Fear of falling tends to move us toward survival: fight-or-flight or all-or-nothing thinking. With this approach, we fight through the fear by forcing ourselves to engage, rushing through the stress until we’re comfortable again—this is the “all.” Or we flee from the fear and fail to engage with it—the “nothing.”

This fight/flight survival tendency causes us to “practice to get it over with”—that is, to rush through our falling practice without making an effort to be present. We tense up (as shown in this picture) or take too much risk, which makes it more difficult to pay attention. We devalu...