How to Heal (and Even Benefit) from a Setback or Failure in Your Art Practice: Inspired by Buddhist Teachings
Failure Comes To Us All
by Thea Fiore-Bloom, Ph.D.

Many authors and coaches tell creatives we need to get good at failure.
We must be “resilient” and “get back on the horse.”
Okay, I get that.
I mean, all experienced artists know their art practice only evolves if they can allow themselves to experiment, bomb, and recover on a regular basis.
But the thing is, some of our failures are doozies; they can leave us debilitated and doubting our calling.
And I don’t hear many experts telling us what we can actually do that will motivate us to pick those gravel bits out from our face, get up, and move forward.
(For my post on how to recover from a harsh art critique, go here.)
I recently discovered one way to recover from creative failure.
And my hope is that if I share it with you, it may help you deal better with your own face-down gravel drags.
The best way to explain my odd recovery process is by giving you an embarrassing example of an epic fail from my art life.

This story involves one wise guide, two-part epoxy, and three tenets from Buddhism.
Ready?
My Failure Story of Coming Unglued
I make these unusual, Joseph Cornell-like compositions inside vintage cigar boxes.
They’re based on myth and dream symbolism. They often contain tiny dollhouse antiques. I paint, wallpaper, sand, and age each piece.
I avoided selling my art for years because I harbored a secret fear.
A fear that did indeed come to pass.
Despite my best intentions, some bit or bob managed to come loose from my artwork during shipping.

My first customer wasn’t mad, she just let me know something to the effect of:
“Hey Thea, love the box, one of the antique metal chickens on top flew the coop—it fell off during shipping.”
I was flooded with embarrassment.
Okay, I reasoned to myself, I messed up, I stumbled, this is why I shouldn’t charge much for these boxes, I’ll get back up, buy better glue, and I won’t let this ever happen again.
I sold another box treated with the new glue. I shipped it.
The customer gave me a glowing review on Etsy but wrote me a private note that casually mentioned how she had to whip out her own glue gun to stick a miniature boat back in place.
Because I was new to selling my work (or maybe because I’m both Italian and Jewish), the guilt was off the charts this time.

Boats and chickens falling off equaled shoddy craftsmanship which in my eyes equaled — bad artist.
Despite my boyfriend’s protests, instead of being compassionate with myself and looking at the failure as a learning opportunity, I decided to give up selling my art and stick to writing.
But soon, I missed the thrill of making and even selling art.
Failure and Maitri Meditation
One day I did what I thought was going to be a ho-hum Maitri meditation (which is a meditation about making friends with yourself when you’re in pain).
I was surprised to feel compassion for myself and my failure welling up inside me.
And throughout the meditation, this compassion grew. It allowed me to take my focus off failing and put it back on why I started making the boxes in the first place — for the love of it.
I also began remembering many affirming things I was told about my boxes (even if they did suffer from “stray chicken syndrome”.)
Suddenly I was driven to get off my butt mid-meditation, grab my laptop and start googling crazy queries like, “Why things fall off during shipping even when well glued?”
The Google Gods quickly whisked me to Canada, specifically to the website of gifted painter Laura den Hertog, who (with her sister Karen) had put together four free videos on how to ship your work, so it never gets damaged.
I learned a lot about external packaging from the videos but nothing about internal gluing.
Desperate, I threw a hail mary pass and sent an email to Den Hertog via her contact form to see if she had any answers to my glue problems.

Caveman Gets Shown a Bic Lighter
Den Hertog wrote back in 2 hours.
She had even popped over to my Etsy site and thought that the only glue that would survive shipping the kinds of things I was making was two-part epoxy.
(It’s the glue you mix together and have three minutes to work with before it adheres all your tools permanently to your counter.)
A curtain parted in my brain.
I was like a caveman being shown a Bic lighter for the first time.
Being the kind of gal who buys things she doesn’t yet need at hardware stores, I had some two-part epoxy in my house.
I ran downstairs, dug it out from under a sink, and clutched it to my chest; radiant with the hope I might become a real grown-up artist again.
With Hertog’s encouragement, I proceeded to rip all the objects out of my boxes, reglue them with the 2 part epoxy and repair the scars that surgery left behind.
Miraculously, another box sold a few weeks later.
I shipped it and held my breath.
The result?
I received my best 5-star review yet, and no complaints about glue issues. I even had the guts to email the client and ask if there was any “chicken-fall-off syndrome.”

Nope.
Post-Glue-Gate Failure
After what I now refer to as “Glue-Gate,” my self-esteem slowly began to rise along with my prices.
So thanks to my failure and the wisdom of a more experienced artist, I no longer have as big a coronary as I used to when I got an Etsy notification that someone has kindly bought one of my boxes.
How about we take a quick look at four steps (inspired by Buddhism) that you can take if you need support after you feel you’ve failed?
Four Steps To Recovering from a Creative Setback or Failure
1st Post-Failure Recovery Step – Acknowledge the Suffering
Acknowledge the failure hurt.
The first noble truth of Buddhism is the truth of suffering.
The Buddha taught that life on earth is painful as well as beautiful.
It’s important to remember that you experienced failure while attempting to bring to life something your soul was urging you to try.
Now that’s commendable, so show yourself compassion.

2nd Post-Failure Recovery Step – Show Yourself Compassion
The meditation I was doing that led to my post-failure breakthrough is called Maitri or Loving Kindness meditation, popularized in the west by Vietnamese meditation master Thích Nhất Hạnh.
(You can learn more about Han and the philosophy of Maitri here).
Remember the role of compassion in my failure story?
It opened a blocked path in my mind so I could remember that I love making art — no matter who is watching.
And so do you.
3rd Post-Failure Recovery Step: Put Your Failure in Perspective
Everybody Fails – Especially Successful Artists
Self-compassion allows us to see all artists fail, especially successful ones.
One thing I remembered during my meditation that helped me recover was a story a curator once whispered to me when I used to work at the Art Institute in Chicago.
He looked around to make sure the coast was clear before telling me that artist Julian Schnabel had a specially certified “plate crew” that went jetting about the globe.
Their only job?
To glue back all the fallen crockery that regularly crashed down and broke onto posh museum floors from Schnabel’s zillion-dollar “plate paintings.”
My point is creative setbacks and failures happen to everyone, but whether we grow stronger from them depends if you can do two things:
1. Mentally re-frame the failure and put it in the proper perspective.
2. Then, find a solution.

4th Post-Failure Recovery Step – Stay With the Problem
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
— Albert Einstein
Super successful artists often are no more brilliant than we are, but they usually are more persistent. They tend to stay with their creative problems longer.

Take Georgia O’Keeffe, for example. Early on in her painting life, O’Keeffe was disappointed with her combinations of color with form in her oil painting. She saw them as failures.
But instead of throwing in the towel, she persisted till she found her solution.
She arrived at her solution by rigorously restricting herself to using just black charcoal on white paper for months, only adding back one color at a time as she felt she understood the role of the previous color in her work.
O’Keeffe believed in herself and her work enough to stay with her problem, and so can we.
Pema Chodron on Failure
As beloved, humorous Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron would say, it’s just a matter of “befriending our obstacles.“

So to sum it all up, in order to fail and rise up stronger, you may want to:
- Acknowledge the pain or humiliation you feel.
- Feel compassion for yourself.
- Remember, all great creatives fail early and often.
- Stay with the problem longer than feels comfortable to find your solution.
Now go make trouble more art.
“Failure is always hurtful, humiliating, and embarrassing, but it’s the price to pay for daring to get what we want out of life.” — Fabian Duttner
_____________________________
Have you ever had a failure or major setback in your creative practice?
Would you like to be more compassionate with yourself?
What has helped you get back up?

Let us know in the comments at the end of the page.
You might like these other Charmed Studio posts:
Bye-Bye, Facebook: How Artists Can Succeed Without Social Media
Letting Go of Approval: A Story for Artists (That Involves Underwear)
How to Feel Better When Someone Unsubscribes
Why You Need a Feel Good File: The Emotional Rescue Tool No Creative Should Be Without
Transcending a Troll: O’Keeffe Shows Us a Way Out
Van Gogh Probably Didn’t Kill Himself
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If you’ve never had the pleasure of hearing Pema Chodron speak, play this short video.
She will make you laugh and make you think.
Thank you for sharing this story thea it is encouraging to hear such stories that make clear that at the beginning it is hard to figure things out but it eventually gets better. And one should not give up so fast 🙂
Scharle
All new projects are daunting at first, but slowly we make our way up the mountain. Thanks Scharle. Best of luck with the book you and your mom are almost finished with, how exciting!
This was wonderful! Self-compassion is the key to almost everything in life don’t you think? It sounds so easy but it seems to be so hard. Thank you so much for the links to the meditations.
Yes self compassion is the key staying sane and open-hearted and evolving. Thanks so much for reading and taking the time to tell me you could relate. You always make a writer’s day. 🙂
I like the “Glue Gate” analogy. I’m constantly trying crazy creative experiments and failing. But sometimes I do win. You never know until you try. Great article Thea!
Kevin I am delighted that you liked “Glue Gate”, laughing at my life always helps me get up and go on. And thanks for letting me know that you are constantly trying crazy creative experiments and failing, and occasionally succeeding that is heartening and inspirational to me.
Thanks a lot, Thea! Before writing my piece today I was wondering how you were. Since your blog is one of the few I follow.
Great advice! I think it will be useful for me in my etsy adventure. There will surely be more and less popular products. And some that will probably be dear only to me.
What I want to take away from this post – is to be kind to myself. When you are making art and not selling it, the pain is not that noticeable. So, my family does not like it, but I love the result. And some of my friends do too.
But actually going into the outside world and taking the risk – it’s scary. But I am prepared to take the risk since only in this case I can succeed in getting my art/craft into other people’s hands. I am no longer satisfied with creating and not sharing the results. And I don’t like stuff piling at home. 🙂
Yes putting your work out into the world is terrifying but usually eventually exhilarating. Be patient with Etsy, it takes a while. I have interviewed many artists who didn’t make their first sale for 8 months or so. In the beginning, it is a lot of hard work and experimentation, but then you find your niche and your people. I think your books and bookmark theme will draw in book lovers. Good luck!
Love your post Thea, and appreciate your insight. Its too easy to slip into the darkness when we fail. But really its not so scary after all!
Thank you for writing in Marjie, it means a lot to me. You’re right, it sure feels impossible at first, but it’s not so scary after all, especially if we realize we are all in the same boat. 🙂
Well this came at a good time. I’m actually picking myself up off the floor rather nicely lately. But now I want to get some 2 part epoxy, dig out those cigar boxes I collected to make cigar box guitars and start making things! I won’t, though — I’m going to STAY WITH MY PROBLEMS LONGER! But that epoxy is tugging at me…. go away…. pick up a paintbrush… focus focus focus!
OOOOh, now you have me coming down with a case of cigar box envy… would love to see images of your favorite ones, email me some photos when you have a chance, sadly you can’t leave an image in WordPress comments.Yes, stay on the floor a bit longer, keep staying with your problem- great job. And remember we are all on the floor — just at different times.
Wow…it’s a great trick to be able to take a failure and turn it into something so much bigger and better. Sage advice as always Thea. I can’t even count the failures I’ve had that I simply let lie, but the ones I overcame, that turned out to have very sparkly silver linings turned into life lessons. Looking for solutions is so key…just like you and Pema Chodrom said. Thank you.
PS: “Caveman gets shown a bic lighter” is possibly the best line you ever wrote. Cracked me right up.
PPS: So grateful the Google Gods threw us together that day!
Cheers,
Laura
Thank you Laura. I used to edit out lines like “Caveman gets shown a bic lighter.” But then I realized it is okay to write how I actually talk, and that is alright just to be oneself on the page. It’s still scary to actually do though, so thanks for the reinforcement.
great post, thea….need these reminders! thank-you…
Hey Zoe,
You are so welcome. Nice to see you on the comments page, thanks so much for taking the time. Hope your beautiful work is going well.
Thea