Success and Failure

Failure is simply the left hand side of success’s face. Turn one way or the other but make no mistake, they are one face.

Our issue with failure is that we think of it too repetitively and resist it too much. We resist failure more than we invite success.

There is an inbuilt duality in an athlete. One who judges everything, let’s call it the mind, and the one who is aware of the mind and what it is doing, let’s call it awareness.

Let’s examine this outer layer of awareness that is “aware” of its own mind and thinking. One is object “mind” and one is subject “awareness”.

The real self beyond mind, which is simple awareness, knows nothing of success or failure. The very idea of becoming this or that resides in the mind, the personality, but not the self.

The self understands that success and failure are relative and related, they are the fabric of the athletic journey as they are the fabric in life.

So here’s some advice for athletes from a non-duality standpoint, and from the raw experience of watching so many athletes struggle with the full face of success and failure.

Learn from both the success’s and the failures, be as complete with failure as you are with success. If there is something you have not learned in the failure, you will repeat it until you do.

You must understand there is no failure, it’s just a matter of the rate of progress that failure brings to success. If you ignore the lessons of failure you are ignoring the chance for success, one relies on the other.

As with everything in life there must be opposites, there must be cold for there to be hot, there must be up for there to be down. You don’t resist the ball coming down after you have thrown it in the air because you accept it as a fact.

Athletes resist failure! They think it is somehow unnatural, the ugly side of success’s face that no one wants to look at, nor mention.

For success to exist, there must be failure. Just like for you to exist there has to be awareness, no awareness, no life, no life and there’s no you. Everything is connected.

I’m not speaking of liking failure here, you don’t have to like something to accept it, if it’s cold and it’s uncomfortable, surely you won’t like it, but you have accept it if you want to be able to look at it and learn from it.

Resistance and ignorance are not the road to success. Success and failure are exactly the same face.

As with all things that we try to attain, when we try to attain something through the sense of the personality, we set ourselves up for trouble. We make it personal, there is nothing personal in failure, it’s a fact of life and awareness itself is life’s definition, not the limited personality that we mistake ourselves for. It’s all part of yin and yang, light and dark.

All problems start when we make it personal, the personality takes sides, when you really look at it closely, it’s insanity. This is how you can distinguish the facts of life from the bullshit of a construct called the conditioned mind that makes us think we are an object.

When human beings think they are an object there is always suffering. We split everything into two parts, what we like and what we don’t like. We lose 50% of our capacity to calculate and evaluate rationally with all the facts.

Awareness is the simple act of remaining as the subject, not shrinking yourself down to the small object your personality tells you that you are.

Personality narrows the field of focused awareness, it dumbs everything down into good and bad, it lacks any authentic intelligence and in that avoids failure, disappointment and discomfort like the plague.

I’m yet to meet an athlete who has been successful who hasn’t at least made a truce with discomfort. If you can’t accept the discomfort then you can’t move towards success.

Awareness is seeing things the way they actually are, no filter, and from that standpoint taking the action that is needed that moves you directly to the other side of failures face, onto the side we term success.

Success is right under your nose, looking out of your own eyes. It’s the only place you can ever know success from.

It’s a room with a view, built only for you!