Mark Nepo: Falling Down and Getting Up.
Falling Down and Getting Up is an invitation to view adversity from a new perspective. In this gentle, insightful guide, Mark Nepo helps readers navigate the challenges of life by making the bold choice to embrace every experience as a chance for positive change.
A Conversation with Mark Nepo – Falling Down and Getting Up: Discovering Your Inner Resilience and Strength
OMTimes: What led you to write this book?
Mark Nepo: 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.
OMTimes: What does this book explore?
Mark Nepo: 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.
OMTimes: What do you mean by the title, Falling Down and Getting Up?
Mark Nepo: 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.
OMTimes: 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?
Mark Nepo: 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.
OMTimes: You have 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?
Mark Nepo: 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 which 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.
OMTimes: In an early chapter, you talk about the difference between healing and justice. What are you suggesting here?
Mark Nepo: 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 healin 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.
These devotions are always interlaced and dependent on each other. In serving justice, I can remove what’s wrongfully in the way and open the door of your prison, but only you can walk out of that prison. Likewise, if I am pinned under some weight of oppression, you can help remove that weight, but it is my work to stand again. At their deepest, healing and justice work together the way we need two good legs to walk and two good eyes to see.
OMTimes: What is your hope for anyone engaging with this book?
Mark Nepo: 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.
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About the Author
With over a million copies sold, Mark Nepo has moved and inspired readers and seekers all over the world with his #1 New York Times bestseller, The Book of Awakening. Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual guides of our time,” “a consummate storyteller,” and “an eloquent spiritual teacher. Visit: MarkNepo.com or Live.MarkNepo.com 
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