Living a life of meaning was never going to be easy.
Topics that we discuss today are: Regret, Personal Growth, Grieving, Meaning Making and the Journey of Life
Just Be Like This Today: “Today I am Embracing Loss”
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about personal development, wellness and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
There are two kinds of loss you can suffer from.
The first kind is when something dear is taken away from you, like the loss of a loved one, for which the invitation is to the art of grieving, or the loss of our youth, realising too late our summer is over and you are already deep into an autumn and not yet prepared for winter.
Today’s post is on the second kind of ‘loss’ which is called Defeat. This is when your peace is taken from you, your world darkens, your emotional safety is severely shaken and that which you cherish most in life is threatened with harm. This is always accompanied by an inevitable weight of self-doubt, when your sense that you were doing the right thing—that it was all working out—is turned upside down and you are left feeling the fool for ever thinking it was going to be okay.
I have been here, deeply, powerfully and quite recently too. This post is my way of distilling and sharing what I learned from that, and by that simple act between us, my defeat can have great meaning.
Defeat is what we call it when life breaks our hearts. Underneath your depression and your frustration and your anger is a kind of sorrow that comes from having your heart broken by life. Heartbreak isn’t just when a loved one dies, or someone breaks up with you, it is when you get knocked off your feet, emotionally and psychologically, the world darkens, and you feel utterly abandoned. Half the reason you feel so depleted is because of how desperately you believed in your dream, and did not want to be caught skipping out on effort.
It can feel like the universe has a dark sense of humour and is taking active pleasure in your undoing. How else would the double-edged sword deliver such a precise cut severing your sense of shelter and your sense of belonging in the world, and then perfectly cutting loose the chains that held back all your dark thoughts and unkind beliefs about yourself? And then as the veil slips from the mirror, you see your own reflection, your own shadow behaviour brought to light, and the old voice nags into your ear the old narrative —the one about how your desperate efforts and investments are not enough. And the people closest to you, that you are most vulnerable to, suddenly vent your flaws and mistakes, and the sting of it comes from how it rings true, but at the same time, raises those things you believed would have been accepted and forgiven, instead distilled into a poison and laced onto the tip of a stiletto blade, plunged straight into your heart.
Take heart.
This is not the end. This is actually a new beginning. A new phase is beginning and life is actually doing you a great courtesy, showing you a truth you need to see.
Just before the wheel turns in your life, you will always be given these kinds of system checks, to make sure you are who you think you are. This is not to shame you or humiliate you, or simply mess with you.
Think of it like an automated systems check that is creating a scenario to show you the worst that your life can get from here, without necessary focus on what is needed to get you to the future, better you. In moments of adversity and crisis, you do not fall to the level of your intentions and idealism, you fall to the level of what you have integrated. Where you have shadow behaviours it will surface them. It will reveal where you are out of alignment with your own integrity and authenticity. It will show you where the work is in your relationships, and especially the relationship to yourself. The biggest invitation is to realise how your story has bullshit elements in it. Something about your narrative and your belief about how reality works is off, otherwise this would not be happening. This is not about invalidating suffering or trivialising the hardship of your journey. But at the end of the day, we all came here to grow and to actualise towards our true fulfilment, and our hardships were never punishments, —they were always invitations to growth, to self-leadership, to better perspective, and to meaning-making. This has to be true for you too!
If you can grow from an experience, you give it meaning.
HOW TO PRACTICE THIS PERSPECTIVE
Your failures reflect your unrealistic expectations nothing more.
Think of this like troubleshooting and debugging an inevitable software crash that will lead to enhancement and upgrade. I call this practice STEPPING THROUGH:
ONE: Hit Pause.
This means slowing the pace, creating space, stepping back for a moment, and taking a tactical pause. If you feel distressed, it is likely you are on autopilot, either reacting badly or going around in terminal circles, causing you to spiral deeper. This means hitting pause on the idealism as well, give your own strict rules and expectations a rest. Your life will recover.
TWO: Take stock—
of what needs doing right now to look after what we care about, pets, kids etc. and manage those. Again park your idealism, not everything present is important and not everything important is urgent. Not everything you feel, belongs to the story you are acting out.
THREE: Choose your Stance.
Are you a leader or a victim? Are you here to turn this around or make more drama? There might be an injustice that needs to be honoured or a problem that needs to be addressed. Whatever you really care about is always going to be best served when you are at your best. Invite whoever is involved into a similar reset and give them time to get there. Even if you are on your own, this can be the different aspects of your own internal persona: The Child, The Animal, The Protector and The Judge. (See this earlier post on Vulnerability for Reference)
FOUR: Break Down The Problem.
There is never only one thing, with one dimension. Some of it is real, some of it is ‘Story’. Some of it is an old wound, some of it is fresh. It is never one thing. Some of it was avoidable, and some of it was inevitable. Take some time to work this out and put everything in its own box. Some ‘boxes’ may be related. Talk it through with someone Neutral and be open to being ‘wrong”—often this means nothing more than being open to the idea that you have been idealistic, distracted, overwhelmed, biased, mistaken, ignorant or unaware. These each have specific invitations with powerful gifts in their hands.
FIVE: Step Through Each Problem.
Speak your truth, check your assumptions, and validate the feelings. The problem seldom only began when you first noticed it. Consider all perspectives and consider a wider perspective. Some things need maintenance, some ideas require challenge and replacement, and some behaviours require adjustment. Some expectations require resetting.
SIX: Own your Part.
Some of every problem was avoidable. Committing to learning from these situations can make the act of owning your part that much easier. This is also what turns the experience into real growth. This was the point of choosing your stance.
SEVEN: Accept if something is Broken.
Not everything can be fixed or should be fixed. Sometimes it was time to break. It is either a relationship, a promise or a belief that is too small for the life you are trying to live. Life kindly keeps saying ‘no’ to us, before we stop knocking for ‘yes’ outside the wrong door.EIGHT: Design Your Future.
By asking “How am I going to face this next time?” and “What do I need to work on?” you will know what you need to invest in and what it will take to not get back here.NINE: Take time to Grieve—
and process your regret. Regret just means you cared. Just because your expectations or story were askew does not mean that you didn’t have your heart invested in the effort you put in and the outcomes you had been hoping for. Honour the one who walked the road (and allow that in others too.)
You create your own meaning in this life. If you learn from your defeats, from your mistakes, from your losses and so-called ‘failures’, you alchemise adversity and regret into opportunity and meaning.
You will face defeat again, and again. This is what it means to be going somewhere in life. The definition of resilience, literally, is about how you endure challenges and defeats and are made stronger by them. The real question is “Are you going to face this one with leadership—so that you never have to endure it again?”
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
It is not your triumphs that define you, but instead how you face and grow from your defeats.
Just be like this today: “Today I am embracing my Defeat. ”
Until next time,
Rocco
If you need help ‘stepping through’, reach out. Rocco helps people make sense of their defeats and map ways forward that foster self-acceptance, deepen their sense of purpose and create meaning from their lives.
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