Rising Strong as a Spiritual Practice

In Rising Strong as a Spiritual Practice, Brené Brown examines why vulnerability and recovery are inseparable. A willingness to live openly creates trust, courage, creativity, joy, and love, but it also means accepting that disappointment and struggle can knock us down. Drawing on her research with resilient people, Brown argues that spirituality repeatedly appears as a resource for getting back up and making meaning from difficult experience.

The program connects this spiritual dimension to a progression of reckoning with events, rumbling with their meaning, and turning insight into a lasting revolution. Brown considers how a sense of belonging can help people remain themselves without changing merely to fit in. She also explores the perspective that spiritual practice can provide, the role of faith in humanity in becoming less judgmental, and the value of death-and-rebirth imagery when working toward forgiveness.

Brown does not define spirituality as dependence on a particular religion, theology, or dogma. She describes it as trust in human interconnectedness and in a loving force greater than the individual. That understanding may be approached through worship, meditation, nature, or creative work. The result is a practical account of spirituality as a personally cultivated source of perseverance, compassion, purpose, and wiser action during hard times.