You will break down. You’ll be let down.

You’ll be disappointed. You’ll fail. You’ll lose. You’ll rock the bottom line. And in a way, you’ll die many times in your lifetime.

You will cry and weep, rolling in pain and suffering. There will be days you’ll detest the sun’s light. You’ll disappear into dust at other times. Yes, you will experience all of this and more.

Because—how else in the world are we to recreate ourselves if not from the ashes of what we used to be and what we long to be deep inside?

How else would we come to recognize the parts of ourselves that keep holding us back from being the best version of our potential?

How else would we know how to build up the being we are inside, that has been broken into pieces for such a long time and now longs to be integrated and whole?

We often don’t realize it, but every single one of us is experiencing failure in one form or another each day. And failure is not the opposite of success; it is the very ground for a new success to arrive and bear its fruit after something old has come to an end.

From this perspective, we learn to welcome failure because truthfully, we are failing every moment and from the experience we are seeing the world in a new light, something we could not do otherwise.

Have you failed to notice?

We fall each day, then we stand up again and continue to walk.
We fall when we fail at taking care of ourselves or loved ones.
We fall anytime we break our promises to ourselves.
We fall anytime we allow someone else to trespass our limits or boundaries—letting ourselves down.
We fall anytime we lose courage to hang on and keep following our hearts.
We fall anytime we lose faith and instead believe our inner demons.
We fall anytime we abandon love and chose fear instead.
We fall anytime we are too scared to try something new and not leave behind the things that are no longer serving us.

But if we were not to experience all these so-called failures, then how could we know success?

How could we know that all these things that seem to be going wrong are teaching us how  to put everything right again?

If we cannot fall, we cannot know what rising up means.

Everything is connected, and duality seems to be the way of life. We cannot have failure without success because what seem to be opposites, in fact, often complement one another, such as the knowledge found in knowing that all is well, even when it seems like it is not.

This is a way for all of us to broaden our horizons and widen our perspectives. This is the way to have ‘’new eyes” and opens us to new life experiences. This is the way to mature and grow. This is how we gather courage and dare to follow our heart’s longings. This is the how we allow transformation to happen within—to have the kind of lives that we really long for deep down.

Nothing in life is bad—all experiences are necessary for us to be whole.

So take the ashes of your life, if your house is already burnt, and create something new from them. It may take some time, but what you create can be beyond your imagination. The life you create from your ashes may be absolutely unimaginably magic.

 

Relephant: 

How to Dance with Failure to Win at Life.

~

Author: Ilda Dashi

Image: flickr/Matt Wynn

Apprentice Editor: Molly Murphy/ Editor: Ashleigh Hitchcock