Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
About This Book
Many, if not most, people and institutions remain in 'the first half of life' forever, preoccupied with establishing their identity, climbing, achieving, and performing. If you knew there was a further journey, wouldn't you choose to do the 'first half' quite differently? The further journey involves challenges, mistakes, loss of control, even 'necessary suffering', because that is how we grow. This message of falling down and in fact moving up is the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. The Companion Journal helps those who have (and those who have not) read Falling Upward to engage more deeply with the questions the book raises. Using a blend of quotes, questions for individual and group reflection, stories, and suggestions for spiritual practices, it provides a wise guide for deepening the spiritual journey - at any time of life.
What You'll Learn
The "falling" required for the second half of life is not literal failure but the necessary deconstruction of the first-half identity — the self built around achievement, certainty, and status. The great religious traditions all have a mechanism for necessary suffering — the cross, the dark night, the descent — because there is no genuine transformation without it. Wisdom comes not from more success but from the integration of failure.
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