Keep one-point
Centering means “collecting to a point.” Wherever we focus our attention is where we “collect.” This means we have a movable center. We can practice centering in negative energies: lust, anger, jealousy, worry, guilt, anxiety, fear, greed, hatred. We can center in abstract thought. We can center in caring love, in compassion. We can center ourselves in another person. We can center in immovable stillness. We can center in the moment’s ceaseless movement.
Centering is a felt phenomenon. Have you ever walked a railroad track, a balance beam, a fallen log, or the top of a concrete wall? When you were doing so, you were centering. Recall the experience. You feel and act one way while balancing (safe, serene, breath flowing easily, no thoughts, no worry) and another way when unbalanced (held breath, tightened muscles, flailing arms, visions of doom, alarm, and insecurity).
Centering is associated with attention. If you let your awareness rest comfortably at your balance point, you remain centered and balanced. If your attention goes elsewhere (thoughts of falling or daydreaming distraction), you become uncentered, off-balance. Centering is grounding, condensing, and deepening.
Centering is a fluid, dynamic process. One does not become centered once and forever. One practices centering. “Experts” are those who constantly practice. Centering in the morning, centering in the evening, centering at suppertime. Centering while sleeping. Centering while working. Centering while driving. Centering while walking. Centering while talking. One is always centering. One is performing a definable action, a clear cut maneuver.
The warrior of spirit can, through awareness and attention, collect to any point of choice. Whatever is attended to becomes the warrior’s center. Though there are many useful and valuable centers, our warrior ancestors have found one particular center which allows access to all other centers. For a warrior of spirit, inviting and allowing attention to settle to this vital spot is essential.
Centering involves collecting yourself to the spot just below your navel and deep inside via breathing, perhaps even envisioning and sensing the submolecular dimensions of this point. Allowing attention to settle to this vital spot is useful for detrancing yourself and opening to the current flow of reality.
This place of centering is called by different names: center of balance, one-point, and balance point. All refer to the place just below your navel and deep inside.
Finding Center
All humans are members of one tribe: the Navel Tribe. We are all plucked from the same vine. A first step in finding your one-point is to find your plucked place: your navel. Put the palm of your hand on the spot just below the navel. The place beneath your hand contains the one-point. This place is also your physical center of balance.
For a moment keep your hand glued to this place. Take your other hand, lightly grasp the “glued” hand and pull outward from there. This place you feel being pulled is your center of balance. This is the location of your internal gyroscope, of your center of balance, of your one-point.
[If you are in a wheel or motorized chair, your physical center of balance may be in another location, possibly higher up in your body or down in the chair itself. Take a moment and sense its location. See if you can sense moving from there.]
Small Bowl of Water
Another way to practice moving from your center is through the use of your imagination. Visualize a small bowl of water at your one-point location. The bowl can be as simple or ornate as you wish (mine is a small wooden bowl filled with clear cool spring water). You may wish to get sloshing out of your system by deliberately walking in a way that sloshes the water out of your bowl. Do this in a spirit of fun and laughter.
When done sloshing, settle for a while, ensure your bowl is refilled. Now walk around without disturbing the still surface of the water. A common tendency is to walk stiffly while holding one’s breath (for fear of spilling the water). Walk with ease, with relaxed arms and legs. Breathe deeply and slowly and smoothly.
The Head / One-Point Comparison
This exercise is designed to allow direct experiencing of the difference in moving from the one-point and moving from the head. The head is chosen as a comparison point because most of us are accustomed to living in our heads. We move around preoccupied with internal chatter (sometimes called “rooftop” chatter).
Place the palm of one hand on your forehead. Imagine that it is stuck there. Begin walking by grasping the stuck hand with your other hand and pulling. Continue to pull yourself along. Sense how it feels to move when your attention is focused within your head. [Many people on my university campus walk from their heads. Some of them even walk with their heads preceding the rest of their body.]
Now place your hand just below your navel and pull from there with the other hand. Walk from this place of one-point for a while. Sense how it feels.
Switch back and forth, walking from the head, walking from the one-point until you can vividly sense the difference in balance, in mood, and in awareness. Say the differences aloud or write them down so that the intellect, as well as the body, can comprehend.
Mindfulness of One-Point in Daily Life
In the beginnings of practice, one-point is maintained, like any other skill, only through conscious awareness. Moving, living, and opening from one-point eventually becomes as familiar as breathing: no thinking required. A way to practice the maintaining of one-point is, upon awakening, to consciously go to the one-point, get out of bed from the one-point, let the one-point take you to your morning rituals, move from the one-point through the day. Drive from the one-point. Eat from the one-point. Talk from the one-point. Listen from the one-point. Write or “keyboard” from the one-point. Walk from the one-point. Sit down and get up from the one-point.
One-Point Walking
Observe a child learning to walk. The child gets up, falls down, gets up, and so on. [The child is like a small samurai embodying the warrior admonition: “Seven times down, eight times up!”]
As my son Phil has so aptly pointed out to me, walking is the art of controlled falling. This controlled falling is learned so well that our continuous balancing is largely out of awareness. Balancing is a process that never stops, a process that eventually occurs at infinitesimal levels.
Since meditation can be defined as a continuous aligning with the middle (medi), as an inner balancing, walking can be consciously meditational. Walking can be moving meditation.
Connecting Heart and One-Point
To develop an even stronger sense of the one-point, you may wish to practice breathing into your heart and down to the one-point. Stand with weight equally distributed on both feet, which are about shoulder width apart and flat on the floor or ground. Visualize, sense, and feel the crown of your head as suspending from a heavenly cord. Breathe in to your heart area. When breathing out, breathe down to the one-point.
The heart begins to receive more energy, to be bathed in energy, to energize. The one-point becomes more firm, calmer, more dynamically still. Instead of living only in your head, you are practicing residing in the one-point and in the heart. You are beginning the practice of going out of your mind and into the Mind.
Grounding Exercise
Settle. Relax. Breathe. Allow the upper body to be suspended from a heavenly cord attached to the crown of your head. Turn your awareness to the balance points on the soles of your feet. Visualize roots growing out of these points into the ground. Let your awareness move to the submolecular level by sensing the root tips as one-cell thick, so small they can move into the tiniest crevices of the earth. Sense the root tips gently moving into and through these crevices. Allow your roots to grow.
Midline Power
The midline of the body is the place projecting greatest power and energy. This bodily line proceeds from the mid-sagittal suture at the crown of the head downward through the body, a razor thin line between the right and left sides of the body. One projects energy outward from this line. When focusing (on anything!), align this area with the exact center of the point of focus.
For example, if sitting at a keyboard, align the midline of the body with the keyboard, directly facing it. This allows balanced responsive movement with the entire keyboard.
When ready, allow your midline awareness to extend beyond the head to the limitless sky (the sky becomes one’s head) and through the earth so that you are rooted and grounded in the earth. If you wish, allow the midline to extend through the earth and out into the sky on the other side of the earthly sphere. Your midline then goes from sky to sky while firmly anchored in the earth.
Allow awareness to return again and again throughout the day to your midline (from head to ground). This can produce an exquisite sense of balance.
Stance and Midline: The Earthly Triangle
You may often find yourself standing with your feet together, as if your ankles are tied together with a rope. This makes you a pushover. A more balanced way of standing is with the feet about shoulder width apart, toes pointing forward, knees slightly bent.
Allow your midline to be poised between heaven and earth as described above. Allow awareness to settle at the soles of your feet. Subtly shift your weight toward the toes. Notice the sensation of balance/imbalance as you do so. Allow your weight to slowly shift to the heels. Notice when you have shifted too far back.
Continue this slow movement back and forth until you sense the center point, the center of balance for each foot. Visualize this balance point as a small circular spot on the sole of each foot. These spheres of balance of the feet when connected by an imaginary horizontal line form the bottom line of your Earthly Triangle.
Become increasingly aware of your one-point, the balance point about two inches below your navel. Open to an awareness of the connection of the one-point with the balance point on the sole of the left foot and on the sole of the right foot. Sense the existence of your Earthly Triangle: an isosceles triangle with its apex at the one-point. Visualize internal energy moving up, down, across, and around the triangle.
Your Centering Practice
For this manual to be of any practical use to you, it is essential that you find and adopt centering practices that are most natural and suited to you. Perhaps it is imaging the small bowl of water at your core as you move through the day, or one of the other practices described above. Perhaps it is none of those.
Take a few moments and open to understanding what you do naturally that allows you to settle and center. Or, if you do not already have a centering practice, which of the above practices or variation of one of these practices might you embody in your daily life? Choose only one at this time.
