A pattern
that seems to have come up and seeped into my mind and thus how I experience
myself in my life and living, is a fear of failing. In the back of my mind
there have been thoughts and experiences coming up that have created this
overall feeling within myself that I have somehow 'failed' and/or am failing in
my process of self-change and self-expansion. I've been struggling with that
experience for a while now, which has also seemed to result in avoidance behavior such as sleeping a lot and not really wanting to wake up and face the
day/my life, not feeling like maintaining my 'social life' and not really
feeling like doing things in general. In the back of my mind there is just this
experience and idea of 'what's the point, I've failed anyways'.
And when
looking at this experience, I can see that it's basically just a fear of
failing that I am dealing with. A fear that I have made real by believing it
and thinking it the whole time. I have molded and shaped my perception of who
I am and how I am walking my process and my life according to this fear that
has been haunting me in the back of my mind. In other words, because I fear
failing I constantly feel as though I have failed and/or am failing.
However,
then I stepped back from this experience and this perception of myself as
having 'failed' for a moment, and I looked at the reality of myself and of who
I am, who I have been and how I have been walking my process and my life. By
doing this, I came to the conclusion that actually in a lot of ways I have
transcended many patterns in my mind. I have become an overall more stable and
down-to-earth individual. I may not have entirely changed or overcome patterns
such as social anxiety, insecurity or self-suppression, but I have already made
substantial changes in how I experience myself internally and how I behave,
interact and express myself externally.
In
conclusion, I realised that within this fear of failing, my mind was creating
the perception and the experience that the entire process that I have walked up
to this point has been for nought and that I haven't created any change what so
ever. And this perception is strange, because it is suggesting that in all this
time of having applied the tools of introspection and self-investigation
through writing, self-forgiveness and self-commitment I haven't learned
anything and I have not in any way expanded or developed myself, while in fact
I KNOW that this isn't so. I can physically SEE the changes in myself and in my
life - changes that I have created myself over time as I walked my process of
self-change.
For quite
a while now - and on many occurrences in my process - have I experienced this
haunting feeling that I have failed in some way and never have I realized this
one simple fact. The fear and even the concept of having 'failed' seemed to
just completely override and hide all that I have in fact accomplished and
created through the process that I have in fact walked. When the fear of having
failed comes up, all that I become in my mind is a 'failure'.
In other
words, every bit of potential, success, growth and expansion within myself gets
suppressed when the word failure comes up in the mind. Even though there is
potential and even though success, growth and expansion has in fact taken place
over the years, all of that just disappears completely because all that I am
seeing with my minds eye is "failure".
What I am
trying to say and show here is that the whole concept of 'failing', at least in
the way that it exists at this time, is a mind program. It is a program in the
mind because it is not aligned with reality. The fear of failing and the belief
that "I have failed" is like a sheet that creeps up in your mind and
covers up the reality of who you are. The reality being the gradual learning
process that has occurred over time as well as the steps that you have taken to
change certain aspects of yourself.
For
instance, the reality of myself is that even though at times I may have been
more slow in changing a thought/behavioral/emotional pattern and I may have
sometimes been stuck in a certain pattern for a while, eventually I did create
a change and moved through whatever it was that I was trying to get through.
Failure is a mind program because it is a one-dimensional concept that doesn't
allow me to see the entire multifaceted reality of who I am in space and time.
The mind program of fearing failure is something that will eventually only make
me give up on my potential and sabotage my own process of self-expansion and
-development simply for the only reason that a fear of failure will block me
from seeing any potential for self-expansion within myself. So in a way it is a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the
next blog I will continue looking into the fear of failure and specifically
into what the solution is to changing the pattern of fearing failure.
