When You Fall Down, You're Really Rising Higher

How to Turn the Hardest Moments of Healing Into Fuel for Accelerated Recovery

When you are dealing with a major health crisis, recovery is a process. You will meet setbacks along the way. This isn’t a sign that something’s wrong with you. It’s simply how real healing unfolds.

After working with thousands of patients and families in rehabilitation after horrible crises like multiple trauma, spinal cord injury, stroke, intense medical illness, failed surgery, depressive episodes, etc, I can tell you this with absolute clarity: progress is never a straight upward line. It looks more like a jagged mountain range or a rising stock price chart. You move forward a few steps, then slide back a couple. You rise, you fall, you rise again, usually a bit higher than before.

Sometimes you get an infection and you’re wiped out for a few days. Maybe your pain increases after an over-intense training session. You followed up with orthopedics, and the bone isn’t healing as intended. You get some bad news or something else that triggers a bad mood.. Or you just can’t improve your endurance or balance.

The key question is not whether setbacks will happen. They will.

The key is how you meet the setback—and whether those situations become obstacles, or springboards for your healing and recovery process.

There is an inner game to responding to adversity.

Your choice of mental and emotional response can have a profound impact on your nervous system, your energy, your emotional resilience, your recovery speed, and even your spiritual growth.

And the stakes are high.

When things go wrong, it can trigger frustration, self-judgment, blame, shame, or hopelessness. And that can trigger a vicious cycle of negative thoughts and emotions that suck your energy and motivation, and can even shift your biology to create worse physical symptoms.

If you’re going through a health crisis your normal tools for coping might be overwhelmed. There’s no shame in that. If you’re open to growth, a crisis can bring you to a higher level of function, clarity, and service.

I want to share some insight so that you can build the mindset, skills, and resilience that turn setbacks into accelerated recovery.

Spiritual Integration Supercharges Recovery

Modern coaching teaches powerful tools for reframing setbacks, regulating emotion and physiology, and supporting clearer decision-making. These are crucial tools to support healing and recovery when a health crisis has disrupted life and work.

Yet many successful people find that cognitive/behavioral strategies alone don’t fully unlock the deeper transformation needed for comprehensive healing. A spiritually informed approach adds a deeper and clinically-meaningful dimension. It turns on the compassion, love, and transformational clarity that flow from your inner soul. You go beyond self-regulation to self-transcendence. It’s the difference between pushing your way forward, and being carried by the deeper intelligence that exists within and beyond you.

Spiritual integration doesn’t replace evidence-based “secular” techniques. It can amplify their benefit: melting internal resistance to change, sparking inspiration and energy, increasing emotional coherence, and awakening an even deeper sense of purpose and potential than you had before the crisis.

The result is not just coping, but recovering with greater integration, confidence, and momentum.

Your Spiritual Anatomy: A Map To Turn Setbacks Into Growth

The sages of Kabbalah offer a simple, profound framework that explain the inner workings of our body, emotions, mind, and spirit. You have an inner operating system that maps the relationship of your biology, emotions, thoughts, and spirit. You can learn to navigate it skillfully.

It’s like a map of the territory. We could call it your spiritual anatomy.

They also gave instructions for how to navigate the inner territory. How to turn the fall into an ascent. To find the light in the darkness and come out stronger and more effective than previously.

It’s the skill set that helps you navigate. It’s the spiritual physiology that goes along with the spiritual anatomy.

Let’s unpack the anatomy and physiology of your soul, which determines how you respond to circumstances.

Today let’s start with three parts of the system.

• You’ve got an inner engine that generates emotional energy and creativity.

• And you’ve got two sometimes-polarized aspects of yourself that compete in their effort to mobilize that energy, emotion, and creativity.

One of them is characterized by a high level of conscious awareness. It cares about connection, love, meaning, purpose, and insight.

The other is more instinctual and less conscious. It’s focussed on safety, pleasure, and comfort, though it also has a level of inner intelligence.

The sages of Kabbalah gave names to that inner spiritual anatomy.

• Neshama is the aspect of high awareness, connection, insight, higher purpose, and meaning. It’s your divine soul.

• Ruach is the engine that produces energy, emotion, and creative power

• Nefesh is the instinctual part that seeks comfort, safety, and pleasure. It’s bound to your physical body. It’s called your animal soul.

According to the sages, these are three levels of soul, in a continuum from the most spiritual to most earthy. But they are completely integrated and penetrating with one another. Their relationship determines your choices and the state of your mind-body system in every moment.

That’s especially important when you are facing adversity.

The key question is “who is driving the ship?”

Is your energy and emotion being controlled by your divine soul? or your animal soul?

Is your available energy and intention going toward comfort, safety, and pleasure? Or is it flowing according to your higher purpose, insight, and meaning?

A Question Of Balance and Harmony

This is not an “either-or” “black and white” process. Both your divine soul and animal soul are involved in the healing process. This isn’t a moralistic shame-filled discussion about being good or bad. It’s about finding the path that helps you heal faster and get back to life.

Your animal soul is important. There are times when you need rest, sleep, food, comforting words, or a pleasant warm bath. When you don’t want to think about anything–you just want to feel some nice music or get a massage or walk in the forest and let your mind be empty. Great! You’re feeding the animal soul and it needs that care and love, in the right measure.

On the other hand, the animal soul can react to pain and adversity in unproductive ways. In its desire for safety and comfort it can derail your desire to heal, transform, and grow.

Your divine soul is a superpower that can be mobilized to transform adversity into growth, expansiveness, and new possibilities. It recognizes the needs of the animal soul, like a responsible owner of a horse. The owner takes care of the horse and feeds it and provides shelter. And the owner learns how to ride the horse, so the horse is respected, but does the will of the owner.

That’s the relationship that helps you heal. When your higher faculties are guiding and mobilizing your embodied instinctual tendencies. Not the other way around.

We want to put you in the driver’s seat, so you can direct all of your faculties. To align yourself with your best intentions and maximize your recovery.

In part B of this essay, we will unpack the spiritual physiology of recovery. We will look at how the spiritual anatomy plays out and practical approaches for how you can mobilize it.

I’m eager to hear your feedback on all of this so far, so please share.

And please subscribe so you get notified of future posts.