are you familiar with Anthony De Mello?

right on Nathan! thanks for struggling and for sharing your struggle and your victories...

For me the process i'm in feels like one of learning to let go of inherited ideas of "success", and learning to distinguish between where my heart leads me and where shell-images of self/world would lead me. (letting go of the "shoulds" and "ought tos", embracing the "coulds" and the "love tos")

As someone who early on rebelled against Christianity and notions of "let go and let God" i don't how much "surrender" as a theme resonates for me. But "acceptance" is definitely resonant, and in the same genre, i think.

in terms of the corporate machine...i face the same struggle. i see that i am not an island. living in this world, i may never be completely free of the Matrix: but i sure as hell can engage it enough to help bring it down =)

i'd like to hear more about how increased emotional vulnerability to your friends works for you. like, what in your interactions has changed?

I read this recently and wrote it in my little notebook of thoughts.
Failure is just a way for our lives to show us that we are moving in the wrong direction, that we should try something different.

I would add that if you have spun some gold from the expereinces that it is not at all a failure. All is part of the path and i wish you continued learning and sooo much joy through all the muddy parts!

"Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even"
–Muhammad Ali

"The leaders I met, whatever walk of life they were from, whatever institutions they were presiding over, always referred back to the same failure something that happened to them that was personally difficult, even traumatic, something that made them feel that desperate sense of hitting bottom – as something they thought was almost a necessity. It's as if at that moment the iron entered their soul; that moment created the resilience that leaders need."
–Warren G. Bennis

"You must think of failure and defeat as the springboards to new achievements or to the next level of accomplishment."
–Les Brown

“The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.”
–Sir Humphrey Davy

"Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It's how you deal with failure that determines how you achieve success”
–David Feherty

The wisest person is not the one who has the fewest failures but the one who turns failures to best account.”
–Amy Grant

"Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or a greater Benefit."
–Napolean Hill

“There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.”
–Eric Hoffer

"Success is 99% failure."
–Soichiro Honda

“I am not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed; and the number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail and keep on trying.”
–Tom Hopkins

“I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
–Michael Jordan

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”
–Robert F. Kennedy

“The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.”
–Abraham Lincoln

“Failure is a path, not a destination.”
–Robert Logan

“Failure is... the highway to success.”
–Og Mandino

“The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure.”
–Henry Miller

“Failures are like skinned knees, painful but superficial.”
–H. Ross Perot

“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
–Mary Pickford

“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.”
–William Saroyan

"If you give people the freedom to innovate, the freedom to experiment, the freedom to succeed, then you must also give them the freedom to fail."
–Paul Sloane

“The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.”
–Rabindranath Tagore

“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”
–Denis Waitley

"Failure is a detour, not a dead–end street."
–Zig Ziglar

Thank you for this beautiful and powerful post.

We live in a world (and specifically a culture, in North America) which tells us that failure is absolutely unacceptable, inexcusable, and something to be railed against at every turn. It's a message we encounter at every turn, so much so that it hangs invisibly in the air at all times ...

Your coming to terms with failure simply as another place in your life's journey, though, makes you far more a success (I belive) than winning all of the contests/competitions/petty one-up-manship games people play with one another every day. You have gained a kind of mindfulness around the experience, beholding it without judging it, simply and radically seeing it for what it is. Not an indictment of you, or of your decisions, or of your self-identity. Simply what it is, noticing it and being present with it.

To me, that's a triumph of wholeness. And to that I can only say ...

WAY TO GO!!!

You have learned a valuable lesson that shows you are a couragous man...to have the ability to take risks to be authentic
Thought you might like this quote...

“This mistaken idea of the importance of mistakes leads us to a mistaken concept of ourselves. We become overly impressed by everything that is wrong in us and around us. To be human does not mean to be right, does not mean to be perfect. To be human means to be useful, to make contributions - not for oneself, but for others - to take what there is and make the best out of it.”
- Rudolf Dreikurs

Rudolf Dreikurs wrote a whole book about...The courage to be imperfect
You may want to check it out...
"Courage to Be Imperfect: The Life and Work of Rudolf Dreikurs "

Nathan,

I was blown away by your post... by its authenticity... and by the fact that it could just as easily have written by me as well.

I won't bore you with the details -- resigning after refusing to become roboticized by a top American corporation, then losing a relationship because all of a sudden my lack of "success" brings out my girlfriend's worst fears of not having enough money, enough security, enough this or that. So I'm history for her as well.

I'm actually grateful for those learning experiences... especially recalling one of my favorite passages from a book titled The Way of Transformation, by Karlfried Graf von Durckheim (acknowledged as the "Father of Transpersonal Psychology"). Check it out...

* * *

The Way of Transformation

The man who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him refuge and comfort and encourages his old self to survive. Rather, he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it, thus making of it a "raft that leads to the far shore." Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him. In this lies the dignity of daring. Thus, the aim of practice is not to develop an attitude which allows a man to acquire a state of harmony and peace wherein nothing can ever trouble him. On the contrary, practice should teach him to let himself be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken and battered – that is to say, it should enable him to dare to let go his futile hankering after harmony, surcease from pain, and a comfortable life in order that he may discover, in doing battle with the forces that oppose him, that which awaits him beyond the world of opposites. The first necessity is that we should have the courage to face life, and to encounter all that is most perilous in the world. When this is possible, meditation itself becomes the means by which we accept and welcome the demons which arise from the unconscious – a process very different from the practice of concentration on some object as a protection against such forces. Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation, can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable. The more a man learns whole-heartedly to confront the world that threatens him with isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed and the possibilities of new life and Becoming opened.

* * *

Cheers,

Dave