I was really exploring this idea of failing. As I brought this website to the surface and stepping out into the world with this offering of Self-Inquiry, the fear of failing or of not being enough really came to the door. Then I sat and explored what is behind this idea of failing, what is failure? Is there ever actually such a thing?

There is an idea of what you want to achieve and so, if you achieve that, that is success but, if you don’t succeed and get that outcome, is it failure?

When I look at it further, I can see that again, as children, we are shown that, by succeeding, we get our needs met, love, validation, acceptance. So succeeding becomes very closely tied to survival. School applauds the people who seem to be clever and the people who appear to struggle are deemed difficult. Even death somehow has become a failure?

I grew up in a family where there were six of us and each of us vying to succeed in our way so we could get what we needed, love. But this for me is the flaw, we were loved, it’s just the learnt reward system that dominated, that says unless you are good, succeed, you wont be loved or rewarded. So this is a simplistic view point of one element that ties into our feeling of being loved.

But it’s a curious one that I am playing with, is there really ever such a thing as failure? I know that when this was said to me before, its not the winning it’s the participation, it felt like such a platitude to the losing. But now, as I sit with the idea of failure very close to me, I have invited it in, I am sitting down and having a cup of tea with failure, I am seeing that failure isn’t as real as I think it is. That the fixed idea of the outcome is where the suffering of failure appears.

If I can be more open to the possibility that the outcome may appear in many ways, it may happen how I am planning, some parts might happen as I think or something completely different may happen. The only reason failure will have happened, is because of how I choose to see it. What does the success bring to me, is it again validation, love, acceptance? Is this why it needs to look a certain way? Has an old belief system said, this is what success looks like and it is the only way you will be loved, survive?

Is this really true?

“Between the stimulus and the reaction there is a Pause this is where Freedom lies” Victor Frankl

So in my having tea with failure, I am hanging around more in the pause to see what’s actually here, not what I think is here.

Aileen xxx