The Secret to Writing Your Life
By K.M. Brown for Medium
Make space for your inner voice with Proprioceptive Writing
When you hear the term “sixth sense” you may think of someone with a highly developed or even psychic intuition. But we all actually have a sixth sense, known as proprioception, that helps us feel our body’s location in relation to the surrounding space. You can pluck a strawberry and pop it in your mouth without looking in a mirror because your hand knows where your mouth is. You can walk down a sidewalk without watching your steps because your feet know where the ground is. You can bring your fingers up to scratch your nose when it itches without accidentally running your nails across your ear instead. We constantly rely on our proprioceptive sensors to transmit information to the brain, a communication that allows us to stand, sit, lie, and move through space with ease.
But the inner space isn’t always as easy to navigate. While we trust our proprioceptive senses to carry our bodies reliably through the world, we have less faith in our inner voice’s ability to carry our words. We struggle to even hear it, at times. It has a lot of competition for our attention.
But a technique known as Proprioceptive Writing can help you get past the distractions. Its practice will enable you to tune in to your thoughts and emotions by routinely making space for them, writing them down, and listening to yourself read what you wrote. Although Proprioceptive Writing isn’t intended to produce a marketable product, it’s an invaluable practice for professional writers because it reveals your unique voice — that signature stamp of self-expression that makes each one of us stand out from all the others.