and failures which happen to us are special occasions to accept ourselves instead of beating ourselves up. When we think back to our childhood in which we made so many errors: Of course we were blamed in order to improve. But had we not wished to be loved anyway and despite our wrongdoings? Only slowly we have learned that there are situations in which we will not get love and that this is our own fault caused by our imperfection. Only slowly we have learned that love depends on conditions. And for a long time we could not believe this because we entered this world full of unconditional love for these parents who have brought us into existence.

And of course we also did not have any guilt feelings when we spat the meal we did not like back to the table or when we tore the table cloth together with the porcelain dishes and the full soup terrine from the table. By the reactions of the grownups we learned that we lose their love when we do not act according to their ideas. It might return, but not for sure. We start a new phase of learning: Not a learning of how to direct the spaghettis into our mouths or how to deconstruct an alarm clock but another kind of learning. What do I have to do or what do I have to omit for love to stay? How are the conditions by which we are loved and how when we lose love? Thus we learn to adapt to expectations and needs of others, a kind of learning which is fueled by evaluations and judgments from others.

For love is life, and lovelessness threatens life. We secure our lives by adaptation. This is a skill we have taken on during our childhood. In as much as we have taken it on, we have lost our ability to love ourselves. Self love has been replaced by self criticism and self devaluation. We have erected a ruthless inner critic who punches us as soon as we have committed the slightest mistake. We start to scold ourselves when something went wrong before others could do so and hurt us even more. As soon as we act inadequately, we shrink and tense up and reduce our breathing volume and thus the life energy available to us.

In this manner, we meet the world and the other people, more or less crooked and diminished. Then they should love us, from their own crooks and distortions? This seems a quite implausible undertaking similar to blind people who intend to explain colours among themselves. Again we get the assertion that we are not loveable because we are so inaccurate. The scenery is complete: The love we would need does not exist and we have to be content with the bits and pieces we get at times from here and there. And at least it causes some relieve when we can lament or blame others for our misery.

We can escape from this corset only when we turn the tables and start with ourselves. We have to heal the wounds from our childhood for we only can recover physically when all roots of inflammation have been healed in our bodies. Healing means that we have to replace all the acts of unkindness then by love in the now. Then self love can grow and we regain our childlike innocence.

This does not mean to shut our eyes to our own shortcomings. Self love is not equaled with arrogance and smugness. In the same way that true love from parents does not make the children self centered and vain, true self love also heals the blindness towards one’s own mistakes. Good parents point out the failures of their children in a loving way. Thus we can learn to treat ourselves understandingly and lovingly. Then we take our mistakes seriously, do not devaluate ourselves but learn from what went wrong.

Sometimes we hear someone complaining that he or she has already learned so much on the way of self love and still the love to receive from others is so little. Isn’t this unfair, does it not contradict all teachings which state that you get everything back you give to others?

Such an attitude shows that the love to oneself is not fully developed but still attached to a part of the ego instead of unfolding towards the world. The fully developed “pure” self love would say: Take everything in life just the way it comes, and feel the power of love behind it. Even if you encounter bad experiences, accept them with tranquility; one day you will realize that there is something hidden inside these experiences which will further your growth one day.


The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com

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