This is the second recommendation that I have physically purchased. I got it from the Papers Plus in Wanaka last month when I purchased Lost Connections. I was excited to finally dig into a book by Brene Brown, a prolific writer and researcher professor at University of Houston.
Recommendation #12 from OHSU friends
Rising Strong by Brené Brown
As I prepared for my trip, I was traveling between Billings, MT and Portland, OR. I had decided to finally get eye surgery to correct my Strabismus, vertical double vision. While I was in Portland, I met with several OHSU friends that recommended Brené Brown’s work to me. Rising Strong was published in 2015 and is about how to get back up after falling down in your life.
To rise strong, we must be vulnerable. We must experience and understand the stories that happen to us and the stories that we tell ourselves about WHY those events happened. It’s about reckoning and rumbling which lead to revolution in our thoughts and lives.
According to the Amazon write-up, “Walking into our stories of hurt can feel dangerous. But the process of regaining our footing in the midst of struggle is where our courage is tested and our values are forged. Our stories of struggle can be big ones, like the loss of a job or the end of a relationship, or smaller ones, like a conflict with a friend or colleague. Regardless of magnitude or circumstance, the rising strong process is the same: We reckon with our emotions and get curious about what we’re feeling; we rumble with our stories until we get to a place of truth; and we live this process, every day, until it becomes a practice and creates nothing short of a revolution in our lives. Rising strong after a fall is how we cultivate wholeheartedness. It’s the process, Brown writes, that teaches us the most about who we are.”
It was a powerful book that led me to tears and ahas! It confirmed once again that writing and podcasting the story of my relationship and divorce is the rumbling and reckoning in my own life. It is one of the ways that I am being vulnerable.
Brené believes “that vulnerability—the willingness to show up and be seen with no guarantee of outcome—is the only path to more love, belonging, and joy.” And I completely agree. Because as I’ve been vulnerable over these last 11 months, I’ve also rekindled friendships and found love, joy, and peace.
As a lover of math, I also appreciated her thoughts on integrating. “The Latin root of the word integrate is integrare, which means ‘to make whole’…The tools used to integrate [our] stories of falling are readily available to all of us because they are deeply human and part of wholeness: storytelling and creativity (primarily writing about or taking notes on their experiences…our wholeness—even our wholeheartedness—actually depends on the integration of all of our experiences, including the falls.”
And as someone who is fascinated with the concept of home, I loved her Manifesto of the Brave and Brokenhearted. It ends with this stanza,
Showing up is our power.
Story is our way home.
Truth is in our song.
We are the brave and brokenhearted.
We are rising strong.
I might have used this song before, but it completely fits in with the theme of this book, and I love it very much, and there’s a new remix of it out there, so it’s technically a new song! I hope you enjoy this song, and I highly encourage you to check out Rising Strong.