On Proprioception and Beingness

When the System has No Data to Locate Itself

Proprioception, in its simplest physical sense, is the body’s felt knowledge of itself from the inside. It is how you know where your hand is with your eyes closed, how much force you’re using, whether you are upright or leaning, moving or still. It is not visual. It is not conceptual. It is relational sensation. Information arising from muscles, joints, fascia, inner ear, and nervous system in constant conversation.

The question might be, where am I, where am I, where am I? And the body’s answer would be, right here, right here, right here. My body, unless compressed in a “good way” by exactly the right garments or enough yoga, answers, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. Or, more distressingly, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Or worse- no “where” at all. Like I cannot localize. And if I cannot localize, I cannot orient. And If I cannot orient, I cannot discern. And if I cannot discern, I cannot choose. And if I cannot choose, I cannot self-actualize. See?

See how this is about the body but not just the body (although, it really is the first and last terrain of knowing)?

See how this is about coherence?

Coherence, my new and only goal in my life, is when proprioception is working across all levels. If proprioception is self-location through feedback, then coherence is self-location that agrees with itself—body, mind, emotion, and spirit all reporting the same coordinates.

I am still feeling the impact of Agnes of Hamnet. I can still feel (on the page and through Buckley) her embodiment, her orientation, her coherence, and I want it. I want to walk this earth with such bodily knowing before it is too late. Because it can grow too late. It just can. But the static- the staticky, coordinate-confusing, dis-orienting, uprooting, illusory, poisoning, dissonant, signal-saturation has me, and most everyone I witness (near and far) incoherent.

I, truly regrettably, watched a few hours of the Grammy’s last night. I was hoping to watch Yungblud win and anticipated he would deliver a moving speech. He did win, but not for Zombie, and from red carpet to when I could stomach no more, I saw him maybe a total of 60 seconds on screen and not to win anything, or even speak at all. He was panned over, having won an award before the, let’s call it “show.” Before I tilt toward diatribe, let me zero in on what I felt while I sunk further into the couch de-pressed by: the pharmaceutical commercials, the social programming in every ad, the highly bizarre look at me look at me are you looking at me crowd milling about self-consciously behind the hand-picked weirdos (Jelly Roll I exempt you from this) who got to speak (was it speech?) mostly about their outfits which were entirely debauched costumes, the virtue signaling, the fake, dark, and rapid fire performances ( Justin Bieber sad darling, I don’t mean you signaling, signaling, signaling, stripped down to your socks as you actually sang every note before a sea of bad actors). It was a naked theater of dark absurdity and I hung on too long waiting for a thing that didn’t come.

So, I am coherent about this. My mental clarity, my ethics, my awareness of many systems at play at once, all of the disorienting things being piped through the speakers and into eyes I generally protect. I googled “Grammy’s terrible” right away hoping to have others signal back to me, Yes, this is all wrong. It is all wrong. Because even with my eyes closed in the dark, I am looking for feedback.

Because feedback has to come from somewhere or we do not exist. Literally. Proprioception is not a mere thing. It is a process of self-location that only works through contrast, pressure, and feedback.

You do not know where your arm is until it meets resistance, weight, gravity, space. Floating in a void, the signal collapses. You are literally, suddenly, nowhere. We know solitary confinement erodes not only wellbeing but being-ness itself.

That principle scales.

Ruptures create this state as well. The death of a loving witness. Expatriating. Disclosure. A romp down a rabbit hole. Standing under a blue sky watching the trails waft into a white firmament. Plant medicine. A child who will not come Home.

Hello? Is anyone here?

Physically, proprioception requires tension and release, gravity, boundaries, and resistance. Consciousness discovers itself by encountering otherness. Coherence arises through constraint. (And we now live in an era of almost anything, anything, anything goes.) “ Tell me where the lines are/ The endings and the beginnings” I wrote years ago in a poem called “Overlap.” (It is here in Poetry on my page). Tell me a hard truth, I have said all my life. Say the thing. Tell me yes or no, and mean it. Show your face, your cards, your truth as best you can, and I can then choose from clean intel.

There is almost no clean intel anymore. Not in the way we are living. Mental proprioception, “Where am I thinking from?,” means knowing when a thought is yours versus inherited. A sensing when your attention has drifted (drifted? Were you paying attention at all? Agnes was paying attention. Her body was attending and choosing and digesting and responding like a panther or a safe baby. Where are there panthers and where are there safe babies?)

The markers of mental disorientation are racing thoughts, confusion, and looping.

Looping, that old nemesis. The why am I doing this (thinking this, watching this, saying this, consuming this, regarding this, proclaiming this- like the pins on the outfits at the Grammy’s) again? Is it even my thought? Do I need it to be? Do you need your thoughts to be your own? Can you tell when they are?

Coherence theory says yes. We can feel when something original, true, and authentic (we have authored it so to speak) is moving through us. And by contrast, life-affirming contrast, we can tell when it is not. And death to us all if we consume large scale productions (like a political theater, a megachurch theater, a gathering of celebrity, Emily in Paris, journalism, history books, pharmaceutical commercials) and can no longer spit it out like a poison berry.

We should know to spit out poison berries.

But if most everything is a poison berry (and not a Jelly Roll testifying to Christ or a Bieber in his underpants) then the body will be so saturated with static that it can no longer tell Good from Evil or Life from Not-Life.

And now a word on fitted garments and the tolling of church bells.

I read a lot of “period” literature and watch programming set in eras when you had a single pair of boots and your clothing had to be buttoned up. Modern “feminism” decried the corset (before quietly sanctioning Spanx) and perhaps on behalf of organs, with good reason, but a fitted garment meant you had to keep your figure. That is how they phrased it. A gossamer gown held only by nipple rings ( Chappell Roan) could fit anyone at any size really, but a new-made dress of fine fabric that could not be replaced nor altered without great cost, must be fitted into. A structured garment alone could signal to you where you not only were but need to say. Days were spent in industry, sugar was scarce, and you moved a great deal about your mostly routined and proscribed business. So your buttoned dress and your sense of self kept signaling back to you where you were. Who you were and roughly how you needed to continue being.

You rose with the sun, extended the day to the extent of your candles and habit of early rising. And you made it (often on foot) to church by the end of the tolling bells. As did your neighbors whose tardiness or absence you would notice.

You could, as Agnes chose, attend without meaning or speaking the words you were expected to speak. But you didn’t not go. There were consequences.

We are all desperate to witness consequences on the Great Stage are we not? Have you looked into the redacted and unredacted Epstein files? If so, how long have you known? Did you know, know but knew alone so it didn’t count? If you haven’t or won’t look, why not? Because it might rupture your world?

I get it.

I have a student who continues to choose a punishing school and a punishing sleep schedule. After a few months of weekly sessions, she opened up to me about her Origin Story. I suspected the cruelty of her school keepers must be serving her somehow. And I now understand. This school is the only form of proprioception in her life. It says, Yes and, more often NO, to her. A word she rarely hears. They take things from her if she doesn’t play by their rules. She both detests this and needs it. Her late homework hours pressure her in a way that nothing else does. You know of course her Father isn’t there. You knew.

Emotional proprioception asks, “Where am I feeling from?”

It is the capacity to feel where grief lives (mine is in my throat as we no longer wail when we ought to). Where fear tightens (mine is in my jaw and behind my eyes). And also, where joy expands. (Mine is in my lungs and belly only after I happy or sad cry.) It is also the ability to feel where anger has edges versus diffusion.

We can again turn to Agnes who knew how to howl.

It should by now go without saying that trauma disrupts proprioception. Of all kinds. And that childhood sexual torture, rightly so, creates sociopaths. Systemic, just barely hidden, not really hidden, satanic and orgiastic abuse of babies and children would, rightly so, create not only legions of White Walkers, but a miasma of psycho-spiritual pathogens which render all of us without compass. We cannot taste the poison berry. It has been blended into every cup we bring to our lips.

Any nutritionist would suggest an elimination diet to detect what is hurting you. But what if everything you consume is hurting you? And there are so few reference points or moments of clear signal so you cannot ever tell what is what?

Can you fast from the air? The noise? The Story?

Maybe. Good old silence still has a few rounds in the chamber.

And beyond that, true connection. Eye contact, presence, shared breath, the safety to ask questions and let us hope, a body or two, to let our dissonance bounce off and be returned to us cleaner, safer, and true.

I want to be such a body. I am turning toward Crone. The woman whose advice you seek. No longer the maiden nor mother who chases others with what she thinks they should do. You will find her by water or in the woods. She will emerge from behind a tree where you sit, weeping and lost, on rock. You will say What should I do? And she will say, This. Child, do this. And you will do it.

And it won’t only be the This that does the work. It will be her Knowing. Her coherence. Her time spent with nettle or in the company of birds. Her devotion to smoke and numbers and following directions. She will be almost friendless, I think. But not lonely.

Because she will know Where she is, which is Who she is.

And your body, near her body, will hum.

And there we are.