This week a drone struck the edge of a nuclear power plant in the UAE. Russia fired over 500 drones and missiles into Ukraine in a single night. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Two Navy jets collided mid-air over Idaho. Railroad workers walked off the job in New York. A Senate parliamentarian blocked a billion dollars earmarked for a presidential ballroom.
And it is Monday. Again.
I don't say all of that to overwhelm you. I say it because I think it's important to know the weight of what we're actually carrying before we talk about how to carry it. There's a particular kind of gaslighting that happens when we skip straight to the coping strategies without acknowledging that the thing we're coping with is genuinely, objectively a lot. You are not catastrophizing. You are paying attention.
One thing I’ve learned in my education as both a meditation teacher and a personal trainer: there is a physical skill that exists specifically for what we are all being asked to do right now. It's called proprioception. And I think it might be the most useful concept I can offer you today.
Proprioception is your body's ability to know where it is in space. It is the sense that tells you where your foot is without looking at it, that keeps you upright when the ground shifts, that allows you to catch yourself mid-stumble before you fall. It’s balance, yes, but it is also so much more than that. It is your nervous system's constant, quiet conversation with the world around you, making thousands of micro-adjustments per second so that you can remain standing even when the ground underneath you is not entirely steady.
Here is what I find remarkable about it: proprioception does not require the ground to stop moving. It works precisely because the ground is moving. The adjustment is the skill, not the absence of disruption.
We are not going to get a steady ground right now. I don't think anyone paying attention genuinely believes that is coming soon. What we can develop instead is a better proprioceptive response; the internal capacity to register disruption without being toppled by it, to make the micro-adjustment, to find your footing again not because things have settled but because you have gotten better at settling yourself.
In the body this comes from practice. Balance training, proprioceptive work, deliberate exposure to unstable surfaces so your nervous system learns the vocabulary of instability and stops treating it as an emergency. The wobble stops being a crisis and becomes just information.
The same principle applies to the nervous system more broadly. What we practice we get better at. If we practice absorbing every piece of news as an emergency signal our nervous system becomes exquisitely tuned to emergency. If we practice returning to ourselves in a deliberate way, repeatedly, even if brief, then after each wave of disruption, we build. We are building capacity, rather than numbness or detachment.
The difference here is important. Numbness is the nervous system shutting down inputs it can no longer process. Capacity is the nervous system getting strong enough to process more without being destabilized by it. One closes you off. The other keeps you present.
So here is what I want to offer as a practical thing to carry into this week: every time you feel the wobble, be it the headline, the scroll, or the ambient dread that settles somewhere between your shoulder blades, take a few seconds and find one physical point of contact. Feet on the floor. Hands on a surface. The weight of yourself in your chair. Just locate yourself in your body, in your space, in this moment rather than the one the news is pulling you toward.
It is not a cure. It is a micro-adjustment. And micro-adjustments, made consistently enough, are how you stay standing.
With love, Cerissa