Isaac of Nineveh, also known as Abba Isaac and Saint Isaac the Syrian, was an important figure in the Christian Church of the 7th century. He is best remembered for his writings on penance.

One thing he wrote

Blessed is the man who knows his weaknesses, for this knowledge becomes for him the foundation, root and beginning of all goodness.

These words are a powerful reminder of the importance of humility.

Humility is where we are not afraid to admit our weaknesses to ourselves or others. Humility involves self-awareness, because we need to know what our weaknesses are before we can admit them. Humility requires honesty, in the form of a willingness to be open about who we are. And it requires trust: knowing that it’s okay to reveal your vulnerabilities to yourself and others.

Understanding our weaknesses helps us to compensate for them

If we understand our weaknesses then we are able to compensate for them. Here is a small example. Let’s say I know I have a weakness for a particular type of snack (which would be potato chips). I can avoid going to the supermarket aisle that keeps them. I can ask my partner not to buy them for me. Knowing my weakness helps me avoid its pitfalls.

Or let’s say I know I tend to be unkind when replying to someone who criticizes me. I may caution that it is wise to wait in a calm, clear and compassionate state of mind before answering.

An understood weakness is a weakness that we can work around.

You may notice that I talk about strategies for overcoming weaknesses. It’s very deliberate, because I think the concept of willpower has been blown out of proportion. I’ve written about this elsewhere, for example in relation to social media addiction. It’s really, really hard not to get sucked into social media, rather than just really trying, I found it much easier to create a barrier between myself and the object of my lust.

For example I could do:

• Don’t keep your phone by your bed so I don’t pick it up first thing in the morning.
• Have my phone turn off for the night so that I can be more conscious of turning it on.
• Turn off notifications so I’m less tempted to open the app.
• My phone doesn’t have social media apps at all, so I had to access these services through a browser.
• Block social media sites in my phone’s browser so I can only access them on my computer.

Those kinds of strategies helped me break my addictions to Facebook and Twitter (neither of which I use anymore). This successful strategy was not based on willpower. Instead it was based on an awareness of my weaknesses, combined with a strategic approach to overcoming them.

Intimacy comes from expressing our vulnerability

Being aware of our imperfections helps us develop greater trust and intimacy in our close relationships. A few years ago I realized that some traumatic childhood events had left me with a hyper-sensitivity to any indication that I didn’t matter to other people. For example, if I greeted my partner when I came home, and she didn’t respond (usually she was preoccupied with something) I would feel hurt and irritated. The same would happen if I cooked a meal for us and she didn’t comment on whether she liked it or not. And since she’s spent a lot of time living on her own, she habitually turns off the lights when she leaves the room, even when I’m still there. I can be very reactive when suddenly plunged into darkness.

See also:

Realizing that my reactivity went back to early childhood events helped me understand it more. It allowed me to practice self-compassion. I could see that in being reactive it was not that I was a “bad person”. It was not that I had “failed” at being a considerate and compassionate partner, or at being a Buddhist. It’s just that my brain was wired at an early age to be afraid of being ignored by those close to me.

Knowing my weaknesses makes it easier for me to forgive myself. It’s even easier for my partner to forgive me, because I can tell him, “I’m sorry I snapped at you; my sensitivity to abandonment heightened when you turned off the light without checking whether That’s what I wanted. She can understand that.

Revealing our weaknesses to each other helps us understand and empathize with each other. We no longer see each other as “bad fellows,” but as flawed human beings who want to be kind to each other in the face of our inner constraints. By revealing our faults to each other, we learn to love each other’s flawed nature.

Understanding our weaknesses helps us to be patient

Vulnerabilities are part of the human condition. We all have them. Weaknesses are not “sins” that convict us of. By recognizing this, we free ourselves from the burden of pretending to be something we are not. We no longer feel the need to defend our bad attitudes. We can only explain to them.

Recognizing our own weaknesses also makes it easier for us to be tolerant of the weaknesses of others. We no longer try to hold them to an impossible standard. We understand, in the words of Voltaire, that “we are all made of weakness and error.” And so, as he joins us (continuing his train of thought) “Let us mutually forgive each other’s folly.” We can recognize that we are all doing a tough job living this human life. Knowing this, we can support each other instead of trying to make life more difficult.

When other people mess up, as they will, we can recognize that they are not fundamentally different from us. We all have a mind that gets things wrong. We all have conditioning that leads us to over-react to certain events. We all have selfish longings, malice and delusions. It’s what we’re dealing with, and our tools for dealing with it are very imperfect, so it’s not always easy to change ourselves.

Accepting our weaknesses helps us to see things as they really are

One of the central teachings of Buddhism is the concept of Anatta, or not-self. Sometimes people translate this as “no self”, but the Buddha never said that there is no self. He even said that the idea that there is no self was a source of suffering. when they talked Anatta, he points to several aspects of the self – our perceived physicality, our feelings, our thoughts, our emotional habits, and even our consciousness – and says that we should regard these as “not mine”; not me; I’m not myself.” What he encouraged us to do was to stop trying to define who we are.

Many of us take for granted that our shortcomings and weaknesses define us. In many people’s way of thinking, having a flaw or weakness means that something is wrong. We, They feel that they have a self that is flawed: that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. it is Shame, in the sense that psychologists use the term—meaning that we believe we are unworthy because of something we have done. We don’t see the virtue as being simply unhelpful or harmful—we see ourselves as fundamentally bad because we control it.

The belief that our flaws and weaknesses define who we are can lead us to try to hide what we’re really like. We become dishonest, trying to hide ourselves from others, and even from ourselves. When our mistakes come into the public eye, we try to rationalize or brush them off, perhaps by blaming others (“It was you who pissed me off”).

Buddha’s teachings Anatta – not self – suggests that there is no permanent, unchanging self or soul within us. Rather, what we perceive as ourselves is an ever-changing collection of physical and mental elements. This means that what we are is not definite, but rather indefinable. It is something that is different in every moment. We can never define ourselves. We cannot define ourselves by our weaknesses; They are not us internally. We cannot define ourselves in terms of anything.

Accepting our weaknesses is part of the process of opening up to the reality that we do not have an unchanging “I” with fixed characteristics.

Admitting Weakness Doesn’t Mean Being Passive

Accepting our weaknesses means just what I said: that we see them as facts that must be taken into account, and as things that we need to work with.

As I explained, we can work with them:

• Observing our patterns of reactivity, and slowly letting them go.
• Learning to be aware of weaknesses and compensate for them.
• To be honest with them.
• Dealing with them with more compassion and understanding, so that we don’t torture ourselves.
• Using self-awareness helps us to understand how they create suffering in our lives.

Also, while we are doing all of this, we can develop the skillful qualities of wisdom, compassion, and equanimity.

We will never be able to completely get rid of our imperfections. Life engraves them deeply into the structure of our brain, and I consider the notion of a “complete Buddha” to be a myth as well. (He was perfect only to the extent that he was completely free from selfish craving, malice, and delusion. He was not omniscient and he sometimes made mistakes.) But we cannot completely get rid of our weaknesses.

And we don’t have to. Acknowledging our weaknesses, acknowledging them and explaining them to others, forgiving ourselves for having them, getting to the point where we can stop causing them great suffering for ourselves and others, and above all being with them continue to develop skillful qualities; That’s enough. This is enough for us to live lives that are meaningful, joyful, and beneficial to the world at large, and to those we are closest to.

but the first step to know Our weaknesses As Isaac of Nineveh states, this knowledge becomes “the foundation, root and beginning of all goodness”.

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