Reflections on Rising Strong by Brené Brown, Part 1

I love the power of language and ideas as motivators—to cut to the heart of the issue and impart the wisdom we most need to hear.

These past two weeks, I finally picked up a copy of Rising Strong by Brené Brown, stunned and bewildered that I hadn’t found time to read it until now, since she’s one of my favorite thought leaders and researchers. As I read through, some of the concepts here struck me as relates to the work my clients and I are doing together, so I wanted to surface some of my favorite quotes and my personal reactions to them.

On (inevitably!) falling: “If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability.”

Yes! And falling is not failing. I love that she normalizes the risk we take on when we make brave new moves.

On the impact of courage: “We can rise up from our failures, screwups and falls, but we can never go back to where we stood before we were brave or before we fell. Courage transforms the emotional structure of our being.” 

For those of you familiar with The Hero’s Journey (Joseph Campbell’s work and archetypal story framework), you know that the capacity of the individual to meet a challenge or obstacle, grapple with it completely, and solve it differently from how she or he ever originally imagined creates a sort of alchemy that changes the person on a cellular level. It’s a character evolution, and a one-way portal.

On the unpredictability of the healing journey: “I’ve seen the [healing] process take twenty minutes, and I’ve seen it take twenty years. I’ve seen people get stuck, set up camp, and stay in one place for a decade. While the process does seem to follow a few patterns, it presents no formula or strictly linear approach. It’s a back-and-forth action—an iterative and intuitive process that takes different shapes for different people.” 

Healing is most definitely non-linear. There is not always a relationship between effort and outcome in this process. There was an era for me, early into the start of my healing journey, in which the top motivating idea that propelled some of my initial healing was the fear of what would happen if I did nothing. CranioSacral Therapy in particular is a modality most people don’t discover until their 50s or 60s after decades of living with chronic pain, which is why those of us who are younger almost never hear about it. I discovered it at age 32, in my opinion, 3 years later than I ideally might have. I immediately grasped its potential to spark deep nervous system rewiring and a conversation with my subconscious in a new-to-me way that felt intuitive, poetic and wise. Finding those modalities that most supercharge your healing can be a process, and committing to the ones that reliably work and reimagine your relationship to your body and your past can drive outcomes beyond words.

On misguided self-protection: “Even with small, everyday conflicts and disappointments, physical and emotional intolerance for discomfort is the primary reason we linger on the outskirts of our stories, never truly facing them or interrogating them into our lives. We disengage to self-protect.”

We can sometimes be so afraid to confront these things that we architect elaborate resistance tactics. What’s wild is that we aren’t consciously aware we’re doing this. It takes a special kind of determination to be with the wild unknown to see what can shift.

On the power of curiosity: “We can’t chart a brave new course until we know exactly where we are, get curious about how we got there, and decide where we want to go. (It’s) an emotional reckoning.”

Curiosity is, in fact, the secret ingredient. If we have a knack for accessing curiosity in other parts of our lives, we have a strategic advantage when it comes to our healing. Can you be curious and fearful at the same time? Or curious and vehemently angry? Or curious and totally frozen, feeling powerless? If so, I commend you. That’s how we get somewhere new.