Never Give Up
Even if you don’t have an exact destination in mind, having goals is essential in life. Well-thought-out goals will at least point you in the right direction. Without a game plan, you’d be like a headless chicken, blown about by windy old vata dosha.
However, if you are living with ADHD, you’ve probably set billions of goals that you’ve not achieved and you’ve let yourself down on more than one occasion! You might find that you keep doing the same unwanted and unhelpful things. You let yourself down.
But what you do when you find yourself visiting square one (AGAIN) makes the difference.
The Skillful Choice - Grace, compassion, and self-forgiving
It’s not how often you fail; it’s how skillful you can become at experiencing square one as the ultimate classroom. Each “mini-failure” is an opportunity to learn something new about what led you to abandon yourself. If you use your energy for compassionate inquiry and exploration, the moments of failure become transformative grist for the mill. Your newfound insights will inch you a little closer to your freedom - or moksha as it is called in Sanskrit.
The Unskillful Choice- Intolerance, fury, and self-sabotaging
Or you can use it as an opportunity to beat yourself up. You could remind yourself that you’ve made the same mistake a million times before, and you’ll never change.
If you have ADHD, chances are your healing journey will be anything but linear and you may feel deflated and demoralized if you keep returning to what feels like square one. If you buy into the belief that being back at square one means you are a failure, you risk fulfilling that prophecy and choosing a downward-spiralling path.
On the other hand, if you see square one as a turning point, an opportunity to learn and grow, things can change.
Living with ADHD is hard. But no matter how often we mess up, the point of power is embracing square one as a power spot rather than a place of shame and failure.
Perfection is elusive, square one is a useless construct, and every successful journey begins when we arrive at where we started and know the place for the first time.