Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, 1762
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.
Maya Angelou
Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, „I will try again tomorrow“.
Mary Anne Radmacher
Don’t obsess over existential questions or fuss over how you are perceived by those who have not yet found themselves. Just live in the merciful day. Come out of hiding. Stumble out of the shadows and show yourself, as much as you can, for as long as you can. Give your talents to this world, because you will hurt if you don’t. There is so much life inside you, and this wounded world needs that life now more than ever. And if you are pulled back towards that black hole of despair and doubt, take a deep breath. Remember my love for you. Remember that it is okay to despair and doubt. Take another breath, and keep going. The worst that can happen is failure. And we know how to fail, don’t we? We have survived failure many times before. We have risen from it many times before.
Jeff Foster
Fortitude, faith, and tenacity are indispensable in the pursuit of healing, growth, and the cultivation of Emotional Sobriety. When working with clients and dealing with my own challenges, an image I often utilise — by way of example — is that of a toddler learning to walk.
The first thing to notice is that the child’s efforts seem to be driven from a force within, silent and invisible. She knows, herself, when the time has come to embark upon this endeavour. The timing is different in each case and just right for each individual.
Once the process has been initiated, the child will first experiment by standing upright while holding on to some supporting object (a chair, the leg of a table, a grown-up, etc.). Then she will aim to stand unsupported.
Next come the first single steps, followed, after much practice, with sequences of steps. And, so it continues until the child learns to walk unaided.
In each phase, she will fall (fail?) countless times. According to a New York University study published in 2012* a typical child learning to walk falls an average of 17 times per hour during active play, accumulating roughly 2,700 to 4,000 total falls before their gait stabilizes. Brand-new or very novice walkers can fall even more frequently, sometimes up to 69 times an hour.
The report comes to the following conclusion: How do infants learn to walk? … Infants accumulate massive amounts of time-distributed, variable practice. With each day of walking, they take more steps, travel farther distances, and fall less; and they may be motivated to walk in the first place because it takes them farther faster than crawling without increased risk of falling.
The third main point to consider is that, in general, we adults all master the skill of walking. We can therefore deduce that those qualities of fortitude, faith, and tenacity, that were at play in the original learning phase, still reside within us.
In recent days I have been in frequent contact with a friend who has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital due to persistent passive suicidal ideation.
In contrast to active ideation, where the formulation of self-harm plans may already be in progress, passive ideation could be described as harbouring a persistent wish for death without having a specific plan or intent to end life, accompanied by thoughts such as: „I wish this were over“ or „I wish I wouldn’t wake up in the morning“.
There appears to be considerable weariness at play in this case.
This type of weariness, and the resulting burnout, is familiar to me too, from earlier phases of my own life.
Burnout is often attributed to doing too much and thereupon running out of steam. My experience leads me to a slightly different conclusion, which is that burnout is a result of driving through life — over extended periods — with the handbrake engaged.
What does that look like in practice? In essence it is a stance of mental resistance to whatever is happening in the present moment.
For example, when we experience pain, whether due to current issues (a bereavement, a setback, the break-up of a relationship, etc.) or the reactivation of an old episode of pain from the past (e.g. childhood trauma), a common reaction is to want to „unmake“ the pain — to make it go away.
We might as well take a walk down to the majestic Rhine near my home and instruct it to flow upstream!
This is a very human reaction and thus quite understandable. Who wants to experience pain? However, when we learn to shift from being reactive to being „response-able“ (a practical definition of Emotional Sobriety), we can accept the painful stimulus as is, and then utilise it as a cue — usually in the form of a new patterns of thinking, feeling, and taking action — which will help us move forward in a healthy manner.
To do this, we must first allow whatever feelings manifest, even the most painful and discomforting ones, to be present. For any person who has developed reflexes or impulsive reactions — way below the radar of our consciousness — which supress pain before we even realise it is there, this is no minor matter. It requires nothing less than a complete rewiring the brain.
Awareness is the first step. For those who live much of their lives on autopilot, as many of us do, there is little or no awareness of the gap between stimulus and response. We simply jump impulsively from one trigger to the next.
A major reaction, when it comes to pain, is to supress it. We do this by zoning out, by numbing our feelings, by distracting ourselves. This can be achieved by using substances (alcohol, weed, etc.) or behaviours (workaholism, porn, gambling, etc.), or a combination of both.
Feelings cannot be selectively muted, however. When we supress pain, we also disable our ability to feel joy, wonder, love, etc.
Not only do we deaden ourselves in terms of experiencing the awe and vitality of life, but the suppression also consumes vast amounts of energy, eventually leading to burnout. And, in the long run, it doesn’t work. The pain manifests anyway, coming out sideways as unbridled anger, rage, or self-destruction.
The path to awareness is through the body. Many spend their adult lives predominately in the head. We can change this by cultivating practices which return us to our bodies. Breathing exercises, mindful exercises such as yoga, chi gong, etc. are helpful in this respect.
The short, repetitive body-centred exercises central to the PQ (Positive Intelligence) Mental Fitness programme are an excellent way of raising awareness. As in the case of the toddler learning to walk, cultivating Mental Fitness requires massive amounts of time-distributed, variable practice. This translates into several short sessions throughout the day, every day.
In the heightened state of awareness, we can learn to identify the inner voices of our Saboteurs (Judge, Controller, Victim, etc.) and switch in real time to the life-affirming Powers of Sage (Empathise, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, Activate, etc.).
We encounter our Saboteurs in the spirit of compassion, recognising that their initial intent was to protect us and ensure our survival during our formative years. The moment we begin to judge ourselves for having Saboteurs, we are simply pouring oil on the fear-driven fires of the mind.
In the unfit mind, Saboteur messaging is transmitted at a very loud volume, while the Sage Powers tends to be almost imperceptible. By means of ongoing daily practice, the volume of our Saboteur voices is dialled down, and they can more easily be intercepted before they get a chance to hijack us before we realise it.
Since the Saboteurs are always fear-driven, this rewiring facilitates a shift from fear to love. From the place of love, we can now craft a conscious response to the given stimulus or situation. We evolve over time from reaction to response. We cease reacting and become „response-able“.
As Mental Fitness is established, the messaging of the Sage Powers becomes more audible, and we learn to pause and ask ourselves which combination of Sage Powers would be most beneficial in any situation. The energy which has hitherto been bound up in engaging the handbrake then becomes available in this novel creative approach.
It is also beneficial to consider the so-called Sage Perspective which states that: „Every situation contains a gift or opportunity“. When we approach challenges from this perspective, the likelihood of finding life-affirming solutions is greatly increased.
This is a process — like the art of learning to walk — of countless repetitions and iterations. It requires tenacity, faith, fortitude, and on-going practice.
The Saboteurs don’t give up easily, however. Though they began life as a protective mechanism, they have — in the meantime — become runaway trains, with a very strong self-perpetuation drive. To this end they bombard us with apparently credible lies, such as: „As long as there is no conflict, I will be safe“ (Pleaser).
The opposite is, of course, true. The more we try to avoid conflict, through evasion or manipulation, the greater the conflict becomes in our life, with untold consequences.
Every time we falter in cultivation Mental Fitness, — just like the toddler learning to walk — we need to get up, dust ourselves down, reset, and take the next step. This is the key to the success of the transformation, this shift from fear to love.
This requires the unconditional acceptance of the fact that we have fallen. That becomes the starting point for the reset, despite the efforts of our Saboteurs to trap us in denial. With repetition, shame and guilt subside as our self-esteem grows.
In the final analysis, the truth does set us free.
*Adolph KE, Cole WG, Komati M, Garciaguirre JS, Badaly D, Lingeman JM, Chan GL, Sotsky RB. How do you learn to walk? Thousands of steps and dozens of falls per day. Psychol Sci. 2012;23(11):1387-94. doi: 10.1177/0956797612446346. Epub 2012 Oct 19. PMID: 23085640; PMCID: PMC3591461.
