Women’s History Month: Voices from Women Will Save the World

I admit it. I feel like a failure. Often.

  • I have not married (and I would love to do so.)
  • I have not had children (and I very much want them.)
  • I hardly ever write (which is pretty much all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life.)
  • I feel like I’ve disappointed my readers by not yet writing a sequel to my novel and not writing more of my non-fiction.
  • I feel like I unintentionally push away my friends and family by not communicating enough.
  • I feel like I never get enough work done.
  • I feel like I don’t stay on top of my household tasks or my pets’ care.
  • And I sure as heck never feel as though I take enough care of myself.

I could go on, but this post isn’t about my self-pity party. It’s about being all-the-way honest because I suspect, while your reasons of feeling like a failure may be different, you have them. And they are constant, and they are ingrained.

By most accounts, my own included, I actually am successful in life. But I feel minutely the pain of things not being totally as I would wish them to be, and I suspect this is true for many women. As I sit here pondering my failure versus my success, I wonder if this is the way so many of us women operate – as we calculate our days and our weeks and our months in terms of tallies and scores and check marks and X’s. Did we mostly have a good day? Or did we have more failures than successes? Did we not live up to our own expectations? (Because those are the hardest to ever, ever meet.) Or are we thinking about how our inadequacy has caused a rift with someone, or not smoothed over a problem, or that we haven’t been able to intuit just the right words or give just the right look that would completely and magically heal a situation? Because, you know, if we’d said the other thing, or done the other thing …I wonder how we are here in a world of seemingly only two choices: success or failure. It seems the consensus fault of the pressure we feel is that we have too many expectations (of ourselves and from the world,) too many responsibilities, not enough support, not enough play time, and not enough space to simply be.

But here’s the truth: All those cleverly crafted reasons we think of to blame for our obsession with success and failure? None of them matter. Blaming those things is only an excuse, a way to convince our egos that we’re “working on it.”How could this be, you ask? Why? Because it’s nobody else’s darn job to make us happy or to smooth our path or to provide us a safe space. This elusive success we think we need to feel validated doesn’t actually exist. It is a hollow word the way we connote it because, even in our feel-good moments, we never allow ourselves to reach that full expression of success, that enough-ness, that, “Yes, I am completely content within every second” kind of success. We may flirt with it for moments at a time, but then we come right back to the cataloguing, the critiquing.

Critiquing does serve some purpose. We even could say the evolution of our society evolves from the continued pursuit people as a whole have toward being better, more. But does this actually serve us individually in this, this life experience? Why do we place so much emphasis on the stepladder of our measure, according to how we compare?

Let’s shift instead to these questions: What is it that provides us value in this moment, in this journey, in this life? What action or thought or experience will enhance our soul’s experience in this earthly body?

Do that.

Yesss … doesn’t that feel good? That permission to roll into that smushy goodness, that all-you-can-bathe-in ecstatic dance of life? To let those preconceived notions go and to hold your self-essence in your arms and pillow-squeeze it like a mama bear hug?

That is our success, a real success: oneness with our own being, regardless of “results.” That ability to unite with our own heart-source and know it is the dearest gift we have ever been given. And as with all pure gifts, there are no expectations of it, no demands made on it.  It simply is. We simply are. For me, this means attention to being present and being open and being happy, without comparison and without expectation. It means trusting I am where and how is best. It means believing all is well now and all will be well forever. It is the action of “doing that,” those things that feel pure and true to me, that feel in complete alignment with my soul, that releases my need to catalogue successes and failures.  We will never give the world all we think it wants, but we can learn that there is no failure in this – because there is no actual failure. There is only our ego crafting failure so we can think we have solved the problem by discovering the problem.

We give what we give, and that amount is perfect, for us and for the world. We create what we create, and it is perfect – just what we yearned to create and just what someone else yearned to know. We experience what we experience, and each time we are enriched with new ways of understanding and viewing our reality.

It is in the in between of the mythical success and failure – the sweet, glorious being-ness – that we are able to find our own peace and come to our own realization that success is not in doing, but in doing that.

Caroline A. Shearer is the founder of Absolute Love Publishing, which was born out of a mission to create and publish projects promoting goodness in the world. Known as a fresh, distinctive, spiritual voice, Caroline’s visionary leadership is uplifting, gently blending love and inspiration. She is regularly featured as a luminary in print, broadcast, and online media, offering guidance and sharing positive stories of her personal spiritual journey toward a more abundant, joyful, and light-filled life. Intuitively guided, Caroline has a remarkable ability to unite others along a path of progressing and celebrating the experience of humanity.

A bestselling author, Caroline’s popular books include, “Dead End Date,” the first book in the Adventures of a Lightworker metaphysical mystery series; “Love Like God: Embracing Unconditional Love;” “Love Like God Companion Book;” “Raise Your Financial Vibration: Tips and Tools to Embrace Your Infinite Spiritual Abundance,” a min-e-book™; “Raise Your Verbal Vibration: Create the Life You Want with Law of Attraction Language,” a min-e-book™; “Raise Your Vibration: Tips and Tools for a High-Frequency Life,” a min-e-book™; “Where Is the Gift? Discovering the Blessing in Every Situation,” a min-e-book™; and “Women Will Save the World.”