Failure Can Be a Prelude to Success

4:53 a.m. "Cold"

I tossed and turned all last night. Coming down with a sore throat. I get up once in the middle of the night for an hour to read from A Course in Miracles. When I finally get up at 9 and see that message looming on the screen, I want to hurl my cellphone across the room.

I'm not sure where I imagine Wyatt was when he texted at 4:53 a.m. If he was outside in this rain and wind, or if he was huddled in a rehearsal studio without heat. I don't want to know then.

The irony of my life as it is this minute is that while I can score two free passes to Global Green's Gorgeous & Green: An Ecofabulous Party, a fundraiser for rebuilding a sustainable New Orleans, I cannot figure out how to get my stranded New Orleans musician-friend a tuxedo to wear. The $140 fitting and rental would be close enough to the $186.50 needed for his bus ticket home, and besides we are about thirty-forty miles from each other while my car sits broken in the driveway.

And so I am beginning to see how sly the universe is. It knows I cannot sit idly by and simply be content to watch people go up in flames in a burning house. Nope, flames around me don't bug me near as much because they appear like a mirage.

An acquaintenance of mine closed their business recently. Let's call the friend Sarah. So Sarah had run a highly profitable and fulfilling business for about twelve years when she bought out her partner and moved the business to a new location to be closer to family. The last few years the business sputtered along, living off its past fortune, until bankruptcy seemed like the only solution.

I met Sarah in the last few months of the sputtering and it was obvious to me, as it is obvious to any observant outsider, that she'd been coasting and hit upon a plateau. She was being asked to step up to a higher level in her business.

It wasn't that she'd done anything wrong in the past (it was flourishing for over a decade), it's that growth is not an option in this universe. I tried to tell her what was being asked of her, how to transform the business to the next level, but as the movie "Conversations with God" shows, sometimes it appears easier to unconsciously chose homelessness over a daunting calling.

It's clear when it's not you at the crossroads.

The Hawaiians call it kahea, the Call, says the Japanese shaman at Saturday's writing workshop.

I ask her during the break, "When did you say Yes?"

"When I was on my knees, hit bottom."

"I haven't fully said yes."

"You can flirt for a time."

I walk away from the living room musing that flirting is a wonderful entry, but prolonged, it's a tactic to avoid intimacy, avoid intercouse.

My Burmese painter-friend Oliver just returned from his yearly trip to his village in Burma, on his return, he picks me up to go to a Thai restaurant:

"Well, it's hard to imagine it's worse than last year and they can get poorer. The village doesn't have a school anymore. They can't afford to hire a teacher."

"Oh," I said recalling how Oliver was bringing them books and language and Sesame Street videotapes. "So how much is a teacher's salary?"

"Seventy dollars U.S."

So putting me in these situations were I cannot sit idly by, that it is how She nudges me into stepping up. It was the day when I met Wyatt that I finally swallowed my pride and wrote to a friend for money coaching. (I wanted to see through all my conditioning, my hangups around money. If you are seekiing a mentor, make sure it's a friend that is a) wealthy b) has held onto wealth for over five years and c) is generous with their money.)

She nudges me into stepping up yet again. And again. No resting on laurels. "This moment doesn't care that we stepped off the 100 foot pole yesterday," I can hear my teacher say.

Recently when I was looking for my bellydancing costume for Halloween, I found two prosperity books by Catherine Ponder that I'd misplaced. In The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity, she recounts how she had been publishing articles for some time when all of a sudden the tide turned and absolutely nothing was being published. This post headline, Failure Can Be a Prelude to Success, is the subsection title.

"Everything I wrote and submitted was rejected, and I wondered if my writing career was ending so soon. I went through a disheartening period, constantly battling with the feeling of failure, and wondering what it all meant.

Months later, as I began to evolve the laws of prosperous thinking, it became evident that the rejections of my articles were an indication that I was not thinking big enough. The time had come for me to write books instead of articles. Those rejection slips were nothing but success trying to be born for me in a bigger way. It was then that the ideas began to form for the writing of this book, and for the many books that have followed.

My first reaction was, "If you can't even write articles that are accepted for publication, how can you possibly expect to write books that will be accepted?" But prosperous thinking insisted on the opposite attitude - my previous failures in writing magazine articles were but an indication that the time had come to aim higher. Had my articles continued to be accepted, I probably never would have pushed past that level."

Bonus: I've been enjoying Steve Pavlina's blog for some time. (He is by far one of the most conscious bloggers out there.) I've only started reading his wife Erin's blog, Erin Pavlina. She wrote a fantastic article recently, "Getting Paid for Spiritual Work." I think you could read the article and substitute "spiritual services" with whatever your unique gift/genius/contribution is.

If you're on my wavelength, you might also benefit from Steve's article "Lightworker Syndrome" ("This is what happens when someone wakes up to a higher level of consciousness, but they can’t figure out how to live on purpose and feed themselves at the same time...") which Erin references in that post. Here's a snippet from her post:

One way you might want to look at it is this:  If you don’t charge for your spiritual services, you will have to “slave away at a desk job” as you say.  How does that serve the greater good?  How many people could you help if you quit your day job and started providing spiritual counseling for people?  From that perspective, don’t you owe it to yourself, to others, and to Source to spend your time using your gifts as much as possible? Aren’t you, in fact, denying your responsibility by only offering your services part time because you have to go out and make a living working somewhere unfulfilling?

images Thanks to Rita Patel for sending me the image, To Love Beauty is to See Light.

Comments

[Chris Campbell]

It's a strange combination of fear and excitement when you start to realize what you have to do. You're right on the edge of something wonderful and I can't wait to see what you do. I took a leap a few years ago which ended in failure and then it brought me to a place where I'm very happy and it wouldn't have been possible without the failure. Sometimes it's easy to become complacent and not see things around you, but when the universe keeps pointing things out to you it becomes difficult to ignore, so you have to stop flirting and either become intimate or try something else. I'm guessing that you know what you want and need to do and you're just savouring the flirting for a while.

[Dan]

Thank you for this, Evelyn. The principles around "failure," the process of hitting bottom and waking up to something else are profound and universal, tactile, embracing, not just an image and idea. When you see it coming, and everything is prepared, it's just a rehearsal. When the real thing hits, the brick of reality, after working so hard to remain unconscious, it's always a different deal: better, harder, harsher, cleaner, freeing. Clear the spring with your own hand. It's a beautiful thing, and damn, the water is so cold it makes your flesh ache.

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