Beyond Failure…and Success
Photo by Jaclyn Chessen.
I'm back from my first ever month-long sabbatical—and it was all the things. Magical, inspiring, nourishing, unexpected, challenging, tender, and so much more. If you'd like a glimpse of the celebration, I shared a little here.
Today I want to talk about what happened the moment we landed home—and what it revealed about my relationship to success.
The Mind Had A Backlog
I didn't anticipate the onslaught.
As soon as we touched down, it was as if the mind had spent four weeks storing up every should, criticism, and judgment it had been waiting to deliver—and it let them all out at once.
You're behind.
Unpack as quickly as possible and get back to work.
This trip was expensive. You need to make up for that now.
You haven't made money in almost four weeks—get on it NOW.
People have forgotten about you.
Don't even get me started on your waistline.
And on and on.
The contrast from the slower pace of Italy to suddenly a racing inner machine was destabilizing. I just wanted the noise to stop.
So at first, I followed the instructions. I unpacked. I caught up on emails.
That didn't relieve the pressure. The voice only got louder.
The "good" news was that my body was exhausted—jet lag and all—so I didn't have the capacity to fully comply with the mental machine's demands. The "bad" news was that I was feeling the tension of those demands in my body, which didn't exactly help on the relaxation front.
I tried soothing myself with logic. Technically, I'm not back to work until July 15th. I set myself up to return slowly. I tried counting the ways I'd been productive. I tried watching Love Island (the youngins raved about it in Italy).
Basically, I tried everything except meeting the experience directly.
To be fair, I did try that too—but the mind was just too strong. It felt like I'd lost fluency in a language I knew three weeks before. And that only made me feel worse.
The Third Morning
Finally, on the third morning, in meditation, I found enough ground to drop under the thinking—into the body.
And I had a profound insight.
I saw the story of failure. That's what had been taking root. That's what the mind was trying so hard to protect me from.
I saw how that story was being generated by a single, narrow metric: money. Until I made more money—never a specific amount, just more—I was a failure. The need to feel successful was so strong. I was meeting my attachment to it—the misunderstanding that success was what made me worthy. What kept me safe.
And then I thought: if success is what I need to feel, I could simply change the metric. After all, I had just returned from a month in Italy. Surely that qualified?
I felt the relief of that reframe. And I've used that move before—widening the view, shifting the metric, redirecting attention toward what's already working. It can be genuinely useful.
But what was so clear this time was that even that was a trap. A more sophisticated form of management. The intellect using its considerable skills to keep an illusory identity intact.
The identity of a successful person.
The Lime Tree
My eyes landed on the lime tree in our backyard. It's a beautiful, robust tree—the one that seems to attract more butterflies than any other in the yard.
It doesn't produce any fruit.
So is it a failure?
Of course not. That tree is simply treeing. Being. No pressure to be anything other than the life force and expression that it is.
In that moment, the need to be a successful person—the attachment to that as the source of my safety—completely dissolved.
Without that story, it's impossible to fail. Without that identity, I too get to simply be. I get to human. And I have a far higher likelihood of humaning well—because I'm connected to that pure life force, not the mind's distorted conditions and demands.
The Path Of Freedom
This is how it tends to move, in my experience:
At first, we're caught in the distorted story and we don't even know it. Then, at some point, we begin to feel the distortion—a tension in the body, a sense that something is off, the quiet knowing that what we're believing isn't quite true. We try to manage the experience and find some relief there. But the lasting peace comes when the story itself dissolves.
We aren't in charge of what we see or when we see it. I've lived with the failure story for most of my life. I've glimpsed what was underneath it before. But I hadn't seen the attachment to success as a source of safety—not like this. Not with this kind of clarity.
And that clarity felt radical. Because wanting to be a success, not wanting to be a failure—these are so culturally expected, so deeply normalized, that we rarely stop to question them.
What is success, really?
Why does it feel so essential?
Is it actually what makes me worthy—or safe?
And who is the "me" that needs it?
These questions aren't meant to destabilize. They're an invitation into a different way of seeing. A shift in consciousness that removes the pressure to be anything other than what's here, right now. Where the foundation is trust—and a growing recognition of the kindness of reality, as opposed to the ego's fearful defenses.
This is the work I love most.
Something New
Which brings me to something I've just created.
The Apprenticeship is a year-long mentorship for coaches and practitioners who are ready to build their practice from this place—the inside out. Not just better strategy. Not just more clients. But the kind of freedom that comes when the conditioning underneath your business starts to become visible. When you stop outsourcing your worth to your results, and start building from genuine groundedness instead.
It's intimate by design—limited to three people at a time. Each one chosen through a conversation, not an application.
If you're curious, you can discover more here.
With lots of love,
Amber
