How it feels to fail

Life has it's ups and downs. I'm sure you've noticed and I'm preaching to the choir so far. We've all had experiences with failing to get our wishes fulfilled, to get things to turn out as planned, to get people to help us out and to get what we really deserve. We are all walking around with a long list of failures that may bear the weight of grievances, regrets, and other heavy burdens.

This morning I realized the payload from failures can be jettisoned. What appears as failures "ain't necessarily so". There's many different ways to feel about failures. We can instantly succeed at changing how we feel about a failure. We can awaken by failing.

The most obvious feeling to get from failure is that of a real failure. We can feel like we really failed in ways where we can try again, see if we've got what it takes and see if its something we can fix if we didn't get it quite right. We can even get the message that we are a real failure when it comes to this facet of human endeavors. We can conclude that we will never succeed at this, are not cut out for this, and do not have what it takes to get this right. We can feel trapped, cursed, under the influence of bad luck or under the thumb of overwhelming opposition.

With a little more confidence, power and determination, we can turn this around and get a very different feeling from failing. We can feel like others have failed us. We can feel betrayed, let down, mislead, ambushed or deceived. We can see those who failed us as the real failures. We can use that fact to boost our confidence, overcome our insecurities and silence our haunting doubts. We can make a habit of tearing others down to feel good about ourselves and looking down on them while we put something else on a higher pedestal. We can dish out degrading experiences so "those real losers" don't get in our face, see us as similar to them or compare us to something we put down with a vengeance.

With a little more ingenuity, humility and insight, we can get a very different idea from failing. We can disregard who did it to whom. We can pass up blaming ourselves or others and move on to better things. We can get a feeling there is something else to try, a different direction to explore or another approach to experiment with. We can feel curious, adventurous, reinvigorated and open-minded. We can use the failure to launch into a different arena.

With a little more love of paradox, sense of the whole deal that's operating and panoramic outlook, we can succeed totally from failure. We can awaken to how fate operates and how living under a curse effortlessly succeeds at creating failures. We can see how happenstance defies what we do, what we had in mind and what we expected would come about from our contributions -- by succeeding at something totally other. We can see how to play at that level too and create our fate. We can be made to feel like we really are not really here (transcendent), not registering on people's brains (invisible), not going anywhere anytime soon (eternal), and not conforming to standards of normality (free of limitations). We can be as we really are and live those experiences totally.