Centering

How to Center

Where is your center? What does it mean to be centered? Or, for that matter, what does it mean to be in the present moment? Is it self-centered to be centered? How do we relate to the world around us? How do we deal with the stresses and challenges of life? How much of ourselves should we sacrifice for others? Is centering a selfish act or an act of love?

Our culture, with its many advances and technology, has caused great disconnection - from nature, from each other, and worst of all, from ourselves. We’ve reached amazing heights in science, technology, and social networking. It has defined for us how to be successful, productive, and to do what is expected of us. But in the process, humans have become more disconnected, stressed, and unhappy. Think about it. These are all of the things that are outside of us. What about what’s inside us? We’ve lost our ability to find our center. 

Centering is about balance. It’s about awareness. As I’ve discussed before, it's about what we’re paying attention to. If we’re paying too much attention to the stuff outside of us, we can’t be centered. We can’t be centered if our attention is only on the stuff outside of us. 

When we can center within ourselves, we feel more balanced, the more inner wisdom is available to us, and the better we are able to be kind and loving to those around us. 

Being centered within ourselves means we access the connection between our mind, body, and spirit. I think of these as concentric circles, one within the other. And you can decide for yourself which one is in the very center. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter -  because our mind, body, and spirit are completely interconnected. The more we allow our awareness to become centered, the more integrated we are into our humanness. When we’re centered, we’re “grounded”, and the more our body can maintain its capacity for self-healing and, the more our spirit can do what it's here to do. The more we can sense and drop in and remember our center, the more we have a sense of self.

“We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” These words are attributed to the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I find this a useful way to consider how we can center ourselves. If we’re spirits having a human experience, that means we’re spirits living in a body. If our spirit is going to be fully human, it needs to be fully incarnate and engaged with our humanness. This starts with being centered within our body. 

If you’ve been working with me or taken one of my courses, you’ve already learned to check (and maybe you’re even checking in this very moment) where your attention is. If our attention is in our head or outside of ourselves, things don’t feel as good or work as well as they can. I know many of you have had some amazing “aha” moments and successes in your life because you’ve learned to use your attention to feel more centered.

How do we use our body to center? We drop into it. We tune in. We sense. We feel. 

Centering doesn’t happen through thinking. It happens through experiencing, perceiving, and awareness. Don’t think. Feel. 

Through awareness of our mind, body,  & spirit connection, we can wake up to ourselves as human beings living in a body on planet Earth. Consciousness and awareness happen through paying attention. Paying attention to our attention. Many of you have already learned my method of how to drop into the body, and to use a bit of imagination to start to connect to something beautiful inside you that feels good. Take a moment to drop in and pay attention to your attention. 

What I’ve found is that the fastest and easiest way to center ourselves is to get our attention in our body. For most people, it works best when we put our attention in the lower part of the body, our abdomen, legs, or feet. It’s often easiest to imagine and sense that our body is water or fluffy clouds (this isn’t too far from the truth, actually, because we’re about 70% water).  Keep connecting to those nice feelings, whatever they are for you. It's about feeling the good stuff that’s within all of us. 

Does it feel good? Do you feel a bit more calm? If it’s a challenge, that’s okay; just keep dropping down into the lower part of your body and connecting to those good feelings. The more attention we pay to the good and positive feelings in a place more centered within our body, the more our body is able to access its own state of equilibrium, and even better, it’s the state where our body’s parasympathetic nervous system can be more active, and the body’s self-healing mechanisms can do their thing. Are you still feeling that good feeling? If you are, this is the simplest method, the breadcrumbs to your own Center. It’s a simple but profoundly effective way of centering. The more you do it, the more centered you can be more of the time.

If we know our own center, we have a better sense of our outer edges. From our center, we can better determine our own healthy boundaries. From our center we have a perspective, a vantage point where we can see more clearly. The better we know our own center, the better we can know how to love ourselves so we can know how to love those around us. Our center includes our heart, but we are more than just our heart. We are a whole and embodied being and when we can center, we can have more access to our wholeness, our whole self. Are you still feeling your center? Can you stay with it? Stay centered?

From our center, we can love better, connect to nature, rewire our own nervous system, access spirit, and heal on many levels. 

The more we center, the better we can know ourselves. We can listen to those gut feelings. We can find our own inner wisdom and the wisdom of all of creation that flows through everything.

Through centering, we can find balance. We can be in the present moment. We can know peace. 

We can Be.