Many of us are going through our lives very aware of a safe and secretly stashed bundle of pain underlying our daily awareness that we’ve felt for so long we aren’t even sure where it comes from. It almost seems as if it’s part of who we are, or the way we see the world, but it’s important to realize that this pain is something that needs to be acknowledged and processed. The longer we sit on it, the harder it is to work through, and the more likely it is that we will be forced to acknowledge it as it makes itself known to us in ways we can’t predict (but then again we know the ways).

The word failure puts forward a very simple way of thinking that allows for only two possibilities: failure or success. Let me tell you this for sure – few things in the universe are black and white, yet much of our verbiage reads as if it is. The word failure signifies a paradigm in which all subtlety is lost. When we regard something we have done, or our-self, as a failure, we lose our ability to see the truth, which is no doubt much more complex. In addition, we hurt our-self.