Using Failure

I recommend failure highly. It is something most of us will achieve in our lives. It’s like a huge makeover of years of accumulated ideas, beliefs, things, relationships and fears. And we all love makeovers.

I failed spectacularly in this life. In some countries bankruptcy means complete loss of respect and reputation. You are shunned. But in the experience, I learned so much.

Failure is only a stepping stone. Failure only happens when you stop trying and believe that you are beaten. Failure is the foundation to your next step. It lets you sweep away the old and begin fresh again.

If you don’t already know about my personal failure, suffice it to say the now infamous Fanny Mae, the quasi-federal lender, issued a policy change around 1985 to stop lending to anyone owning more than five rental properties. I owned 650. I needed 40 more Fanny Mae loans. My life abruptly changed, ending in a $25 million dollar bankruptcy. I lost everything; owed the IRS $300,000.00; lost my home, my business, my income, my properties and my marriage.

Even in the midst of the ensuing chaos, hope dawned. Failure became the uncompromising foundation, hard and firm, to begin again. The question before me was “Do you want to repeat what you’ve already done?” I did not. I’d already done that business to death. I moved into and then fully chose a completely different path, one I never knew even existed. The gut wrenching loss allowed for that new opportunity. All the old had been swept away and I had a clean start.

Passing through that dark place of suicidal intentions, I moved on. Self worth destroyed; future in doubt in every way, survival was necessary once I chose life.

Now a clean slate can be a scary thing. I decided that I could either be scared or excited. Scared wouldn’t help and both feelings are like butterflies in the stomach. I chose to be excited. Remember when you were in school and couldn’t wait to be graduated? Everything was possible. The world was your oyster. You just needed to be set free to conquer it. It was exciting. You were filled with anticipation of the first job, being out in the real world and making your mark. Life after failure was the same thing. I knew I could either embrace that wondrous excitement or hang on to the fear of what I’d lost.

Many times one cannot see the possibilities, the reasons, the clean slate of opportunities when the muck and mire of failure and loss seems to drown you. My shift came through curiosity. I have always loved learning and researching; teasing out the solution to a puzzle; and I was certainly in the biggest puzzle of my life. I chose to read a book unrelated to my business. I was curious. I wanted to escape. That book piqued my interest to begin a quest to understand myself, the universe and those big questions about the meaning of life and my part in it.

I read voraciously, 450 books in one year even in the midst of the bankruptcy issues. I couldn’t stop. I was enthralled, fascinated. Half way through all that learning, I saw an ad for a lecture on one of the topics in those books and went. Finally I’d found real food for the soul. I was hooked. The financial crisis began to fall into a perspective and became more of a background to my life, instead of my whole life. The awareness I was grasping through the books and the teacher easily became more engrossing than the financial distress. What I was discovering gave me a new way to understand what had happened. It gave me an opportunity to think about my life in a new way and to see new and very different possibilities.

Because I pursued this new knowledge with passion, I fell down Alice’s proverbial rabbit hole deeper and deeper and found more passion, knowledge and truth and called it food for my soul. I found so many new interests I felt good about. My new love became Tarot, the ancient method of divination, self analysis, spiritual growth and the soul’s journey. It was complex, deep, comprehensive, multi-layered and fascinated me endlessly. After 20 years it still does!

I cannot imagine any journey being more exciting. I was grateful that I’d had that fulfillment of having had lots of money and the things money could buy. Though I was never truly what I call wealthy, the billionaire type, I certainly lived a life that was free from want and full of luxury. I often meet people that say “Gee I wish I could …. Live in a big home; drive a luxury car; take a trip; etc, etc. Been there done that and it was grand! But the point is BEEN there. I don’t have to revisit it. I am fortunate and grateful to have experienced it. I neither fear nor crave such a reality again. It is a nice balanced place to be.

No matter how far you fall into failure, no one can remove your knowledge. It is your self worth you must repair; that and your passion. One will lead into the other.

My passion for Tarot led me to begin doing readings for others. It became the next part of my life, these 20 years. You can bankrupt the entrepreneur, but you can’t take away the entrepreneurial spirit. So my business, metaphysical and right brained, took on an entrepreneurial flair.

Failure was my springboard to a new life. Chaos and depression were experiences to acknowledge, embrace, and nurture consciousness. My whole next 20 years proceeded in unimagined ways from the foundation of total failure. Thank god I lost everything. Yes, it was painful and there are more benefits from having experienced that shift than I could ever have imagined as I was passing through it.

Because I moved into this strange world of peculiar knowings, intuitions and medical intuitives; I was diagnosed and healed of cancer all within one week. Had I never lost it all, the diagnosis would have come long after; the potential healing would have been a totally different path and who knows its outcome. I have often wondered if my properties, all in inner cities, would have survived the meth labs and lead paint and mildew problems that plague older, inner city property. I loved what I did, but certainly the stress had its impact.

My life is much simpler. My life style has changed little. My only real indulgence in the old days was dining out. I still love it but with all the fatty, starchy, fried restaurant foods, I actually prefer to cook at home using healthier ingredients. I am happy. The basic tenets of my first and most beloved teacher on this new path were “Drink Water. Choose Joy and Live in the Now”. It has become The Way for me.

I recommend failure highly. Use it well.

Choosing Joy in the Midst of Crisis

Choosing Joy in the Midst of Crisis

A Different Way
No matter what happens, there is a different way to see things. You can broaden your perspectives. If you first understand how you create your own reality, you will be much more powerful in creating the experiences you prefer. No one "does it to you"….. you are creating "it" by what you choose to focus on, mentally and emotionally. In truth, everything is done for you as a reflection of your personal growth. You can tell what's happening within you, your emotional thermometer, by what's happening in your world.

How You Create Your Reality
Thought and feelings combined make your world of experience. What you focus on and what you feel are a powerful alchemical mix that is out-pictured as your reality. Emotions deep in your subconscious are the operating system of your life. Your thoughts and emotions give form to all that occurs in your world.

Triggers
Everything is a trigger to your potential emotions. Your interpretation of those triggers, based on your emotional operating system, determine your perspective. If you feel injured, you are. If you don’t feel injured, you aren’t. If you love a flower, it triggers a feeling of beauty and appreciation. If you determine that same flower to be a weed, other emotions are triggered. Same triggers, different interpretations.

Acknowledgement
Let me acknowledge those reading this who have had crises in their lives: rape, wrongful imprisonment, abandonment, abuse, floods, famine, earthquake, fire, disastrous health or lost a loved one, be it a mate, a sibling or a child.

My crisis was merely financial. It gives you a perspective, doesn't it?

Crisis Defined
When we are children, great drama is a skinned knee, being picked last for the team or not making the team at all. As we grow up, our dramas become larger and larger, yet within us is still the small child who skinned a knee. Crisis isn't defined by the externally applied test of severity, but by the internal gauge of our own emotions.

Losing the football game because you fumbled the ball on the tie breaking last three seconds of the game may be equally as devastating as if you had made a bad business decision that resulted in losing your job. We categorize levels of trauma; but to the emotional self, it's all pretty much the same: a massive blow to self worth, lovability, connectedness, abundance or control.

My Story
I had been a real estate investor. The Feds changed the law so I was unable to get loans and I needed many. Then I heard "In any moment we can choose joy. It is always a choice." I was being served with hundreds of lawsuits. I chose to be happy as the postman delivered a container full of more foreclosure notices. Instead of my embarrassment, I focused on him as he began telling me of his anniversary surprise for his wife. He was so happy I became happy. I was amazed. Choosing joy worked, for real.

How It All Shifted
When I stopped asking "Why me?" and began asking "Why did I create all this?" I began to heal. This led me to many discoveries about how to choose and what choices were available. I read hundreds of books, studied thousands of hours and sought out extraordinary masters, only to be redirected to myself as the source of all that was occurring in my life. I learned how I was that source, how I was creating what was in my world and finally how and why I had collapsed my financial world so completely. These answers didn't come all at once. It was the journey that made the difference. All the reading and all the teachers didn't give me answers so much as they gave me pointers so I could rediscover those answers for myself.

Ten Pointers: The Secrets I Learned to Choosing Joy
1. MAKE A JOY LIST. This gives you scheduled time to focus on joy. This is so incredibly simple that most of you reading this will think it’s too silly to do. But it is one of those life-changing things that is incredibly effective.
2. BEGIN APPRECIATING ANYTHING. This little thread will become a lifeline to joy. When you decide you’ve had enough of an undesirable feeling, you can begin to shift immediately by changing your focus to appreciating anything. Appreciate one thing, anything, then more things, until you all you feel is the vibration of appreciation.
3. LOVE A THING ‘TO DEATH’. When you are hurting and finally decide you’ve had enough you can love the pain to death. Once you make the determination to be done with the pain you can use any method possible to shift your awareness into one of love. It may be music, poetry, spiritual books, walking in nature meditation, or journaling. By shifting your focus, you allow yourself to move into an altered state, altered from the downward spiral you were in. You literally step into a clear space in which you choose your next feeling.
4. GIVE AWAY WHAT YOU NEED. When you’re hurting and in pain find someone else to whom you can give what you need. When we give away what we need, physically or emotionally, we have recognized at a deep internal level that we already have it within ourselves, or we wouldn’t be able to give it away. Eg. Give away loneliness by sitting with a stranger in a park or coffee shop.
5. SHIFT YOUR FOCUS. Whatever you focus on you get more of. This is the Law of Attraction. Attract what you’d prefer. Focus on joy, love, health or abundance!
6. CREATE A WELLNESS PLAN. Plan for your health on all four levels of your being: Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual.
7. CREATE A PERFECT DAY. Choose a day that becomes Christmas like in its expectation of joy and perfection. My day is April 21st.. every year!
8. REMOVE THE LABEL. Whatever you call the energy: anger, guilt, fear or something else, tear off the label you have given it. Beneath it is pure raw energy. Use it to feel good, heal yourself or get energized.
9. BECOME A SCREEN TO EMOTION. Allow them to pass through you. When you feel a wave of emotion coming toward you, choose not to clamp down and hold your breath but become pliant, like a tree in the wind. Open to the experience and imagine your whole self becoming like a screen door. Let the emotions sweep through you without attaching to them and without getting stuck in them.
10. CHOOSE JOY. It is always available as an option. Choose it by first remembering times of joy in your life. Then become it. Feel it. Be it. Exult in the feeling.

These secrets are expanded in greater detail in my book “Choosing Joy in the Midst of Crisis” available through my website.

Get straight Talk, Tea and Insight with Dolly Mae. Visit www.dollymae.com for scheduled events and other articles. Email dolly@dollymae.com or call toll free 877.246.9569.