Episode 123 - How to Frolic With Failure

Written By Mary Lofgren
 

  • Mary

    Host

    Hello, and welcome to the Come To Your Sensors podcast. I'm your host, embodiment based coach, Mary Lofgren. Here, we explore how to live bravely and beautifully through a lifestyle of embodiment. You'll hear gems to empower you around mindset, mindfulness, somatic psychology and neuroscience, as well as beauty, food, style, and the art of slow living to meet your soul through the senses. I am so happy that you're here. Let's begin.

    00:49

    Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to come to your senses. Welcome to today's playground sandbox, maple, grab a ribbon on the maple, because today, we are learning how to frolic with failure. I have experienced so many delicious varieties of the bouquet of failure, you know, job failures, business failures, relationship failures, personal failures, friendship failures, all sorts of failures, great and small. And I think that that is a often unwanted, yet essential dance partner of living a life that truly feels like it is our own. Most of the failures that I have experienced were also the defining moments of me, finding out who I really was and what I was really made of, and learning how to stand my ground for what matters to me. And learning how to humble myself in the vast array of things that I don't know and be open to learning and to receiving guidance and wisdom and feedback. And so today, we are going to learn how to take failure, and just like everything that we do here at Come To Your Senses. Rather than using this as a reason to loathe ourselves or to and bold in the inner critic. Instead, to bring it to the playground of life, because I believe that anything no matter how serious, no matter how dense and heavy can become more solvent and more transmuted with the buoyancy of play.

    03:05

    You know, this weekend or last weekend, I went to this amazing Burlesque festival called land of this land of sky. Balesque Festival. It's here in Asheville, North Carolina. And it was really five star. I've seen hundreds of Burlesque performances in my life, being a former performer myself, and it was really top notch. So if anyone who had anything to do with the production of that festival is listening great job. And one of the things that I just took away so gratefully was the way in which Burlesque brings a comedic element to some of our most private, shameful feeling like we're so alone in this moment, moments of being a human. So for example, a entire act that was dedicated to a cheeseburger, all about falling in love and all about not being able to live without you, and an entire act dedicating to watching TV late at night and loving your favorite chair. And you know, just so wildly inventive. And I left there knowing that I myself and everyone in that audience would now look at their Netflix binges and DoorDash late night emergency deliveries and the act of eating a cheeseburger and loving it. Even what might be perceived as too much, that those experiences would be validated through play and through art and through nudity, which is why I love Burlesque so much. So if you love this podcast, Find a Burlesque show in your city. Go. Hoot and holler and praise and tip the dancers well. But anyway, That experience of performing Burlesque and teaching Burlesque for many years was really a training ground for me. On how to as my mentor in Burlesque Joe Weldon used to say, flaunt my flaws. And take the parts of myself that felt like failures. You know, when I started performing Burlesque, I couldn't even wear short sleeves in the summertime because I felt so much shame about my upper arms. Not to mention the feelings I felt about my breasts and my belly and my butt for three b's. And after the experience, of playing with these parts through rhinestones nipple tassels and glitter on my tush and shimmy belts on my hips and my belly. And when I felt shame, learning to shake my jiggly parts even harder. I was utterly and completely transformed. You had to pay me to keep my clothes on after that experience. And so I'm digressing a bit here in part because I taught a Burlesque class recently I am in the process of creating a burlesque based offering for you. That's gonna be coming this fall. So if you are not already on the School of Sensual Living mailing list, you want to make sure to get on that by going to school essential living dot com slash love. That will add you to my email list, but it will also send you a weekly love note that is a love letter to your body and to your unique beauty. And the sensual spell that you cast just by being and breathing. So school of sensual living dot com slash love, and you can also find a link for that beneath this episode.

    07:20

    But anyway, having all of that said, coming back to my main point. See, I, you know, on my online dating profile, after seeing that Burlesque show, I switch one of my questions to, you know, I used to have a different response, but one of the questions is, like, what is it that you can't shut up about? And I wrote Burlesque, obviously, for very good reason. And so we are gonna bring the intelligence and the for quality and the joy and buoyancy. And I use that word buoyancy very deliberately because something then is buoyant. You know, I think of like a buoy in water. It floats and it bounces and things bounce off of it. And failure can really drag a human down. I mean, I have been knocked out k o punch I don't even know what that term means, but I think it's a boxing term, which means that you can't get up. And today, we're gonna now move into our gems. On how to bring this buoyancy and how to bring fun and play and pleasure to reclaim your power. By frolicing with failure. Let's begin.

    08:48

    So we're gonna begin with an image, which is have you ever seen a video or maybe you've seen it in person? Of a dog jumping off of a dock or a boat. And the way that they just I mean, I could watch this over and over and over. I think it is the cutest thing. When they run and get a running start and then they get to the edge of the dock and they just completely superman, like all four legs out in all directions to land in the water. And I think that that's a powerful image to start with in what it looks like to frolic with failure. Is just to take the most enthusiastic, passionate, excited, high dive, knowing that even though you're jumping into the unknown, you're gonna do it in style and with a lot of enthusiasm. And the word failure what I find so interesting about that word and the way that words really shape our experiences. Is that failure simply means lack of success. And so our first gem is around defining what does success mean to you. So something that's been really helpful for me in my own life and as a business owner is defining what are my values So for my business and my brand, some of my values are vulnerability and exposure being real. That's all under the category of one value. The body being body led instead of just led from the mind. Deep beauty So beauty in all of my products and services and offerings, but also that each person who interacts with my work feels their own unique beauty and care is also another big value of mine. You know, my work involves a lot of personal relationships. And last night, I was just working on a special project for a client. And the little business owner voice who's always watching my time and you know, profit margin and all those other things that I am so glad that I've learned how to think about. There are many years where I didn't think about that at all in my business, and that that wasn't a failure necessarily, but it caused a lot of suffering. And what's amazing about knowing our values is that it creates a benchmark for our decision making and our definition of success.

    11:49

    A business coach that I study with is Jennifer Kem and that statement was taken from one of our recent coaching calls, is that our values are these center points around which everything else orbits and also how we define our success. And so perhaps you have a certain set of values for yourself as a parent, and maybe something doesn't go great or your kid flies off the handle or you fly off the handle. There's a lot of ways to look at that. Through the limited lens of just being a good parent that whatever happened might seem like a failure. But if one of your values as a parent is teaching a kid all of the different shades of being human, and teaching them how to repair. If you flew off the handle, then that's just an opportunity. To practice and to deepen your embodiment of your values. And so that's our first gem. It's asking yourself in any endeavor Before you even begin, what is success here going to look like? And that brings us into our next gem. Which is taking failure less personally and more neutrally through taking it as just information. So I recently just last week actually, brought a product into my collection, which is called the Healing Heartbreak Support Kit. And it's in the store in my online shop. I'm in the process of building out my online boutiques so that some of the tools that I work with with my coaching clients can be made more accessible. And so keep an eye on the boutique. Over the next couple of weeks and months. But the healing heartbreak support kit, I knew that that was gonna be a very niche product. Because it's really designed for someone who's going through a season of heartbreak or breakup, and that's not gonna be everybody. So all of that is just a way of saying that it didn't sell to the degree that I wanted to wanted it to in its first week, and it didn't earn me a spot on. Good morning, America. Which is something I texted my friend, Ellie, but there's still hope, you know. And there were some moments on day one where I was like, oh god, another failure. You know, it's only sold x amount of units. And Once again, I went back to my list of values, and it was like, this is such a genuine product, like, This was born straight from the very depths of my heart, and I put so much care and so much attention to it and I feel so confident about it. And I feel really proud about how accessible the pricing is. And so if I'm using the traditional barometer of capitalism to define whether or not I've been a success with this product, Some might call that a failure. But when I look at it through the lens, that is a bit more feminine or feminized. The feminine brings in this holistic experience or it's not just about one metric of good or bad, but it's about the entirety of the experience. And so the fact that it was so deeply in alignment with my values and then it sold any of the support kit was a smashing success. And the information that I got was simply that I might need to market it more, might need to market it through an Instagram ad that speaks directly to the experience of a breakup. Might need to switch around the sales copy or whatever to speak more directly to the heart and mind of someone who's suffering with the pain of breakups, but it wasn't a failure. It was just the first try.

    16:30

    And that's another gem. That is more of a mindset gem that you can bring to maybe some of your past, quote unquote failures. Which is, was it a failure or were you just learning? Was it a failure or were you just a beginner When I think back to my very first retreat ten years ago in Connecticut, some of you listening, our OG retreat participants, I don't think I made a dollar of profit off of that retreat. And I was really hoping. I was you know, new in business and and part of the reason is because I brought four assistants. I'm laughing now. But I brought four assistants for a group of about six people. And I'm really proud of that now because I felt so incredibly supported and we had design support and we had personal Mary support, a friend of mine who's massage therapist, and my husband at the time was there. And, you know, there were just so many layers of support And I was also it was my very first retreat. I didn't know a single thing about spreadsheets back then. I was a beginner. I was learning. And now, I retreat process runs like a well oiled machine we just had last year the YUUL retreat, which we will be having again this year. So again, get on that school of central living dot com slash love email list. If you wanna be notified and nab one of those spots, there's only six spots for that retreat. And it's here in Asheville, North Carolina, and it's a holiday retreat. So it's a chance to hit reset on your body and your mind and your spirit and to savor and enjoy the comforts of the season in the month of December. But any who, It was my first retreat since the pandemic. I've hosted about fifteen embodiment retreats in my career. And it was just such a delicious experience to be not in the messy middle. To have acquired some real skills. And there were things that I will do differently this year. But to look back on any of my retreats and some of the things that went wrong, as a failure would once again be seeing the experience through a limited, non holistic lens. And that's one of the things that we deeply practice here in my courses, in my classes, my coaching, in my retreats, is pulling the lens back from the limitations of fight or flight. And the limitations of oppressive systems that cause us to see ourselves as incomplete. And seeing our lives more as a masterpiece in creation than a car with parts that need to be fixed. Your Rolls Royce, and don't you forget it?

    19:52

    Our next gem on frolicking with failure, is a story that I've told many times on this podcast before, but it's one of my most precious stories in how I refused to let a failure define me or enter my nervous system as shame. And so many years ago, I made a mistake. I was working in a corporate job that I loved and I made a mistake that ended up costing the company five figures of money. And I went in the next day and got a lashing from my boss. And at the time, I was just starting to explore pleasure and sensuality and fun and play as a guiding principal in my life. And that night, I came home with champagne I think I bought a bottle of move quicker, the fancy kind, and chocolate, and all sorts of treats to celebrate. And my husband asked, wow, what are we celebrating? And I said, we are celebrating that I made massive mistake in my job, and I don't ever need to do that again. I have fully learned not to do the one thing that I did that led to the loss of revenue. And when I look back on that memory, it is a joyous memory in my mind and in my body. Because again, using the tools fun and pleasure and celebration and refusing to let my conditioned mind write the narrative about that experience. Telling me that I'm a failure. And then I should take that shame in as a preventative tool to make sure I don't repeat it. It was like the celebration created this protective coating. Where I could see myself as a first timer who was learning her way and learned a big lesson and got to celebrate it.

    22:25

    And the final gem is a legendary story in my family history. Which has to do with my dear dad, who my dad's absolute unyielding passion in life was horses. And when he was a kid, he used to give pony rides in exchange for riding lessons at this local barn. And one day, he came home, just elated. And his mom, my grandma, asked him Joey, what's so exciting? And he said, mom, I fell off a horse today, and she was confused. Because usually when someone falls off a horse, it's not really something to celebrate. And she was like, why are you so happy about that? And he said, well, because you always say it takes a lot of falls to make a great writer. And this was completely genuine. I mean, my dad was really young and that story just so deeply warms my heart and so may you take that gem into your own pouch of wisdom as you belly flap like a corgi off of a summer boat and walk boldly in the direction of your dreams, which also requires that we walk boldly in the direction of our failures. If you enjoyed this episode, I would be so honored if you would share it with a friend first and foremost. And if you would hit the subscribe button For extra credit, you could leave a review, but sharing with friends and subscribing ensures that you won't miss an episode and that we won't miss you. And you are so cherished and valued here as a listener. May your failures be fabulous, and I will see you in our next episode.

    24:21

    For coaching, classes, and community in creating a lifestyle of embodiment. Head to school of sensual Living dot com. There you'll find a free video series on how to reduce anxiety and intercept the stress response through powerful, confident, body language which. Head to school of sensualliving dot com slash confidence to watch your first video today.

Today, we raise a glass….

To our failures! 🍾

Like a snake shedding its skin, we too shed a version of ourselves that we have now outgrown or a mindset that no longer serves us.

Moments of failure may come with darkness, but they also bring a bright magic that cannot be denied.

In today’s episode you’ll discover:

  • How to muzzle the voice of criticism and shame, and awaken the voice of your inner Fairy Godmother in a Cheerleading Costume

  • A few of my personal stories of learning to frolic with failure - of which there are many!

  • How to use somatics and sensory delight to rewrite your story around failure, and rewire your mindset around risk

And with that, a toast…

To allowing failure to sculpt us into the most brave, beautiful, gorgeous, seasoned version of ourselves we came here to be.

 

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Mary Lofgren
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