I did some deep breathing this morning.
Lately, I’ve been holding a lot of tension in life, and a good breathing session always does the work in terms of letting things go and giving me clarity in life.
There was a topic that kept spinning around my head in this morning’s breath-work “failure”.
After a deep session, tears ran down my face as I recalled all of the events in life that brought me here.
I believe failure is a story we tell ourselves to define a reality that doesn’t even exist.
Many of us create stories in our heads as to why we aren’t good enough and choose a path in life-based on validation and approval-seeking behaviors.
I won’t lie, it’s not like I woke up one day and had this realization.
Much of my life as been guided by emotions. They defined my reality, until one day I had no choice but to face the pain I was running from.
I feel like that is how much of our lives go.
In the course of failing many times in my life, I learned a powerful lesson about failure. It took joining the Marines, battling with addictions, depression, and divorce to sink in, but what I’ve discovered over those long grueling battles with myself was one of the most important things I have ever learned in my life:
Give yourself permission to fail.
One of the greatest things we can do is not to let our emotions define who we are. This is extremely difficult to recognize because our metrics for what we define success and happiness are clouded by the fear of failure.
But, who gets to defines failure?
Life, generally speaking, is never going to make sense.
The moment I started to change my relationship with failure, was the moment I realized we are all failing at something.
Here’s to saying fuck the rules
George