"I did not fail at being a basketball player nor did poetry fail me. More accurately, my inwardness evolved with enough life experience, so that moving bodily in the air evolved into the poet's dance of feeling which then evolved into the spirit's grace of being. I no more failed in my desire to be a basketball player than the cocoon fails the butterfly, though the form of the dream was painful to lose."
"Living up to a dream is rarely as important as entering it for all it has to teach."
Mark Nepo - The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.
In reading this, I see how we often believe we Failed something, when we have actually evolved into a new way of being in the world. He went from movement to feeling to spiritual being.
Some may say I failed at being a Christian when I left the church. Yet I see it as a huge step in connecting to my soul that I wasn't able to reach within the confines of that religion. Totally not a failure for me.
Others will say that I failed at being a sister when I became estranged from my family. I see it as raising the bar in my relationships. I see it as requiring more for myself. A higher awareness in relationships; knowing how each affected me and how I was required to be in some. While I can appreciate their viewpoint of me, it is more about my viewpoint of me and seeing where the growth lies. Again, not a failure to me at all. I have grown in my relationships.
I had seen myself as a failing mother, when I was actually doing my best with the mindset I had at the time. It was a stage in my growth, something to press off from...a knowing of what was not working for my children. This was perhaps the toughest growing I had to do. And to know that I had caused lots of damage due to my lack of self awareness.
If you see life in stages and levels of growth and changing, there really are no failures, just learning and evolving and becoming a deeper, broader, awakened self.
I do find it utterly amazing to have gone from the blind faith of the church into the wide open space of spirituality and freedom to be me. To have left the tight constraints of sins and threats of hell and damnation into feelings of heaven on earth.
And to have witnessed my changes...my dying of one self while birthing another. Of going from not feeling to feeling...of no expression to writing publicly and truthfully about matters deep inside of me. Of sharing myself unbounded.
The 360 transformation was all inside...
I didn't fail at being a faithful follower...I followed blindly well.
I didn't fail at being an abusive mother, I mothered at my level of knowing.
I always have acted at my level of awareness and consciousness...without failure.
My life changed when my inner self began getting restless...when doubts and resentments rose to a fever pitch that I could no longer ignore. When what I tried to control, became uncontrollable.
I believe that many are struggling now to maintain a life of following of going along to get along. That inside of them the unrest is getting harder to cap down. That the strength it takes to keep control, keeps failing.
It isn't that they are failing, it is that they are ready to go to the next stage. It is time to change or die...by going deeper asleep in drugs and mindless religion.
The Crysalis or the Butterfly Soup that Deepak Chopra called it...is the stage of great unknowing and can be fearful. Of leaving behind the life you have always known to step into the unknown. To leave behind a self you are familiar with to one that is strange and new.
If you can see yourself in stages, perhaps it will bring you peace while you are transforming. You are part caterpillar and new growing pains of butterfly...it is hard to find what is you, for parts are old and parts are new. It is okay. All the ineptness and strangeness is perfectly perfect in change.
