Leaving the Ghost Light Burning

We face many circumstances that bring us to our knees at the precipice of our sense-making: in our relationships, our parenting, our roles as heads of organizations or as those trying to navigate the cultures and contexts of them. These scenes of our lives often trigger our smaller, more shadowy selves to steal the show - we call this "Fallback." When we are in fallback, we want to reject these shady characters within us who storm the stage in our most fraught moments, in our most valued relationships. The problem is that when we deny the full cast that compromises us, fallback in its neglect begets a vicious cycle of repeated fallback. This book invites us to leave the ghost light on for all our characters, offering a set of practices to notice, arrest, reflect on, and recover from fallback more quickly, and even to transform ourselves in the process.

Fallback, when we recognize and come into relationship with it, can be about understanding when and why we are not able to bring our better self; reframing our expectations of who we are in this world; accepting the full messiness that is an inevitable component of being human; coming to know and love a more authentic version of self; and cultivating the environments for others to do the same.