Proprioception – Posture – Breathing – Being

An Introduction to Chapter 2 of How to Work Out

Proprioception means having an awareness of where you are in time and space, and posture is how you are or how you hold yourself in time and space. 

Proprioception examples: 

If you close your eyes and squeeze your fist, you know you are squeezing your fist even though you can’t see it.  

I know when my neighbors come and go by the sounds of their vehicles or dogs barking, when the mail comes, or when a plane is flying overhead. 

In the broader sense, as an American, I know that there is more meaning to some of the everyday ways time is spent- relying on gasoline, using an iPhone, simply sourcing food and water- having an awareness of what I consume can be a part-time job for someone who wants to live any sort of ethical lifestyle. And someone can rely on gasoline and factory-farmed meat their whole lives, never consider the implications, and still be a wonderful, helpful, respected part of their community, and that is reality. 

We have a limited amount of control over proprioception. I can close my eyes and imagine I’m in Hawaii swimming near a waterfall and feel like I’m there, or think about my Grandparent’s house in Dobbs Ferry and practically hear the clinking of dishes being washed, but I know it’s not reality. 

Even though I’ve never been to the middle east, or haven’t heard any bombs going off near me, or have never had to flee my home because of warfare, I know that that is someone’s very real reality, and my mind goes to those places a lot.

Let’s ricochet back Lee- In fitness or movement practices we intentionally challenge our proprioception by changing the position of our bodies, or our posture, under different types of tension, in different ways, to create different types of strength and resilience.    

Honestly I could talk about it for years.  

Yet with heartfelt reluctance, I refuse to market self-awareness and posture, if that makes sense. 

Figuring out how to express the many options and nuanced layers of holistic self-care, while still being marketable and direct as a coach is just one anomaly of the wellness world.

I would like to strive to spend more time in community, or active listening with people who I may learn from and who may want and benefit from my skills and knowledge- and less time explaining, correcting, or defending my beliefs on social media where everything seems so open to misinterpretation and misjudgment.

Especially during election seasons, I find an unsettling element of subtle underlying violence in trying to control or change how someone thinks or behaves, which only drives more distance between us and seems to be dragging out the long goodbye of the patriarchy.  

As the beginning of the end of 2024 looms over us, one of my values crystalizes- to be a source of ease and comfort to others and to let go of the need to be heard, to be right, to be valid. 

I hope this is one way we end the perpetuation of violence.           

I’m trying to find my voice in a wellness world that oscillates between the Yoga goddess claiming emotions live in our hips and so hip openers will make you cry (Marketable? Come to my yoga class where you might just “get to” cry in public!), and the ultra-capitalist “no one cares” rhetoric we hear at the gym and in American business spaces. 

Can I find something slightly more chill/warm and nuanced and still be marketable? Will anyone listen?

Moving away from the binaries that have constructed our realities for so long, we realize that life is not so good or evil, up or down, or half-light & half dark. 

We often live our lives by more of a ⅓ rule.  About a third of the time we’re in a state of health, a third of the time we’re… not, and a third of the time we’re in recovery or in-between. 

In movement practices, we spend about a third of the time performing the movements, a third of the time in rest or recovery, and a third of the time transitioning from movement to movement.  

When we learn about breathing and mindfulness practices, we learn the value of cultivating equanimity through our inhales and exhales, by acknowledging and emphasizing the pauses in between the breaths. 

Through parenting, I learned that while it may seem ideal for people in healthy relationships to be “happy” all the time, an actual reflection of a healthy intimate relationship shows that some of the time couples or family members are in complete alignment with one another, sometimes they are in conflict, and part of the time they are in a phase of reparation, recovery, and rebuilding trust post-conflict.  

The very word reparation gives us a clear example of how we can view this concept historically.

While it’s not particularly marketable, I think the more we can nurture and acknowledge one another during these periods of reconstruction the more resilient and successful we ultimately become as there will be less fluctuation between all of the extremes, and more understanding and balance. 

In meditation, rather than trying to banish or control the fluctuations of the mind, we 

just 

keep 

practicing.

Get distracted 

come back to the breath 

start to slouch 

come back to the spine 

begin to ruminate 

change the thought 

come back to the breath. 

If we practice enough, get lucky, or just get bored enough with the back and forth of our thoughts, maybe for a third of the time the mind clears. 

Maybe at first it’s only for two seconds.  

We re/member that since we can witness or observe our thoughts, they are separate from us, that there is something at the core of this neverending oscillation that we can trust to hold all the spokes in place- that is steadfast, that doesn’t fear or worry, that at least appears effortlessly still. We keep trying to go back to it and expand it, edging out the amount of time we spend entertaining the nagging at the forefront of our mind, maybe we change.        

We’re doing it all day every day unconsciously- when we sit in meditation we’re simply taking space to participate more consciously, fearlessly acting as a hopefully compassionate witness to undoubtedly the most destructive and violent entities that could damage or hurt us, our own thoughts.

Comedian John Mulaney describing this in the context of drug recovery in his “Baby J” release is on point:

This chapter of How To Work Out talks about breathing and posture, which are ideas I again approach with slight reluctance.  

In a world where we are so critical and competitive, so hard on ourselves and each other, leave it to white American Yogis to turn breathing into something that can be correct or incorrect, or even a competitive sport.  How loud is your Ujayi? How deep can you breathe? You even know Wimhof?

Here comes modern research to show that constricting or trying to control the breath in extreme ways for long periods doesn’t have some of the benefits we’ve claimed (mainly oxygenating the blood and moving “stagnant” air out of the body). I think we may have been overcomplicating something for the sake of marketability- how are coaches supposed to make money off of teaching people how to breathe? First, by convincing them that they are breathing insufficiently.  

Listen, I’m here to tell you right now that you are great, and that you couldn’t breathe incorrectly if you tried. I promise you that the systems in place in your body that ensure you are breathing, are more powerful than the coming and going of flickers of doubt in your mind, likely courtesy of a few generation’s worth of conditioning. I promise. 

Connecting the mind to the breath without needing to control or constrict, just simply observing,  taking the external feeds we are presented with every day, slowing down for a minute, taking a breath, and connecting them to a more internal world to make sense of reality and maybe find some peace through the process. It has more to do with the nervous system and giving ourselves an opportunity to move from the activated state we are often in when we are out and about, to a more reflective internal state where we are able to observe and process objectively, rather than percieve and feel. A lot of times when we are able to see our worries and insecurities from an objective zone, we realize that much of what we worry about is not rooted in reality, so we can figure out how to let go, and we become more resilient and strong mentally.

Often slowing down and taking a breath brings a wave of immediate comfort if a person is activated. However, long-term mindfulness practices, or trying to sit in meditation for longer periods is like any other practice, it’s not all waves of comfort- part of the time it’s frustrating and feels like “nothing is happening”, and part of the time it’s just kinda boring. 

As I get older I want to figure out how to lean into offering what I know as a source of comfort and ease- for others to resource themselves with, rather than as an authority who you should depend on, or who needs to depend on the insecurity of others to thrive.  I’ll always have faith that even if I never live to see a time when we are all equal, that at our core, we are all whole.

I want to spend less time explaining and defending why I think all the wars and genocide, racism, rape, domestic violence and violence are wrong. 

Explain to me why they are right.  I want to be kind enough to invite others to hear themselves the way that I have sat and heard myself when I needed to change; I want to give them the space, permission, and compassion to change the way that I’ve given it to myself. If we can hold ourselves accountable with compassion, we can work on holding each other accountable with the same, and then maybe we can be strong enough to unify and hold our leaders accountable.  

With all of that being said- here are some facts about breathing. I was trying to look at Joe Miller’s work and put it into my own words, but this 8 minute video is so succint and efficient I’m just going to share it this way:

Forthcoming chapter 2 will outline:

*belly breathing vs diaphramtic breathing

*”bracing” in strength training and how to utilize the breath during movement practices

*the relationship between the ribcage, pelvis, and spine, and how to determine if you have a narrow or wide ribcage, and what that means in the context of your posture

*a few Range of Motion tests that will help determine relative flexibility in the wrists, ankles, sholders, and hips

*a few different classic posture types and potential imbalances or injuries they may be prone to

Stay tuned!