Falling Down and Getting Up
Discovering Your Inner Resilience and Strength

ST MARTIN'S ESSENTIAL BOOKS, Sept 5, 2023

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BOOK DESCRIPTION

Mark Nepo is a master teacher who has been convening circles and guiding retreats for fifty years all over the world.  Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Awakening has been called "one of the finest spiritual guides of our time," "a consummate storyteller," and "an eloquent spiritual teacher." His many books have been translated into more than twenty languages.  Drawn from his many years of teaching, this book explores the perennial practices and choice-points we all face such as surviving and thriving, managing risk and enhancing risk, opening and closing, giving and receiving, living a balance between solitude and community, enlarging our sense of things when pain and fear make us small, and the never-ending practice of course-correcting and tuning as we go. 

Falling Down and Getting Up explores the archetypal rhythm that is inherent to every life in every stage of its growth.  While no one likes to fall down, no one is exempt from this part of the human journey.  From a longer and deeper perspective, falling down and getting up is the inevitable rhythm of transformation.  In fact, each step we take forms a dance of falling down and getting up.  This book focuses on the individual's transformative journey with all its ups and downs and twists and turns.  In essence, how do we learn the dance of falling down and getting up?

Mark's teaching is committed to introducing his students and readers to their own gifts and wisdom.  If you haven't had the chance to sit in one his magical circles, this book is the next best thing.

"The Hindu Upanishads offer the image of how a caterpillar bunches up before moving forward as a symbol of this kind of growth.  Similarly, a nurse, who prompted me to get up and walk immediately after surgery, announced, "Two steps forward, one step back!" This is the rhythm of life we are asked to accept in order to live.  Falling Down and Getting Up explores these timeless rhythms and the essential skills needed to fully live our lives."

EXCERPTS

FROM THE CHAPTER RESILIENCE AND PRAYER

Somehow, when I face what is mine to face and empty myself of all that is agitating me, I go clear like a lake after a storm.  It is then that I can see through to the bottom of what is me, only to see that I share that bottom with all other beings.  When I face my heartache and reach its bottom, there is the bottom of all heartache which is both comforting and renewing.

When we can be completely authentic, resilience is the flow of strength that comes to us from everything that is not us.  Because when being ourselves to the bottom of our personality, we trip into the well of all personality.  When giving all our care to what is before us, we trip into the well of all love.  When diving into the depth of our soul, we also swim in the depth of all being.  Once opened that deeply, summoning and marshalling what is dormant in us to face the situation at hand empowers our fortitude.

The deeper reward for inhabiting our full humanity is that the Universal Life-Force floods us with enlivened capacity.  Just as you must plug in a lamp to access electricity, our presence and full humanity are required as a way to "plug in" to the Universal Life-Force that flows through all things.  When holding nothing back and being true, we are lifted by the healing forces of life and illuminated.  In just this way, resilience fills us with strength from everything that is not us, when we can be thoroughly who we are.

Like it or not, we are challenged to cooperate with the forces of life as they shape us.  One way we do this is to speak from our heart.  Because speaking from our heart makes us strong enough to endure the erosion of suffering.  Speaking from our heart keeps us strong by clearing the inlet we call soul of unprocessed experience.  This thoroughness of being and congruence of relationship between us and other life opens us to a deeper, more enduring form of resilience, through which the core of our being opens to the core of all being, making us for the moment stronger than we are.

FROM THE CHAPTER NO ONE IS WATCHING

It took almost dying for me to realize that no one is watching.  This doesn't mean we are alone but that no one is out of view judging us.  From an early age, we are taught by parents, family, society, and various traditions that our actions are being judged.  If we fail or come up wanting, we are censured by others to some form of living hell.  Once we've internalized the watcher, we carry this living hell inside our minds.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges has a poem called "The Watcher" in which he laments his hell for never being free of this inner critic.  Once a pattern of criticism is knit in our mind, the watcher voice can appear as shame, guilt, regret, or perfectionism.  Yet while we are always accountable for our actions in the world, we are not under the watch of some moral tribunal everywhere we go.  For true responsibility comes solely from the hard work of actual relationship, the authentic push and pull between honest, caring souls.

The struggle to free ourselves of the watcher is part of our initiation into the realm of a true self.  At first, we are trained to seek the approval of these voices in order to comply with the expectations of others.  However, when governed by the watcher, our entire perceptual field is misguided.  For appeasing these voices is not where lasting peace comes from.  In time, only great love and great suffering can silence and even break the grip of the watcher until we are left with a bareness of being that is irreducible.

FROM THE CHAPTER TRYING TO WALK GENTLY

In my forties, after growing up with an angry mother, and after two marriages in which I kept missing what was true, Susan came along and held my face, fully and gently, as if I were a surprising flower.  Till that moment, I hadn't realized that no one had ever held my face.  My life was cracked open that day by her tenderness.

So, we can be broken open by love.  It isn't just the accidents and avalanches that change us.  The whisper of beauty holds a power unmatched in its capacity to open even the oldest shell.  And the whisper of truth is just as transforming.

I was eight when my grandmother brought me to her on the steps of her basement in Brooklyn.  She held me firmly, as if the world were teetering and her deep immigrant eyes said that she'd never let me go.  It is a steadiness I have carried in my heart for seventy years.

What I'm trying to say, in yet another way, is that we each have to find that corridor of aliveness that can carry us through the turbulence of life on Earth.  And it's the unexpected kindness and strength of those along the way who, with the slightest nudge, can save our lives.  Of course, we seldom know if we've made such a difference.  Though, in time, we are humbled to realize when someone has saved us in this way.

Perhaps the most insidious modern illness is the underside of self-reliance that has us believe that we can make it alone.  The truth is that in resisting help, we often break things more quickly than we can put them together.

I remember falling hard on our yellow lab's foot when she was five.  My heel splintered her toe.  I felt awful as she limped over to lick my face.  She had to have surgery, which gave her arthritis.  I never forgave myself.  How she hurt made me walk lightly.  I think this was her gift to me.  I still try to walk gently - even on leaves - so I might break as little as possible on my way. 

It made me understand that everything is a teacher, if we let it in.  The wind teaches the hole in the fence what it was made for.  And experience teaches the hole in our heart what we are made for.

When I was a boy, a friend of my father caught an eel, killed it, and went to fry it in a pan.  I was horrified to see it still twitch after it had died.  But since, I've come to see that what lives in us refuses to die, no matter what is done to us.  When allowed to surface, that pulse permeates everything as kindness and tenderness.  It's how a fist becomes an open palm.  How the dissipation of anger comes full circle to become a soft embrace.  And how every flower is coaxed to blossom by the presence of light and warmth.

Under all the wreckage and ruin, the very pulse of life waits to spark and spread.  At times, we're blessed to ride it like a comet of Spirit, which everyone feels, but which no one can see.

Reviews

Amid this luminous new collection of wisdom, Mark Nepo offers one of the most robust and tender teachings on grief I have come across.  In Mark's hands, pain becomes poetry, and enlarges our hearts enough to carry what we may have thought we couldn't.
— Mirabai Starr, author of Caravan of No Despair and Wild Mercy

Mark Nepo's words have been a friend by my side for as long as I can remember.  Mark uses language to weave us into the web of life, so we feel held, seen, and a part of something beautiful.  He has done it yet again with Falling Down and Getting Up.  Mark has travelled into the depths of what it means to be human and brought back this book for all of us.  When you fall, and you will because we all do, this book will be an outstretched hand helping you to stand again, and take the next step.
— Beth Kempton, author of Wabi Sabi: Japanese wisdom for a perfectly imperfect life

Mark Nepo has led workshops at Omega Institute for many years.  His classes are like a gathering of travelers at an oasis, a nourishing stop on a long journey.  Now, in this treasure of a book, we all get the chance to experience the magic Mark creates - the learning, the beauty, the healing.  As Mark says, "We need each other to heal one more time than we are broken." This new book is sublime.
— Elizabeth Lesser, co-founder of Omega Institute, and author of Broken Open and Cassandra Speaks

Mark Nepo returns.  Hallelujah! Our ever-enfolding, always-growing, supremely astute sage of our times sings to us once again and I couldn't be happier! Through the comforting beauty of Falling Down and Getting Up, I felt understood, awakened, and expanded, not from fantasy but from experiencing, through his words, the deeper majesty in my everyday life.  The majesty that is in all of our lives.  This will be yet another of his masterpieces I will return to, again and again, to luxuriate in his exquisite expression.  You'll want to clutch this one close to your heart, to make it a part of you.  What a gift!
— Kris Ferraro, author of Your Difference is Your Strength

Once more, Nepo hits the perfect note that is needed in these most challenging times.  It's easy to open one's heart to his writings, for all this has a ring of deep truth.  Nepo gives wind to our sails as we navigate the waters of falling down and getting up.  I recommend this book with unreserved enthusiasm.
— Justine Willis Toms, co-founder and host of New Dimensions Radio, and author of Small Pleasures: Finding Grace in a Chaotic World

In Falling Down and Getting Up, Mark Nepo shares a lifetime of hard-earned wisdom through his moving, heart-warming vignettes that are like songs for the soul taking us home to ourselves.  Like a jazz virtuoso, Mark weaves his poetry and teachings to move gently, yet persistently, into your blood and bones as he helps us move from the fear of pain and suffering to the rebirth of ever getting back up as we learn and grow together.  I hope you will find a way to read this book slowly, deeply, and let it nourish you with its gentle, wise and heart-felt guidance.
— Michael Brant DeMaria, Ph.D., 4-time Grammy nominated Recording Artist and author of When All Is Lost

Drawn from Mark Nepo's many years of teaching, this book offers a transformative journey that helps us to connect with and explore the eternal part of ourselves - our spiritual nature, our essence.  Falling down is part of the human journey, but Mark shows us how it can become a path of spiritual transformation.  In this book, Mark unfolds the courage that can befriend us in learning the dance of falling down and getting up with grace.
— Baptist de Pape, author of the book and the film The Power of the Heart

A CONVERSATION WITH MARK ABOUT HIS NEW BOOK OF POETRY, THE HALF-LIFE OF ANGELS: THREE BOOKS OF POEMS

QUESTION: What led you to write this book?
RESPONSE: : I am deeply grateful to my publisher and editor, Joel Fotinos, whose gentle insistence opened me to the life of this book.  Joel kept being drawn to my work as a teacher and finally asked, "What kind of book would you write for those who are unable to participate in one of your teaching circles? What kind of journey would come closest?" What an invitation! From that moment, this book was born.  And, like my other books, it quickly became my teacher. 

QUESTION: What does this book explore?
RESPONSE: : Drawn from my many years of teaching, this book explores the perennial practices and choice-points we all face such as surviving and thriving, managing risk and enhancing risk, opening and closing, giving and receiving, living a balance between solitude and community, enlarging our sense of things when pain and fear make us small, and the never-ending practice of course-correcting and tuning as we go.  My teaching is committed to introducing students and readers to their own gifts and wisdom.  If you haven't had the chance to journey with me in person, I hope this book will be the next best thing.

QUESTION: What do you mean by the title, Falling Down and Getting Up?
RESPONSE: : When medieval monks were asked how they practiced their faith, they said, "By falling down and getting up." This is the human journey from which no one is exempt.  We are constantly challenged to get up one more time than we fall, to open one more time than we close, and to put things together one more time than we take them apart.  The Japanese proverb, Nanakorobi yaoki, puts it this way, "Fall down seven times, stand up eight." This rhythm between fragility and resilience informs the practices that keep us human.  Yet no one can give these practices to you.  Each of us must discover and inhabit them for ourselves.  The Hindu Upanishads offer the image of how a caterpillar bunches up before moving forward as a symbol of this kind of growth.  Similarly, a nurse, who prompted me to get up and walk immediately after surgery, announced, "Two steps forward, one step back!" This is the rhythm of life we are asked to accept in order to live.  Falling Down and Getting Up explores these timeless rhythms and the essential skills needed to fully live our lives.

QUESTION: The center section of the book explores what you call "The Deeper Teachers" of fear, pain, and grief. Can you explain this a bit more?
RESPONSE: : Eventually, everyone will be dropped into the depth of life.  It may happen because of some life-threatening illness or a sudden loss or from being loved unconditionally for the first time or by the sudden beauty of grace.  But once broken open, the deeper, relational journey begins by which we truly know that we are alive.

Along the way, we all experience fear, pain, and grief.  As human beings, we all suffer the tendency to inflate and deflate our sense of self and the nature of our experience.  And so, much of our spiritual practice centers on learning how to see things as they are.  While this can help us move through fear and pain, grief is another matter.  Regardless of what we may lose that is dear, such a ripping away is life-altering and there is no going back.  These deeper teachers will all find us in time.  Our challenge has always been to help each other face what is ours to face, so we can be as alive as possible for as long as possible in the tender journey we call love.

This book aims to uncover and personalize pathways that allow us to right-size our pain and fear in our journey to be fully here.  And to help us move with our grief from the old world to the new in all that life unearths in us.  To be sure, fear, pain, and grief are inevitable teachers, and together, we must try to understand their language and their lessons.

QUESTION: You've written so many books through the years.  Can you point to some of the life lessons you've discovered that mean the most to you?
RESPONSE: : Once on the other side of my cancer journey, I realized that the things we suffer and the things we love provide us with an Inner Curriculum.  When we least expect it, it is working with what we're given while staying close to what we love that is a constant teacher.

Some of the thresholds I have been drawn to learn from and speak to over the years include:

• awakening to the paradox and true gifts of suffering,
• seeing obstacles as teachers,
• having the life of poetry and the poetry of life continue to blur,
• understanding creativity as an expressive form of healing,
• exchanging the want to be great for the great chance to be,
• understanding how giving attention is more essential than getting attention,
• learning from the acceptance of our limitations,
• and awakening to how we need each other to be complete and useful.

QUESTION: In an early chapter, you talk about the difference between healing and justice. What are you suggesting here?
RESPONSE: : In truth, healing often begins by removing what's in the way within ourselves, while justice often begins by removing what's in the way between us.  The ever-present question, for a Spiritual Warrior, is: What can each of us do, now, to inhabit this twin practice: to serve healing within us by clearing confusion and removing what's in the way inside us, and to serve justice by clearing confusion and removing what's in the way between us?

These are lifelong practices worth dedicating ourselves to.  Each of us can stay devoted to being a Spiritual Warrior by learning:

• how to take off all coverings to become one's true self as time unfolds,
• how to serve healing within us by clearing confusion and removing what's in the way inside us,
• and how to serve justice by clearing confusion and removing what's in the way between us.

QUESTION: What is your hope for anyone engaging with this book?
RESPONSE: : My hope is that this book will help you befriend your fear, pain, and grief and not be crippled by them.  My hope is that you will discover one or two specific ways to move forward in your journey toward a blessed and authentic life.  My hope is that the perennial choice-points and practices explored here will help get up one more time than you fall.