failure

Intention and Fulfillment

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No matter how determined the baby is, it won’t derive nourishment from sucking its thumb. No matter how determined an intention may be, it can’t fulfill a want without an appropriate action.

My Intention turns What into Why

You may believe you know what you want and how to get it. Yet, when frustrations come, you may not know to ask why you didn’t get what you wanted. Once I establish routine patterns of thoughts and actions, questioning them becomes difficult. We may live with routine frustration and failure, never knowing why we hurt or how we lost our sense of purpose. Our behaviors tell more about us than our thoughts and feelings. Yet, once acceptance of failure and frustration have been implemented there seems no need to question them – “It simply is what it is.”

There is always an intention with every action, though you may not be aware of it. The results of your intentions and actions is feedback to your understanding.

Sometimes I interpret feedback as frustration. Yet, frustration and failure need not be the focus. Understanding your intentions helps you accept accountability for them. Meditate on these four questions to illuminate your hidden intentions:

  • What do I need and deny in this experience?
  • How does this experience illustrate that need and denial?
  • Why do I need and deny this?
  • Who am I because of my need and denial?

The answers to why we think, feel, and do as we do may stem from one cause, one specific intention. Knowing that cause is the smoking gun of opportunity, which offers us power over frustration and failure! Intentions may be a natural characteristic of life, yet, their fulfillment requires a clearer understanding of them.

When I question why I believe I am who I am, I reveal my intention, and the frustration and failure I felt transforms into –

I love who I am.

My Justified Life Story

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“It’s my story and I’m sticking to it!” My life story is a history of justified emotions I’ve attached to my thoughts and actions through time. I defend any story that adds to the importance of my story.

My story presents a linear timeline that directs my imagination to access a string of memories. Those memories I choose to access validate and support my present emotional experience.

My beliefs hold my perceptions of time and emotions as universal truths, giving authority to my story. There’s a paradox. Although my emotions feel tied to time, they don’t exist there. For example, time flies when you’re having fun and seems to drag when you’re feeling sad. Emotion affects the perception of time.

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Suffering and Attention

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I suffer because I defend what I can’t justify. How is it I can still suffer even when I am justified?

I learn that being right has its price – sacrifice of reality.

When I believe I’m right, I tie up my energies in maintaining my position since being wrong is not an option and is in direct opposition with being right.

I experience wrongness as failure, against which I employ a strenuous and energetic defense. Failure implies a lack of wholeness. I attempt to overcome unwholeness with defense, a diversion of my attention – intention away from wholeness resulting in a perception of even more unwholeness (lack) and less available energy.

More attention on defense => Less attention and awareness of available energy => More Suffering!!

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Fear and Reward

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Why do I continue behaviors based on fear when so often the outcomes of such behaviors fail to satisfy my needs? What payoff do I get for failure?!! How do my fears reward me for having them?

As we discussed in an earlier post, fear causes us to invest our life-force energy in an imagined, worse-case future. Due to the placebo effect, that less-than-optimal future is much more likely to come about. So, knowing that my fearful thoughts tend to sour my future, why do I do it?!!

Reason 1 – Fear is useful.

My fear of getting run over by an articulated vehicle causes me to avoid crossing a busy street against the crossing light. My fear of drowning keeps me on or close to the beach instead of out in the high surf. My fear of hanging out in high places keeps me from falling to my death. My fears have proven their value to me so often, I don’t question them. That brings me to –

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