Fourth Form of Madness

In this society we tend to love success.  Why not it feels great to succeed at the job interview, the footy game or lotto!  We embrace success, share our success stories and celebrate the success of others.  Failure is not celebrated in our society.  It is not spoken about (usually) or embraced or celebrated.  We all remember who came first in the race but rarely the person that came over the line last.

However, both success and failure are journeys that should be embraced and celebrated as they are so entwined and feed off each other symbiotically.  If you always succeed, always ride the wave of success, you never have the chance to learn to fail and fail in style. Seriously, you need the experience of a failure, to feel how it feels, to review the experience, to see it for just what it is – life and nothing more.  And then to just pick yourself up and try again.  If you never experience failure, in what ever shape and form, you never get the chance to know the beast for what it is, to realise it ain’t  such a beast at all and that life, and all it’s ups and down will roll on regardless.

This is a lesson that is very close to my heart.  As a typical card carrying A type personality, I have always strived to achieve in everything I do and be good at it.  Over the years I had manage to build up a fear of failure so great that I could make myself pass out over the thought of it.  🙂 And then I started yoga and a funny thing happened.  With each class, each session of being guided by skilful and beautiful teachers, I started to naturally experience a shift in perspective, mindset.  I no longer looked at the mat as a place to achieve but instead a peaceful place of meditation to tune in my body and my movements and my breath and to drop out of the constant chatter, often negative, about myself.  A refuge.

Along with this I was encouraged to try things that I once never would have tried because I would have pre-empted I would fail.  Oh failure, can’t be doing that.  Not with yoga, with a non-attachment to achievement, a letting go of results, came a thirsty sense of self-enquiry to approaching an asana.  With this new attitude, anything is approachable and dare I say it, an adventure.  There is so much to be had in trying, attempting, in adapting the asana so it suits your body at that moment on that day.  The jewel is in the attempting with integrity no matter what the end point, not in only attempting asanas that you know you can achieve and do perfectly.  When is life ever really like that, only bringing what you like and can cope with?

So today in a class that I was teaching when we came to side crow, I paused and surveyed the room.  There were people attempting the asana but there were many more that were  looking at me like I was the craziest lady in the universe.  I sensed some apprehension and fear and resistance to trying.  So respecting and embracing their fear I tried to talk them to their edge or at least take a step closer to their edge.  I advised them to first and foremost have some fun with this, play with this asana gently and not to be afraid of falling (in their mind failure) as falling is often the part of the process and seldom do we hurt ourselves when we fall.  And most of all, we are going to fall in life, so we really should learn to do it in style 🙂 and to learn to abandon ourselves to the falling process.  And then as if on cue, a lady fell in grand style.  I walked over to her, asked her if she was okay, and she assured me she was and then she got back up and gave it another go.  I could not have asked for a better demonstration if I asked.

If I have learnt anything in this life, it is that we all need to learn to fall, to fail.  We all need to learn to embrace, celebrate and even rejoice these falls as until we do this, until we are able to experience and see clearly failing for what it is, and that it is just life rolling along as it does, a necessary and natural part of life, we will never appreciate and rejoice our successes.  Knowing one without the other is like only seeing the light side of the moon, and that is not the complete picture.  When we bring success and failure together within ourselves we find we are just left with life.  And that’s the way life rolls….