Proprioception and Creative Incarnation - Michael Ellis

Proprioception is the sense of movement of joints and muscles in the body. It 

is different from interoception, the sense of the internal organs, including pain 

and hunger, and exteroception, which is the sense of the external world through 

sound, smell, outer-skin sensation etc. By its very nature, proprioception is an 

individual experience, of the movement in space of one’s body segments, in 

relation to each other, and to space and gravity.


When we begin to speak about proprioception, it is important to note the scale 

of the spectrum of experience that it refers to. It can refer to large movements of 

the limbs, such as the extension and abduction of the lower leg joint in a forward 

step, or it can refer to the fine sense of a small percentage rotation of the index 

finger in the transverse plane. So we are talking about a range of movements of 

some 360 joints of the human body of which we can have conscious awareness, 

to a greater or lesser degree of subtlety. 


For movement and embodiment practitioners, whether dancers, martial artists, 

yoga practitioners or sports people, proprioception is one of the primary 

dimensions of the experience of awareness of the human body. Within this sense, 

awareness can be developed and married to fine-motor control, as well as to 

sustained concentration on large joint movements. Fine motor control and large 

joint awareness and control can be melded to create conscious movement of an 

entire segment of the body, such as the shoulders, neck and arms. An awareness 

of whole body motion, as in the conscious awareness of a large number of joint 

movements at one time, can be developed and become a staple of conscious daily 

experience.


‘So what?’ might be a suitable response, but perhaps you might also permit me 

to argue a particular sentiment; First: It is the universality of proprioception 

that, seen clearly, allows a practitioner to work with the spatial dimension 

of consciousness itself, preceding any externally derived systemic structure. 

Second: ‘Creative Incarnation’ can be seen as the practice of developing 

proprioception in an individual and flexible manner, according to one’s individual 

desire or curiosity. Third: The spectrum of proprioception ability is such that a 

creative attitude to developing one’s body map can lead to manifold equally valid 

experiences of embodiment. Fourth and finally: The investment of attention in 

one’s developing proprioception can be an end in and of itself.


Proprioception, the universal sense.


Techniques such as the Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais are systems whose 

goal is better movement function, through awareness of movement. Qi-gong 

and Yoga are philosophically or spiritually orientated practices in which improved 

proprioception is either symptomatic or causal of progression. Indeed, both could 

be true. An Olympic swimming coach will train a swimmer to refine his stroke 

to get the best results from the interaction between arm and water. Likewise, 

a ballet instructor will teach a student to hold and move a limb in a precise 

range of motion. Good instructors are working on this level, being aware of the 

potential for awareness in the student. Essential to all of these embodiment 

practices is a developed proprioception. Similarly if you take, for instance, walking 

meditation and/or other ‘Zen’ orientated practices, or any practice of awareness 

of movement, already we are talking about proprioception. The foundation of a 

conscious walking practice is dependent on subtle proprioception. This universal 

dimension of bodily awareness is ever-present, immediately accessible, and 

perhaps most importantly, plastic. This is to say that the awareness is malleable. 

One’s body map is not fixed, it is changeable and subject to deepening awareness 

of movement. What this means is that any practice or learning of an action will 

change the body map of the practitioner. The motivations to practice are varied, 

and so we get in practitioners a wide range of results according to their practice. 

A boxer will have a developed proprioception relating to arm, head, neck and 

shoulder in the context of strike range and defensive maneuvers such as parries 

and ducks. The utility of training such special awareness for the sport of boxing is 

plain to see. Therefore we can say that proprioceptive development responds to 

the intention of the practice.


Body Attitude


Motivation is a complex topic to discuss, because it refers to a practitioner’s 

sense of purpose and meaning. It is easy to see that a sports person, being a 

competitive spirit, will train hard in order to win, to be the best they can be 

at their sport. What might be less common, or obvious, is that it is possible to 

cultivate a non-competitive practice (even dance can be highly competitive) of 

developing proprioception. There is something that happens when we take off 

the rigidity of competition or professionalism from the body. It can be described 

as an individual practice of moving, for the sake of the expansion of the embodied 

experience. It is true that external motivation is a powerful force, one that is 

made good use of in learning of all kinds. There may come a time, however, when 

ones practice, or the edges and context of one’s practice, (indeed the motivation 

itself), become vague and obscure to the external observer. What happens when 

there are experiences, available to and experienced by a person, which have no 

cultural or professional context? 


The human being in today’s world is shaped by powerful forces. It is true that 

we are educated with certain ideas and information, and that we pick up certain 

philosophies and attitudes towards life based on our intellectual atmosphere. 

We inherit certain emotional patterns, and importantly, an attitude towards 

ourselves. We develop a more or less functional sense of what it means to be a 

human. However, what is talked about sometimes, but perhaps not enough, is 

the way we are conditioned to relate to embodied, or incarnated experience, or 

in many cases, the lack of such experience. Needless to say, the body has been a 

scapegoat for much of humanities failings, and we are at a time when body image 

and body experience are often very different from each other, not to mention 

distorted by socio-cultural attitudes. 


Creative Incarnation


Each person is an incarnated experience, whether you take the view that we 

are ‘fallen angels’ as in esoteric philosophy or ‘risen apes’, as in evolutionary 

biology, it is no matter for this argument. The word incarnation here refers 

to the embodiment of consciousness, meaning that more body awareness 

is more incarnation; more awareness of subtle body experience is subtler 

incarnation, and so on. The point being that each person has either inherited or 

developed to a greater lesser degree, an individual set of patterns of incarnation. 

Underneath the patterns is the natural body itself. If we take that our patterns 

are malleable and respond to intention, we can see that incarnation is a flexible, 

individual process. ‘Creative Incarnation’ then, is a creative or original practice of 

incarnation. A painter paints, a guitar player plays guitar, a dancer dances, and 

each has access to their creative medium to the degree they have familiarized 

themselves with it. With the art of ‘Creative Incarnation’, there is never an action 

where conscious familiarization is not possible. If a painter, for example, is taught 

that good paintings only use the color red and vertical lines, they will have to 

take some risks if they want to experiment with horizontal lines and blue paint. 

Likewise, incarnation beyond the culturally, socially or religiously accepted norms 

will require some courage. And we’re not talking extremes here; sitting or lying 

down in an ‘inappropriate’ place has many social implications, let alone practicing 

spinal undulation in public.


Projection and the Unknown


For better or worse, human beings have the ability to imagine scenarios. The 

effectiveness of this ability in learning is obvious, and it is well documented 

that visualizations of future events assist in the learning context. The unknown 

aspects of life and experience are often liable to be subject to our imagination, 

and the experience of security is enough motivation to engage in this habit. 

What happens is that the gap of the unknown is filled, more or less, by our 

imagination. This imagination is informed by conceptual and visual sources that 

we have come in contact with. This might seem like a tangent, but I would like 

to propose an idea. What if the unknown is a fundamental principle of learning, 

and therefore life itself? We can intend to know everything, sure, but until we 

reach this perhaps mythical level of understanding, the unknown will continue 

to affect our experience. The motivation to explain or imagine away the anxiety 

of the unknown is sound, but what happens is that concepts intended to aid 

understanding can and often lead to limited experiences of life. Worse, when 

those concepts refer to or attempt to explain ourselves and our experience, we 

can end up with a limited experience of ourselves. Indeed, identity in the modern 

world is an external affair. If the unknown is the trigger for our formulation of or 

subscription to a particular conceptual paradigm, then does it not make sense to 

reclaim the unknown as an internal dimension? 


It is this final point which I would like to emphasize. It is the much unknown 

nature of our own direct experience that might lead us to reach for abstracted 

attitudes to life. In what ideas do we place our hopes, and how do these ideas 

relate to our experience? 


What happens if we cultivate a deliberate and conscious attitude towards 

the unknown within us? In this context, ‘Creative Incarnation’ could be self 

exploration, with no intention or desire to know the full extent of one’s 

experience, but rather as a function of consciousness itself. As soon as the 

unknown is supposedly eliminated within us, it must find a home, and therefore 

a conceptual mask, in the external world. It is possible to develop a practice of 

unfolding the unknown as a method of honoring it as the eternal unknown, with 

no intention to mask it with concept. As mentioned above, the investment of 

attention in one’s developing proprioception (in this case an internal, eternal 

unknown) can be an end in and of itself.


Proprioception, our experience of movement through space, not only from 

point A to point B, but of the space within us, responds to attentive practice by 

unfolding and deepening. 


If the doorway of immediacy is held open, life itself streams through.