Interoception & Deep Freedom

I Am A Commitment to Raising An Army Of Love.

This leadership commitment was the unarticulated understanding I felt deep in the marrow of my bones. The summer of 2023 I was racked with a generalized anxiety, one that was not medically diagnosed but one under which I simply lived. Nearly every aspect of my life needed to shift, including my political leadership. For the prior 3.5 years I had poured my heart into building what is today what I still consider the most audacious and promising political project the U.S. south has seen this century. I had the awesome responsibility of building this organization by developing leaders, cofounding & refounding chapters, winning, losing & fighting in powerful campaigns, leading and supervising new organizers and overall being an extension of the culture I know our people deserve. I learned so much about the need for discipline, strategy, joy & generosity in my work and in my life, all of which I believed then and still believe today will forever nourish me and those I love in the years and life to come.

And yet something in me knew I needed to say yes to nothing less than everything I deserved. I couldn’t tell then, but what I longed for lived in me. I just needed to be a witness to that inner knowing.

Interoception is the human sense system of inner awareness. This sense system is both conscious and subconscious, and constitutes the integration of signals from the body into different regions of the brain which allows for highly accurate and useful rendering of the physiological and somatic state of the body. Not only does interoception make it possible to determine when you are hungry, or thirsty or when you need to visit the restroom, it also plays an active role in maintaining homeostasis and it facilitates the conscious and subconscious self awareness inherent in each of us.

It was this subconscious self-awareness that was making itself known to me. The practice of interoceptive witnessing, of accompanying the deep longings and callings that reside in me, allowed me to move towards an unambiguous calling for more life and greater leadership.

Today I am an organizer, teacher & coach. I am building a living maroon institution and a Black organizer and leadership school that envisions Black organizing that is powerful enough to develop mass bases needed to win on our issues, lead a multiracial alliance for justice and govern society. Not only that, this interoceptive witnessing ushered me into co-refounding the culture and collective practice of cadres in this state into a powerful fighting force. Not only that, interoceptive witnessing has set me up to support the rank and file base building and chapter building work of the organization I helped to found. These are each a sign and signal that listening to my inner knowing isn’t an immaterial wish casting. It is a physiological and historical reality that leads to more possibility.

The deep freedom of interoception.

note: This is part 3 of a 4 part series about my exploration of different human sense systems and their relationship to what I call deep freedom.