Schema as Gravity
The Orbits We Inherit and the Fields We Can Shape
Human beings are not free-floating in the cosmos. We don’t move like photons or bend like waves. We become calcified — our lives pulled into orbits we rarely question. The planets don’t choose their paths; they loop endlessly under gravity’s law. And in many ways, so do we.
Psychology has a word for these inner orbits: schemas. A schema is an invisible framework that shapes how we interpret experience, recall memory, and predict the future. They form in childhood, harden through repetition, and bend reality around them like gravitational wells.
A child harshly criticized may grow a schema: “criticism equals danger.”
A child who receives love only for achievement may grow a schema: “I am valuable only when I perform.”
A child abandoned may grow a schema: “connection always leads to loss.”
These are not just ideas. They are gravitational fields. Every new experience is pulled into their orbit. Praise becomes pressure. Feedback becomes threat. Love becomes fear.
The Ache as Mass
In cosmology, the pull of a planet comes from its mass. In psychology, the pull of a schema comes from what I call ache. Ache is the emotional density that makes certain memories heavy. A joyful moment may drift by like a comet, while one humiliation can exert force for decades. Ache gives schemas their mass — and mass determines orbit.
The Problem of Unconscious Orbits
Most of us live as if we are planets, unaware of our gravity. We repeat relationships, replicate failures, collapse into the same reactions again and again. Different events, same orbit. The ache keeps us circling.
But here’s the difference between us and Saturn… we are not condemned to our gravity. Consciousness can notice the orbit. Presence can hold the field. And practice can redistribute the mass.
Redistributing Gravity
Schemas can be worked with. Through presence, interpretation, and embodiment, we can:
Map our orbits (which memories and aches exert the strongest pull).
Disrupt them (small counter-orbits that contradict the old rules).
Re-code them (rewriting the law of motion by reframing memory).
Embody new gravity (anchoring fresh patterns in posture, breath, relationship).
When we do this, we stop being passive planets circling a dead sun. We become architects of our own gravitational fields, able to shape the pull that organizes our lives.
Consciousness as the Force of Choice
This is the crucial point: the planets don’t choose, but we can. Consciousness is what bends the rules. It’s the one force in the universe that can look at its own orbit and say, no more. That act of refusal, of reconfiguration, is not just psychology, it is existential freedom.
If schemas are inner gravity-fields, then consciousness itself may be a planetary field — an Earth-sized orbit we are only beginning to notice. Perhaps we are fragments of a larger intelligence, waking up within its pull, realizing that we can co-shape not only our personal orbits but the collective field we all inhabit.
That is where we turn next, the gravity of consciousness itself.