April 8th, 2024
The truth is, there isn’t one. There is only the Grace and Compassion that you can have for yourself when you are feeling disappointed.
Whether this leads you to mull in disappointment, sitting with it until it dissipates and in a sense “overcome” this chagrin, the handbook to processing disappointment is a personal journey and there is no ONE way through it. Why? Because each of our individual ways are literally conditioned and forged by our own personal life paths, which we have chosen for ourselves.
I have spent the last three years healing, coexisting with trauma as I worked through it, while counting my daily blessings, with gratitude, prayer, meditation and awe. In that time, I have given myself a new found power to be just that, powerful, along with endowing myself with a deep yearning to live my soul’s purpose. I found in me the strength to pursue entrepreneurship and to be financially independent (a work in progress). I have discovered my inner strength and my distinct abundance given to me by the one and only Creator as this God Consciousness only creates in abundance. I have understood that What we speak, We are. And so I spent three years, altering my speech and inner dialogue and the conversations I had with myself in order to alter my mindset, and emerge like the damn great phoenix rising from the ashes. But one thing which I have been asked repeatedly to face and accept, as a consistent in my life, is disappointment. We all do, because it is real. Feeling disappointed is real. Many will look at you and say, after such a journey through self exploration and transformation, that the disappointment is the blessing. I say bullshit and yes. We cannot go through life only counting our blessings because disappointment is real. It hurts. It tests the psyche and it feeds the inadequacy complexes and all of the insecurities that we seek out on a healing journey, to heal in the first place. Disappointment is real and it often still feels like losing your favourite stuffed animal, as a child. It’s that space in your heart that sits between sadness and wanting to cry, and anger. It is that little circle of void. The wtf empty centre.
There is a myth that tells us, disappointment is caused by expectation. This is untrue. Disappointment is the end result of what it means to have Hope. Hence if we are hopeful beings, hopeful humans, and hopeful women, the other end of that spectrum will be disappointment. Call it what you want to serve the “holier-than-thou” personalities many of us humans seem to be adopting right now, but as a spiritual individual myself, I am calling it what it is, disappointment and feeling it, sucks.
So what DO we do when we feel it or experience it? We invite it in because it is as much an antenna for our energy and a compass guiding us towards our deep inner selves again while simultaneously re-routing you on a trail away from other things. What will be, will be. What is mine will be given to me. What is meant for me, will appear. All things I have worked through in my journey of self growth and transformation but what I feel is missing here, in these mantras of sorts is “what was presented to you initially, was intended for you.” It was meant for you and it did appear to you so by declaring that we should overcome disappointment through dismissing that what actually appeared was not mine, is absurd to me. What was intended for me, appeared.. it just may not have appeared how I wanted it to and for the reasons I believed it was meant to. What appears to us, which then disappoints us out of our hope and belief, of that manifestation, is often giving you an insight to something greater, within yourself. So yes, it was given to you. It did appear to you and oh yeas it was intended for you. It was intended for you to feel every single ounce of that experience. The highs and the lows.
For example, I recently had a conversation with a new friend of mine, of like values and like mindset. In a conversation we had a seed was planted. The seed had gathered so much momentum, that the universe was sending me and her signals all around as to how what we were working on was aligning with our souls purpose and mission. So we decided to start a project together. She then had an idea to invite another incredible woman along on the journey. We had our first meeting and it was so bloody empowering, so moving, so electric and we were all so moved by the power the triune of us created, that we all felt as though it was going to take on a life of its’ own and blow up! As I proceeded to fly on the wings of that energy, a week later the newly added individual, wrote us telling us she was pulling out of the project because she didn’t have time. Her hands were simply tied and yet some universal energy, some curiosity (which is a sure sign of your soul seeking something) had pulled her towards us, enough to meet with us, engage and be inspired. Something tempted her there in the first place. I didn’t respond to her withdrawal, other than to say we would always be there when she decided to join us again as we developed this project, and I looked forward to her joining in our conversations if she ever changed her mind. Simply put it was truly beautiful to just converse with women on a profound and spiritual level. She sent me a heart emoji and moved on. A few days after she pulled out, the original creator left me a voice message also pulling out, claiming she also had no time to dedicate to the project. Or in a simpler sense, for that fact, didn’t have time for 1.5 hour conversations every Friday of simply women supporting women. Time is precious to us all, but to mothers, manipulating it, is an elixir of liquid Gold.
I did not know what to respond to this voice message and in the words of great spiritual masters (long before Oprah) it is said, “If you don’t know what to do, do nothing” so that is what I did.
I did not respond but I was left alone, with the sinking of my heart, a silence and with the momentum and creative energy of this seed newly planted. As I processed the events it dawned on me how it is akin to finding out you are pregnant and then those around you changing their mind about the pregnancy but supporting you from a distance. How can you feel but sad and empty? And then, you start doubting yourself, are you making the right choice? Is the baby the right choice? And before you know it, This questioning leads one on an emotional train ride of suffering through doubt, confusion, and what ifs and of what am I doing? It resurfaces the insecurities, doubts, inadequacy issues and all sorts of other traumatic residue. Sometimes this is just a momentary lapse of consciousness back into our emotional deep where we hold trauma and other times it is like flicking a bug off your shoulder.
Ideas are seeds, they are cells of creativity of hope that are being impregnated and wanting to be nourished and birthed. When the hope of those seeds growing and flourishing is ‘crushed” there is nothing left, there could be nothing left there BUT disappointment. So disappointment doesn’t come from expectation but rather from hope, from momentous energy that is creating something so grand and positive in you, it feels like it’s being channeled.. and then trying to spin it back into its vortex of nothingness, is the black hole. That hopeful and creative energy must go somewhere and even IF it is going to another project that you have started working towards, it has to transmute, because this is what it can only do. When energy transmutes, it is different, it becomes different. It takes on a different form and so the energy of three to one is decreased, and thus the disappointment and this black hole contain this excess of energy, and it is THAT energy that one is left with to process, and to alchemize. How does this happen? Often through emotions of …yes you guessed it….sadness, disappointment and possibly even at times annoyance, displeasure and hostility.
Now how long this feeling will last of course, is contingent upon how much we wish to have it eat us up before plunging into those depths of former bad self-talk, insecurities and inadequacies. However even if we fall deep to the bottom of the ocean with those thoughts, the lesson is once again being taught.
What have I not learned the first few times this happened? You ask the Universe.
Well the lessons are many. Including the actual act of grace and compassion for yourself during disappointment. It will never be consistent. Why? Because disappointment will strike us differently each time it happens. Why? Because what we have invested into each hope varies and so each disappointment will have a journey through us, all on their own.
What did I learn in these most recent heartbreaking disappointments?
Well I wanted to fall to a victim state, so I did. I allowed myself the night to “grieve” that hope, the loss of that energy. Without grieving anything, we cannot process or move on. The grieving process for me however, meant surrendering to all of my emotion and crying for a large part of the night, while curled up on the sofa with “oh woe is me, nothing ever works out. I’m destined to live a life of misery.” Then the crying stopped. It no longer felt right to sit in that space of feeding my demons, the ones I worked so hard on over the last three years to eliminate from my psyche and inner dialogue. These words felt false and as much as I wanted so sit there and believe they were INDEED true, in essence they were not. They no longer aligned. The voice from above was guiding me to keep moving forward, however exhausted I felt.
I was then being asked to revisit the disappointments I had experienced all on this particular day. And to my discovery the first one, was a simple, postponement. I had been refused by a lender for my business but what indeed they had asked of me, was if I altered my start up costs, they would reconsider. Oh but how I wanted to go down that stairwell of agonizing pain and refusal based on my previous life experiences of disappointment. The lenders response was not a negative response but my body and mind, because of past conditioning and because of the hope I held for a YES, wanted to feel like this statement was me, on a a direct shuttle to the bottom of the pit. So Instead of sitting on this shuttle, it taking me slowly towards the deep, I drove it down there. I got in that drivers seat and I said “let’s go.” But I stopped half way, got out and swam back to the surface.
The second disappointment was the pulling out of these two incredibly powerful women in a new project that was materializing. It had been inspired through a conversation I had had with the common denominator of the group. I had hopped on board voluntarily so when a few days later, they both pulled out, telling me they didn’t have room on their plates for anything else, I was left mortified. (This is a conversation for later and as much as women often do fill their plates, we often sacrifice what could precisely be the very thing we need to keep, and that is what has formerly been known, by earlier generations as the “knitting circles”). I responded with “Well perhaps don’t look at it as something being added to your plate, but perhaps the gravy being poured on top.“ Because even here, perception ( a conversation for another time) is everything! And if there is anything I have learned in my spiritual journey, it is that time is infinite and how we approach our relationship to it, is what limits or extends the amount of time we have. Time is not linear. We, mankind have made it linear. (This is also a conversation for another time.)
Retrospectively, in revisiting the disappointments, I came to realize that one of the reasons I took the refusal letter of the lender so personal, is because of my own former belief in my own financial capacity. I felt I was radiating financial inadequacy and he must have “sensed” that. When in fact all he wanted to know is how not to consider my business a risk, and for me to alter my start up costs, again. (On a side note, yes this would have been the fourth time I’d be asked to revise my costs.)
Was it a refusal? Yes and No. It was a postponement, deferral. Was it hopeful? Yes Did I have the energy to want to do this again? No. Was I going to do it again? Yes, but not today. I would leave the alchemizing of production and problem solving for the day after when my head was clear and I had processed all of my grief of disappointment.
THE ART OF OVERCOMING DISAPPOINTMENT: LESSON 2
. ~Anita Menotti
© Anita Menotti The Women We Become