Failure does not exist

Failure is not the end of the road unless we decide it is.

Our subconscious limiting beliefs and fears around failure decide for us that failing equates our survival being threatened.

What is a failure? When do you decide something is a failure? If you get up after you fell does it still count as a failure? Before I get into how this fear of failure is created, I simply want to tell you that failure, as humans understand and perceive it, does not exist anywhere in this world, in nature, in the universe except for our society. That alone should make you wonder.

Why is it that failure or what we define as failure manifests itself as such or is perceived to manifest as such only within our own species?That's because it is artificial. It is false, it's meant to make you an obedient little person that does not question the order of things, but simply and blindly takes what is given to them as the ultimate guidebook for life. Fear of failure is meant to push your limits for other people's self serving interests and motives, to make you accomplish some goals that are outside of your own best interest because of the approval and validation that are implicitly and covertly promised if you do not fail. And then your entire life turns into a neverending effort to avoid failing. So what's the catch. Well, the catch is that what keeps you trapped in running away from failure is that you fear it. Failure is ingrained within us since we are children. Whenever we did something bad or performed poorly in school, we were punished in some way that felt unbearable for our young brains at the time. The key word here is felt. Why. Because it is the felt sense of that impending doom of being punished unless we don't fail that is instilled and locked into our nervous system as a survival response. We fear the rejection of our family which means our survival is threatened. Which means we learn to equate failure with death, like I said in the beginning. Our frail and impressionable minds are taught therefore to embark on a race as far away from failure as possible. An exhausting and debilitating race that is actually a race against ourselves, our nature and our expansion. The fear of failure is a race against ourselves. Why. Because we cannot grow, expand and learn without the rite of passage of mistakes or so called failures. A failure as our human mind understands it does not exist in and of itself anywhere in nature, just as darkness does not exist in and of itself. What failure is is a lack of success, just as darkness is the absence of light. But absence of success as well as absence of light are not and don't have to be immutable sentences. But that's not how society sees it, now, is it? So when we believe we fail, what exactly happens? We encounter a challenge. A milestone, benchmark. This milestone, challenge or landmark, whatever you want to call it, bears within it a massive amount of information that is tremendously useful for one's growth and development. What we like to call failure holds in it the keys to your success if you decide to give yourself the permission to consider a radical approach to it. Allowing the experience of failure to speak to you about what your action steps need more of or less of, what is difficult about it, what is easy and flowing about it, what you love about the process of working towards your specific goal, what you hate about it, what you maybe consider changing your approach to about it, or you may even decide that you don't want to do it anymore etc etc. See all of this could not be possible in the absence of the challenge we like to call failure. You cannot "fail" without at the same time learning something. Its impossible. It defeats the purpose. You would not fail if you were not meant to upgrade yourself through it in some way. If everything went well and uneventful everytime, all the time, that means there is no growing. It's only a repetition of a certain familiar pattern or information that you recycle. That is not to say that struggle and grappling with life is automatically a sign of or a guarantee of a future success. Actually on the contrary. Ease, grace, flow, alignment and allowance are the ingredients that lead to whatever you call success for you. What that means is that when one fails, which is inevitable because we are on this Earth to learn and grow, it is the attitude that they have toward failure that makes the difference. The ease with which they surrender to the reality at hand and allow space for different approaches to that problem is what draws them closer to success. Not increasing the intensity of their effort, because that comes from resistance and from fighting the fear of failure. So how can I mend the apparent contradiction between saying that failure doesn't exist and at the same time that it's inevitable? Well, because they are not the same thing. Failure, as we are groomed to look at, does not exist outside of our social construct of it. What does failure look like in the Cosmos? How is a nebula failing at being a nebula? What about nature? Can a cat fail it's purpose of being a cat? Is a cat afraid of failing to be a cat? Can a tree become unimportant because it is different than other trees? Can a flower fail at blossoming? No. A flower either blossoms or it doesn't, in which case it means its dead.

Its our definition of failure that is unnatural, wrong and even harmful to us.

Failure that we are programmed to fear is peeceived as a death sentence that nobody allegedly can surmount & it translates for our nervous system into losing connection with your loved ones, losing worth, not having value, not being good enough, so people fear it. What is inevitable is encountering difficulties along the way throughout our development as humans. This is normal and is necessary if we want to evolve. But that's not the classic definition of failure that we are programmed to believe. We are programmed to fear it as a stigma that forces us to forever live in shame of our seeming inabilities. This is completely castrating for anyone. We all lack success and have lacked success in every area of our life at one point or another throughout our lives, but we persevered and we eventually succeeded. And so we take those successes for granted. For instance. When you were a baby learning to walk, you fell countless times. But you always got up. You now don't think that you walking is a success story that accounts for many failing steps along the way. A baby falling while learning to walk, does that fit into society's definition of failure? No. Why? Because everyone knows that the baby will eventually learn how to walk. They cheer the baby, they encourage the baby, they lovingly help the baby. Nobody punishes the baby. So naturally the baby learns how to walk, having this support system. There is no concept of failing in the baby's brain and so he/she gladly takes on the challenge of walking. But then growing up the parents start to condition their love and support on how much success in school the child has or how compliant they are. Now the failures start to be punished and the successes are taken for granted or seldom seen and so the child learns to fear failure.At first before conditioning and programming, the baby has no idea about failure because the baby lives naturally and in deep connection to its true self. Society only starts introducing the notion of failure when lack of fear of failure becomes dangerous for its internal mechanisms. It is not conducive to a hive mind type society like ours to have authentically fearless individuals that could jeopardize the system. And so fear of failure becomes a beacon in our lives. Don't get a bad grade, don't fail the exam, don't get fired, don't lose the person etc. Fear of failure's incentives are the negative consequences. We are motivated by negative consequences whenever we run from failure.And when we let failure become a dead end is when we decide that it is. We identify with failing to the degree that we peceive it as insurmountable. But it's not the roadblock of failure that cannot be surmounted. It's your belief about it. The reason we don't see many successful people is that many people stop when they fail. Many people decide that they failed and so it is. Many people give up when life presents to them opportunities to grow because they don't see them as such, as portals to a better version of themselves. They give themselves a death sentence. It is understandable why they do it. Childhood programming when parents rejected them and looked at them with disdain will obviously be replayed in this scenario as adults.

That means we live in the painful polarity of struggling to fight failure instead of integrating a different approach to failure which is benefiting us and thus helps us move with ease from a place of lack of success towards a place of success. So how do we heal our relationship with failure? First we feel the intensely undesired emotions associated with the notion of failure. You cannot simply mentally move past failure unless you first allow yourself to feel what it's like to fail. A full body experience of failure is necessary. You tune into your body for the sensations associated with failure. Where in your body is it stored? How would you describe it? Be very intimate with the sensations associated with failure. Maybe a memory may pop up while you're investigating your relationship with failure. Sit with and validate the emotions. There is nothing that will deeply heal unless we give ourselves permission to feel the emotions that we avoid to feel. What do you feel when you conceive of failure? Do you feel a sense a being lost, abandoned, unsupported, do you feel alone, do you feel your self worth plummeting? Let yourself fully feel this with your conscious presence. Then, after the emotions associated with failure subside, the next phase would be to approve of failure and to reframe it. Well how can you approve of failure, you may be wondering. Think about the times in your life when mistakes helped in the long run. How could you have grown and developed without the countless times you did something wrong? All the successful people have massive amounts of painful mistakes on their path to success. They learn what works and what doesn't through failure. They may even find out that what they're striving for as a successful business does not actually suit them and is not actually for their highest good. With every mistake you make you get closer to your truth. You get closer to what you genuinely want. If a failure in business or exam allows you to reconsider your choices and through this introspection you come to the realization that what you actually want to do with your life is completely different than what you thought until that point, that cannot be called failure anymore, can it?

I dare you to look at all the mistakes in your life that brought you closer and closer to what your truth actually was. And if failure in your life, whatever area it happens in, challenges you to find creative ways to get to where you want to be, that only means the Universe believes in your creative capacities more than you do and it is trying to make you aware of it too.

You cannot fail. You can only change or stay the same. Either way, it's a choice.