When your passions fail and facing defeat, you’re likely feeling a storm of emotions. As hard as this place is to be in, it’s sacred, fertile soil in which healing and growth happen—despite ourselves and our circumstances. Freedom and relief sprout as defeat’s first gifts.
After having lost almost everything launching my motel business, I felt I really had nothing left to lose. That things couldn’t get much worse. I felt lost, angry and betrayed. Yet amid those feelings, I noticed a small feeling of lightness, expansiveness, and freedom breaking through. In a word, “relief.”
In the wreckage of losing everything I had believed in and worked so hard for, when the dust started to settle, I received freedom and relief. These were not feelings I tried to make happen. They happened to me. It was as though life was helping me start moving on from the heaviness of my defeat. Life was showing me that maybe there was something more to my life than what I thought my passion was calling me to.
Amazingly, these feelings of freedom and relief were there even amid my feelings of anguish, uncertainty, anxiety and loss. I felt a little guilty having these feelings, as though I was betraying the passion I had held so dear and pushed so long and hard for. (How dare they come to give me hope when I’m in the midst of feeling so down!)
In the raw moments of defeat, I began to see freedom as one of defeat’s gifts. Freedom as a gift of losing everything. Ironically, much of which I placed so much importance on in the pursuit of my passion, lost importance.
I began to see that life goes on even after failed passions and lost dreams.
Life’s impulse to heal and grow happens to us despite our present circumstances. Be open to feelings and thoughts of freedom and relief when you encounter setbacks, loss and failed passions.
Trust that even in defeat, life is there to provide you the gifts of freedom and relief.
