May sunlight always shine on Brene Brown.  She started an important dialogue around imperfection, shame, falling and getting back up.  A conversation, to be sure, that has been spoken in smaller circles.  Her work, however (and probably thanks to TED talks), is getting a wider, deserved and needed reading.  (And how did it happen, I wonder, that we all are so bent on being seen as perfect?  That’s for tomorrow’s blog).

I am reading her latest, Rising Strong.  This is the Rising Strong Process as given in the beginning of the book.  It has three parts (read the book to get the details.  The devil is always in the details).

“The goal of the process is to rise from our falls, overcome our mistakes, and face hurt in a way that brings more wisdom and wholeheartedness* into our lives.

1.  The Reckoning:  Walking into our Story [it seems she was discovering story and qualitative research about the same time I was in the 90s.  Which delights me for some strange reason]:  Recognize emotion, and get curious about our feelings and how they connect with the way we think and behave.
2. The Rumble:  Owning our Story [she says this is the part that always gets lost in the telling…we skip to #3]:  Get honest about the stories we’re making up [emphasis mine] about our struggle, then challenge these confabulations and assumptions to determine what’s truth, what’s self-protection, and what needs to change if we want to lead more wholehearted* lives.
3. The Revolution:  Write a new ending to our story based on the key learnings from our rumble and use this new, braver story to change how we engage with the world and to ultimately transform the way we live, love, parent, and lead”

[*Brene defines wholehearted living “as engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness.”  !!  Wow.  What a concept!]

My immediate reaction to this was that #2 is pivotal.  It is the balance point of the 3 steps.  If we stay “in” out story, we do not do the work of separating out what’s truth, what’s self-protection and what needs to change.  If we jump over to step 3, we write the ending to our story while we are still “in” our story – we have not done the work necessary to move forward.

Nothing happens by accident.  I read this last evening after having been chosen by the word balance.  And I realized as I read this that perhaps balance is a conduit to something else for next year.  Or perhaps it will only be my first word for the year (the impetus for that linked blog was from Patti Digh, who apparently is one of my life teachers).  Who knows.  I don’t and I am staying with this writing as a way to clarity.  Perhaps it will lead to a question (and questions always contain the seeds of the answer) which is what I have used in the past to guide my year.

The pivotal point [the balance point) to rising strongly is reflection.  For those of you who would like more on that, I highly suggest Paulo Freire’s book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is all about the praxis [that’s his language, and it means:  practice, as distinguished from theory; application or use, as of knowledge or skills]  of action and reflection.

By the way, if you read the Brene’s book, you will see that the underlying form of her steps can be matched to the hero’s story as identified by Joseph Campbell [see his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces].  Makes me think that she’s perhaps picked up the mantle and is building on his work – although that wasn’t what she consciously set out to do.

The unconscious is a wonderful thing; hence, this return to daily blogging.  These blogs are unplanned and unedited (unless I find a typo).  They are stream of consciousness as I work toward carrying forward some amazing energy in my life.  Energy that points to some of the harder questions I have about how to be in the world in a way that takes me forward and holds a space for others to do the same in their own journey.  This is true adventure.  So glad to have you along for the ride!