The Kinspirit Podcast

Self-Mediation and the Medicine of Failures, Mistakes, and Challenges

Listen

Description

Failures, Pivots and Challenges are a Natural Part of the Creative Process

So many creatives carry a wound of abandonment and a fear of rejection around walking through failure. There's this fear that if we fail, make mistakes, or create frustration with our clients through the mistakes we make, that we are doomed to be outcast and rejected forever. So many of us have experienced such intense cases of abandonment and rejection that we even believe, fully, that this experience of being cast out is something we deserved––we called for it. We "deserved" to have it happen. We deserve failure. It's deserved punishment.

But this is not true. Your failures do not define you. You define you. You are a self-defined being. And when you decide who you are, will you allow your body to follow suit?

Mediation is an intentional move to change the conditions and dynamics of a relationship. In many situations, it is a move from reactive and chaotic, dysfunctional conflict into intentional and potentially generative conflict.

From Holding Change by Adrienne Maree Brown, pg. 126, Intentional Adaptation Mediation

  1. Ignore the tangents, follow the feelings. Sometimes tangents are a part of the process. Sometimes. Often they are a brain and memory loop. Your nervous system is lit up and triggered. Literally travelling through time / space and into a past moment, causing your body to live into that past moment too. Following the feelings--sorting through and naming them can help us to come back to the present and find what we need.
  2. Ask hopeful questions like, "How do your feelings connect to what you need most in this moment?" Try to move into what you can control. You can't control people. You can't control the internet. You can't control if Zapier or Google has a lil break down. But you can control your self to some degree. You can at least breathe. So, take a breath and ask, "What is the essence of what you want to happen with yourself right now?"
  3. Change is the only constant. Chances are you're f*cking up because something wants change. It's not because you're inadequate and incapable of being reliable, resourceful, and ethical.
  4. And change toward a desired outcome is possible. It is possible to have a successful system, a setup, a business that suits all of your needs.

These mistakes are not your identity. And the more quickly you can come to terms with the fact that the story of your "wholeness" actually does include all of you. And not just the brightest, most vibrant. The more quickly you can see yourself, the more options will present themselves to you. There are as many options as there are aspects to your being.

Links: