Getting Back Up After You’ve Been Brought to Your Knees | Mark Nepo

Good Life Project

In this profound conversation, poet and spiritual teacher Mark Nepo discusses the necessity of learning how to 'fall down' in order to grow.

Key takeaways

• Adversity is an inevitable rhythm of life, much like the martial arts practice of learning to fall (ukemi).
• The concept of 'no one is watching' serves as a liberation from the social conditioning and the 'watcher' in our heads.

Main topics

• Navigating cancer and physical adversity
• The psychology of grief and loss

Notable quotes

Life is not from here to there, but from in to out.

Conclusion

The episode provides a transformative framework for viewing life's ine

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) We are all going to fall down at some point in our lives, sometimes in small ways, other times in unbearable, seemingly devastating ways. The real question is how do we get up without becoming smaller or making things harder or getting more jaded and feeling alone? For that, we turn to acclaimed teacher, poet, and New York Times bestselling author of dozens of books, Mark Nepo. Drawing from his own cancer journey and study of spiritual traditions over many decades, Mark reframes the moments we try to avoid most. He explains why resistance often makes pain worse, why no one is watching is more liberating than it actually sounds, and how the body, the heart, and the spirit all learn to move with what is instead of chasing what should be. You'll discover why falling down and getting up is a universal practice, not a personal failure. We'll talk about the powerful difference between grounding yourself and chasing approval or certainty. and how fear, pain, and grief can become sacred ground without romanticizing suffering. We talk about what it means to move through life with compassion, not just resilience, why grief changes the map of your life, and why you never really go back to normal. How intimacy, friendship, and even a men's group can become a net that distributes the weight. And along the way, Mark explores the hidden voices we inherit from parents, the social pressure to perform, and the modern habit of living vicariously instead of living directly. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. And we'll jump right in after this short break. Speaker 2 (1:43) You and I have been in conversation a number of times over the years. Your new book is an interesting topic. Falling Down and Getting Up is the title. And it's fundamentally an exploration of adversity, which certainly over the last three years, if not many times over our lifetimes, we deal with. But I feel like for so many people, the feeling that adversity has taken on a much more present role in their lives in the recent few years is just a much more common experience. And yet we often don't talk about it in a meaningful way or really resource ourselves with tools. So that was really interesting that you decided that this was a moment to write about this, especially considering your own personal journey. Where, for sure, I mean, you have experienced adversity on the level of literally being life-threatening in your past. So I'm curious what brings you to this topic at this moment in time. Speaker 1 (2:47) Yeah, so, you know, a couple of things are constellated here. And so, you know, it goes back to my previous book just before Falling Down and Getting Up, which was Surviving Storms. And, you know, right out of the pandemic, I mean, I think the... the doorway to all of this, both books, was a moment that I think a lot of people who've been through things had. But all of a sudden, you know, in the pandemic, my own cancer journey was coming back vividly. And one moment in particular was the moment I was diagnosed. You know, I had, as you might recall, you know, I had a tumor growing out of my skull bone, which was rather pronounced and I went finally to a doctor of course and when I was told that I had cancer you know I was frightened and upended and you know everything but then when I went to leave that appointment the door I had come through to keep that appointment was gone There was no way back to life before that appointment. And I think this came back so vividly because I think the pandemic was such a moment for humanity. The old world's gone. There's no way back. There's only loving each other forward. And when you look at Kubler-Ross's stages of grief, we've had parts of our society in all of it. We've had parts of our society in denial. It was a hoax. We had parts of our society in anger, in resentment. And what were we protesting? Biology? Speaker 1 (4:39) That was the doorway in, and I think that, you know, in the Jewish tradition, as you know, the word Sabbath literally means the one day we don't turn one thing into another. Well, I think the pandemic was a global Sabbath. We were forced to stop. No, not even dream or scheme or go from here to there. We were forced to revisit and accept the miracle of what is, and which all the spiritual traditions point to through practice. But adversity brings us there abruptly, too. And so, moving forward, you know, a central part of this book... is about fear, pain, and grief. And, and, and that came about because out of the pandemic, you know, I was having so many, uh, folks ask me if I might open up a space around that and, and offer something around that. And then that dovetail with my publisher, Joel Fotinos, um, with St. Martin's Essentials. He was wonderfully, uh, he's saying, you know, you, you, you teach more than most of my other authors, you know, and he kept asking me about that space. And then he finally had this wonderful invitation. He said, well, if someone couldn't be in one of your circles, what book would be closest to that experience? So that was quite an invitation, and that, coupled with the things we've been talking about, gave me a way to really delve into this archetypal journey. And, you know, the title comes because I discovered that medieval monks, when asked how to practice their faith, said by falling down and getting up. And I know that. I understand that. And then as I learned, of course, every tradition has some version of that. In the Japanese tradition, there's a proverb that says, fall down seven, get up eight. Speaker 1 (6:48) And it made me remember, too, you know, after one part of my journey, cancer journey, I had a rib removed from my back surgically. And I barely woke up in the hospital room. And this kind but gruff nurse was over me saying, we're going to walk. I said, what? We? Who's we? But then she said, two steps forward, one step back. Speaker 1 (7:19) which again seems the rhythm of really lit life on earth. And then, in doing this book, I ran across another deep echo of this rhythm, which is in the Upanishads, those wonderful, amazing Hindu texts. There's just metaphors galore throughout that. And there was one of a caterpillar, and how a caterpillar bunches up, and it moves back in order to move forward. So, two steps forward, one step back. And the metaphor was that this is how spiritual growth takes place, like a caterpillar, bunching up and moving forward, bunching up and moving. So it made me, looking at my life and at others, Speaker 1 (8:09) No one signs up for falling down. We don't say, oh, yeah, sure, sign me. No, no. But like gravity, it's inevitable. And when we back up enough, falling down and getting up becomes a dance. And so the question is. what we can't avoid it or eliminate it, how do we learn the dance? And what does that look like for each of us? And what is our personal rhythm of falling down and getting up? And when do we need to ask for help in that process? Speaker 2 (8:42) Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right? Because when you use the term falling down to sort of describe a whole host of experiences that we all have, and I think everybody's going to insert their own unique story or unique moment or series of experiences into that phrase. And this is something that you speak about and that you write about also. There's also this notion that we spend an inordinate amount of time bracing ourselves to try and avoid the fall. And then once we realize that we are in the fall, that we are in this experience, that we are tumbling, we're stumbling, we are like spiraling, whatever it may be, the immediate impulse is how do we break this? How do we break this? And you have an interesting reframe, which is what if we looked less at how do we break the fall and more how do we receive them? Speaker 1 (9:35) Yeah. And, you know, this was... Also a constellation of instructions, if you will, around this. I mean, I remember being a kid and my father saying in his own very simple way, if you find yourself falling, go with it. He said, if you resist, you're just going to break something. And I remember that as a kid. As I stumbled onto that in the martial arts, and I don't practice the martial arts, I've only read them and seen metaphors in it. But in a Kaidu, that art of using the energy of whatever you meet, not resisting it, that they actually teach practitioners how to fall and how to get up. It's known as ukemi, is the skill. And that's the first thing they say is talk and roll. tuck and roll so that you're right back up and of course you know when we look at things like when we look at these different ways of falling well a tuck and roll with grief could take a decade Speaker 1 (10:47) Yeah. So, you know, these things, again, how do we inhabit them and personalize them? Because that's where the real meaning happens and how we can help each other. Speaker 2 (10:57) Yeah. As you were describing that, the first 18, 19 years of my life, I was, I trained as a competitive gymnast. And so every day for hours a day, I was flying through the air and often out of control and falling. So one of the things that you learn very quickly. And maybe that's just because I really wasn't all that talented at it. That's a whole other conversation. But you learn quickly that you're going to fall all the time. And it's part of the process of growth. And just like you described in martial arts, part of what you learn is how to fall. Because it's going to happen over and over and over. And you would eventually get to a point. where if you hadn't taken a fall, if you hadn't flown off something for a long while, on the one hand, you're like, oh, this is great. I feel awesome. Like I'm not a little bit bruised or banged up. But on the other hand, there's a little voice inside your head that says, but am I still growing towards, am I still becoming, or have I just sort of like slid into a season of stasis? And I wouldn't have used that language when I was 18. But the experience, the feeling was there. And you're just wondering, you know, like, is this actually okay? It's safe. But is that why I'm here? Speaker 1 (12:20) That's a miseducation that's maybe even more acute in the modern world is that, you know, we want to eliminate turbulence and conflict and challenge, which are all part of the rhythm of growth. Speaker 1 (12:38) And we seem to think that, you know, if we hit stasis, that's a good thing. And, you know, actually, it's not a good thing because too much stasis, the only time we're really in stasis is in death. And we're here, we're alive. And that means we're never free of struggle. I often think of, and I think in one of my books I explored, they imagined an alternative to the myth of Sisyphus. In the myth of Sisyphus, for trespass against the gods, he's punished Sisyphus to roll a rock up a hill, and when he gets to the top, it falls to the bottom, and he does that for eternity. But I imagined, you know, an alternate myth in which for being kind and generous, he's rewarded to roll a ball of light up a hill for eternity. So he can give it away as he finds it and happy to do it over and over again. And that the struggle, which, you know, Camus, of course, in his myth of Sisyphus, ends up in that. point of, you know, we have to love the struggle. And the struggle without end is really what makes the human journey noble. And even when we do, quote, accomplish things, it's often not where we aimed, which is not a failure, but an awakening. You know, I think that I've been, I've learned over my life so far that there's nothing wrong with working for what we want. But often, working for what I want has become an apprenticeship