Hugging the loser in you!

It is common for us to aspire for winning. Get attached to it. Run away from losing. After all, that is how you succeed and grow, you are told.

Let us take this piece of "conventional wisdom" and challenge the wisdom in it. Let us turn it upside down to see if believing this will create any scars.

As i piece my own life together, I slowly begin to unpack those aspects of me which, Debbie Ford or Carl Jung would say, have been disowned. In the last 4 decades of my existence, I have not respected my losing - even though it stared at me in my face from time to time. I turned away when it came near my face. I tuned away when it yelled. I did not acknowledge it. I was not a loser, I told myself. I will WIN.

Incidentally, in my rush to be a winner, I kept creating conditions which made my losing a matter of time. I would never relax. If a relationship was going down, instead of accepting that such things happen, I would either withdraw or push harder to win. It never worked. If I had relaxed, I would have seen how my actions were creating the very suffering I did not want.

The loser label was simply not acceptable.

Reality says we will lose sometime or the other. A job we want might go to someone else. A lover we see as our soul mate might walk into someone else' arms. The life we so tenaciously hold on to will lose to death. Losing is guaranteed. And it is not just OK but also sensible to accept being a loser when life hands you a tough one.

No, I don't want to run away from it anymore. I want to stop and say hello to it. Yes, i am a loser sometimes and that is cool. I want to hug this fear, this demon of losing I have been running away from.   Accepting that i can be a loser allows me stop pushing into those areas where there is no light at the end of the tunnel. It allows me to water those plants which will blossom. It takes away the burden of being all-knowing, all-good all the time. It allows me to look rather at what I do than what result am I going to get. It allows me to enjoy the process. It allows me to breathe.

It's a short life. Win some. Lose some. But live it fully. Thanks to Debbie Ford for bringing this to my awareness.