Finding Your Footing in an Unstable World
Balance has been looming large in my life this past year. I am still healing from two broken legs—and finding my footing has been a daily act of mindfulness. I am doing much better now, but most of the physical therapy I do involves strengthening and balancing. I do exercises where I balance on one foot while I increasingly making the platform itself more unstable by using a BOSU ball or a board that wobbles. Through these exercises I have been getting to know the feeling of wobbling and stability—each in their own measure. I am getting more familiar with which muscles support me and how they are connected to each other. I am getting more comfortable with being off-balance and finding my way back to center.
Balance relies on something called proprioception—your sense of yourself in space. The word proprioception comes from Latin meaning “one’s own” from the words individual and to grasp. To grasp your position in space, or to grasp your relationship to the world around you. Every time we grow, we need to expand our capacities and relearn proprioception—and every time we heal, we need to do the same.
“Proprioception, or kinesthesia, is the sense that lets us perceive the location, movement, and action of parts of the body. It encompasses a complex of sensations, including perception of joint position and movement, muscle force, and effort. These sensations arise from signals of sensory receptors in the muscle, skin, and joints, and from central signals related to motor output. Proprioception enables us to judge limb movements and positions, force, heaviness, stiffness, and viscosity. It combines with other senses to locate external objects relative to the body and contributes to body image. Proprioception is closely tied to the control of movement.[i]”
Proprioception is a confidence in knowing your edges—knowing where you begin and end. And we can expand this sense to anything we are connected to. It’s why we can know how big our car is and how to parallel park. It’s how a pilot can know the width of the plane wings. Or a kayaker can know where the paddle extends. Proprioception isn’t so much a process of stability as it is a sense of stability through a relationship to points in space.
We have been working a lot with leaders lately who lead where there is trauma—either their work is such that trauma is a routine part of the day, or they have been confronted by world events like the pandemic or war. Trauma shatters—and it seems to shatter stability the way breaking bones does. You lose your previous stability and connections to what you know. The old familiar ways of doing or knowing aren’t working anymore. You lose your confidence in finding your footing. You lose a sense of your edges, your boundaries—of knowing where you can find solidity. Finding stability when you have lost your footing isn’t easy.
As I relearn balance with my legs I need to grab onto to something solid a lot. I work on single-leg balancing and need to put a hand down to catch myself. And when you are leading through trauma, it can feel like you are grasping a lot. There is a lot of grasping for certainty—of who is right, and who is wrong. Of what good is. And what bad is. Trauma and instability make us long for something solid. We lose our ability to hold complexity and instead often make things black and white—in an attempt to narrow our choices and feel more in control.
We often mistake certainty for stability. Certainty masquerades as stability. It gives us the illusion of solid ground. But stability is actually a much more fluid and flexible state. Inherent in true stability is the ability to adjust, to flex. The ability to adjust in small, incremental ways. Solidity and stiffness actually get in the way.
To find your footing, you have to know where you are starting. Instead of being frustrated by the fact that it feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable, let those feelings be the reminder you need to pay attention and that you will need to learn something new. Finding your footing means being able to say where you are, and say what’s true for you—saying just one sentence at a time of how you feel, or what you feel the challenge is. And then you follow that up with inquiry: Where can I find my center? Where do I need to adjust? What am learning about myself and the people I work with? What practices will help me learn this new flexibility and balance? Learning to balance again requires attention. Finding your footing through trauma also requires attention. It requires tolerating the feeling of being off-balance.
©2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD
[i] J.L. Taylor, Proprioception, Editor(s): Larry R. Squire, Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, Academic Press, 2009,