What is it about new years that brings so much hope? Is it because we give ourselves permission to talk about what we want? To dare to dream about things we love? To take a leap and go for it? Do we not accept there are things we want to change and declare them outright? Perhaps we have humility. Maybe we set goals. What would life look like if we decided that each moment could be our new year?
“The journey into darkness has been long and cruel, and you have gone deep into it.” Marianne Williamson, A Return To Love.
We make these grand new year resolutions. We fail. So we abandon them. Gym memberships sit idle. Goals wither. Diets die. This is because we have failed to understand the fundamental nature of resolutions. They are a shift in perception. They can be accessed any second, of any moment.
The moment we eat the cookie, we can think, oops time to get back to it and then get back to it. Instead we think failure is finite. We just abandon our dreams too easily. We return to the darkness of amnesia. We cave back into autonomic living. The moment we do this, to avoid PAIN, we suffer. The moment we want to escape the messy feelings is the moment we numb out to all feelings. When we numb pain, we also numb joy.
Failure is not finite unless we chose to think it so, then it will be so for us.
“Emotional energy has to go somewhere, and self-loathing is a powerful emotion. Turned inward, it becomes our personal hell: addiction, obsession, compulsion, depression, violent relationships, illness. Projected outward, it becomes our collective hell: violence, war, crime, oppression. But it’s all the same things: hell has many mansions too.” A Return To Love.
When we fail to harness our emotional energy by changing our thought patterns we suffer. What does change our thought patterns even mean? Instead of thinking “I failed, I suck, I can never be trusted to hit this goal” we can shift our thoughts to “I failed, wonderful, one step closer, I can see my progress, I am ready to fail again and grow even more”. We allow ourselves to feel discomfort. We allow ourselves to feel pain. We sit with failure instead of running from it, denying it, stuffing it, rejecting it. We failed. AWESOME. Let’s go fail some more! Guess what? Some call failure practice! We fell on the bike. We got up and did it again. Each time we failed, we learned. Each time we fell, it hurt. We got back up and did it again. Now we know how to ride a bike. When it comes to our emotions we fail and refuse to get back up. We think the world has wronged us. We think life is unfair. We have some thought pattern that keeps us stuck.
“In our old thought patterns, our painful thoughts become our demons.”
We beat ourselves up for failure instead of using it as a tool to grow stronger. We lose our temper and drift into guilt and remorse instead of thanking the person for showing us our limitations as an opportunity to grow. We have it all backwards. So we suffer.
What if we failed, said “thank you”, and really meant it? Thank you for showing me where I am weak, so that I may work on that area and become strong. What if we look at the failures as a gift; specifically designed for our own higher learning?
“In order to love purely, we must surrender our old ways of thinking. For most of us, surrendering anything is difficult. We still think of surrender as failure, as something you do when you’ve lost the war. But spiritual surrender, although passive, is not weak. Actually, it is strong. It is a balance to our aggression. Although, aggression is not bad – it is at the heart of creativity – it needs to be tempered by love in order to be an agent of harmony rather than violence.” A Return To Love
So here is to your New Year Failure! May your failure bring you great success. For it is only by embracing your failure that you can truly practice your way into success!