“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett
How often in my lifetime have I had to be vigilant as the fine dust of self-criticism clouded my vision, sending me down the rabbit’s hole of despair and disappointment with self.
There is no way to grow up in America without some deficit in self-compassion, as the statistics prove that only 5% of high school seniors have high self-esteem, which is the ability to perceive one’s self as lovable and capable.
Yet as with anything that happens over and over, you either learn a thing or two, or you continue to suffer. As I began to practice mindfulness, and simply noticing without judging, I learned to shift the entire meaning of failure from something negative to a necessary part of living with full aliveness.
At 65, and having gone down the rabbit hole of despair quite a few times, I have learned something— that, “success is the ability to go from one failure to the other with no loss of enthusiasm,” as Winston Churchill said.
You learn. That is key. Rabbit hole or no rabbit hole, you must take the feedback. It is often so hard to let ourselves simply feel the ache when we have wanted something to work out and it does not. We will usually have some story of blame of self or someone else or both. Maybe it’s a relationship, a creative piece, a race or any endeavor in which you have allowed yourself to invest your passion. It hurts when things don’t work out!!
Failure can only be avoided if you do not feel your passion, and you do, say and are nothing. You may feel like a failure if that is the case, but you have not failed until you have dared fully.
From what I have learned, I recommend embracing the attitude of willingness in regard to failure. In my book, Activating Your Loveseed: Revealing The Blueprint For A Better World, I refer to this attitude as amor fati, which means, “the love of one’s fate.”
Here is an except from the book:
Our imperfections, our suffering, bring us to our knees. If we are too perfect and cannot fail, we never surrender and cannot ever discover the true meaning of our larger purpose, and realize the powerful quality of amor fati, a Latin phrase meaning “love of one’s fate.” It is used to describe an attitude in which everything in one’s life, including suffering and loss, are necessary, simply because they are. Amor fati means that you deeply accept the events and situations that have brought you where you are.
My client Tanya went through a bitterly dark night of the soul, as she discovered that Jeff, her husband of 26 years, had given her an STD. Jeff was a self-absorbed man who exhibited high ideals to their four grown sons, as Scout Master and successful doctor, as well as the consummate family man who prided himself in how well he managed his perfect life. Attempts by Tanya to have a more meaningful relationship were met with defensive admonitions that she was not grateful for all he did.
After 28 years, the “house of cards” came tumbling down. Not only did Jeff sleep with another woman, but he flaunted it in Tanya’s face and never acknowledged that he had hurt her. Rather, he justified his behavior based on how little he felt understood by her over all those years.
Believe me, amor fati does not happen right away. How could it? Tanya had to first feel the pain and anger of betrayal, then there was bargaining, and the dance between the two of them which merely proved what she had known her entire marriage, but had pushed away because it did not fit the story she had about marriage and family.
Fortunately, she reached out for help and began to move through the layers and layers of emotion that had been buried, and then the feelings arising as the divorce unfolded. She learned how to welcome whatever feelings were arising, and began to feel more alive long before the drawn out divorce proceedings were done.
At one point, smiling across from me on my green couch, looking more radiant and younger than she had when I first met her, she declared the entire mess a blessing. She said that Jeff had done her a huge favor to be so consistently cruel that she could not second-guess her decision to leave him.
That was amor fati, not only the acceptance but the celebration of what was. The powerful energies of the archetype of Betrayal, which involves deception and broken trust, put an end to what needed to end a long time ago, and Tanya was grateful for the huge nudge.
As Tanya learned to lean into her feelings, she came to realize, as Jon Kabat-Zinn says, “As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than there is wrong, no matter how ill or how hopeless you may feel.”
Imagine that! As long as you are breathing you have an opportunity to shift from wrong to right, and beyond. You can accept each failure as an essential experience in your life that shapes the road you travel.
When you were learning to walk, if you didn’t fall you would never have walked. Somewhere along the way, in school and possibly before, you internalized that it was necessary for you to always succeed. You began to experience shame when you failed. That belief is like a virus that begins to infect your entire self-image.
At first Tanya identified with being a failure, but was able to drop the story about being a failure and see that her marriage has failed.
This shift away from making it about your character to seeing failure as a life experience makes a huge difference. You are the experiencer of the feelings that come with failure, AND you are so much bigger than your experience. You are writing the instructions that were not given, and could only be understood as you took feedback from your life. You are learning the fine art of failure.
I recommend you get an attitude about it failure–a hands-on the-hip attitude toward any critic, inner or outer, that accuses you of being a failure.
You simply respond, “I’m learning the fine art of failure, so don’t tell me how things ought to be.”
You will begin to fail much better!!
Excellent! When I embrace these thoughts, I see that my life is chock full of necessary steps to teach me self-acceptance and self-love. Failure has been a great sharpening stone.