“Everybody falls down, all the way down, you just have to hold on tight. You gotta get up, gotta get up, you are gonna make it through this time.” -”Falls” by: ODESZA
We all fall. Physically, mentally, emotionally fall down, down, down. Through learning and coaching clients, commonly we limit our understanding of falls as though it takes us into a downward spiral when in actuality, we are elevating and lifting as a result of the experience.
If we could just see it that way.
Reworking and auditing the words we use is the most brilliant work we can do. Neurolinguistics will tell us that the words we select drive everything our minds believe. If I know I just “fell down,” immediately, the consideration of down as a space that I do not want to be evokes a negative, lower vibration throughout my body. I can actually feel the heaviness, possibly guilt and shame that can from that. Aligned with a feeling of being a victim. However, reworking the words will help with envisioning that healing can come to my spirit when I fall. What if every fall was called, “falling up?” Falling can now become a matter of soul renewal and mastery as we do it on the upswing.
In falling up, the discovery of our truest healing and mending powers can be discovered. The learning and knowledge of our soul’s resiliency (by overcoming the fall) is where the inner warrior rises. Falls of all varieties will inevitably forever happen, and when there is recognition within the spirit that it is falling up (instead of down), the truest soul evolution and awareness can occur. Habits of living can begin to shift into conscious living. Every time.
Spirit has a way of dealing with me. I get a good kick in the a$$ every time I haven’t quite trusted the messages from God (yet). Yet is a powerful word of optimism and one that signals that if I don’t get it soon, I am going on my a$$, one more time.
It was a chilly January day of 2019, when the newest fall happened. Now, it had been two years since the last, so I was kind of due for a shake up, I suppose. And in this western Pennsylvania town, we are normally covered with snow and icy patches by this point in January. God would have it that there was not a single patch of ice to be found. I was running (like I do most days) through the college housing and partying section of town and my mind was racing and energy depleting quickly. Thinking about people and circumstances completely out of my control. My mind was fixated on the darkness I saw in one individual’s soul for living the way she was living. I was telling a story about her story in my mind and BOOM! I fell so hard, I couldn’t get up. I could not walk, I could not even stay awake. The fall shook rattled my whole body from head to toe. A car stopped as my body was spread across the sidewalk, in the middle of a main area where walkers often traveled to and from classes. A woman ran to me for assistance, wanting to drive me to the hospital. I refused, knowing that I was just slammed with a fall that the hospital could not fix. No one could fix this except for me. I couldn’t walk and my family expected that I broke something as I continued to resist a hospital consultation. As I was carried up the steps, my son immediately ran a bath and put three extra scoops of our healingsalts in. Every huge gash now felt the pain of the fall and the wild sting of the salts. I was losing consciousness again. The pain was so heavy and the wounds from the fall so deep, that I realized God blessed my body with physical pain to stop the repetitive storytelling that plagued my mind. I had to feel it. I never really feel physical pain. In fact, if my body is sick, I usually feel it as it’s on it’s last day and ready to leave my body. Excruciating pain as though I was in a major collision radiated through my body.
The trauma from the fall and the pain over the next day unearthed emotions that I did not see or fully know until the fall. God literally rattled my cage to set me free. I fell up. I released years of baggage during the physical healing of my body. I discovered strength that I never fully realized I had. I was up and running again in just one week’s time.
The scars from that fall now paint my body forever. Each time I prepare for my next salt bath, I look at those scars for just a second, and I thank God for releasing (more) of the old stories that I gave permission to limit my life.
God knows we get better and better after falling up. Each time we are able to heal faster while gathering our learning and then moving on.