Tony is a powerful man behind the scenes in Washington, DC. He was a strategic adviser to several senators and later became a project consultant. His wife threatened to divorce him because of all his business trips. He was the one who really wanted children, and now he was barely home, she said. When he got sick, she wasn’t understanding. As he struggled to spend more time at home and help with the kids, he was torn by the jobs he turned down and worried about what she would do when he traveled.
Tony was an army brat who grew up and moved often. His experience is one that many people have had. He had not been abused or tormented, but he developed some patterns and beliefs about life that led him to act as if he had no say in how things were going, that he had to suck it up and shut up; that to be loved he had to keep his head down, work hard and follow the rules. She had been taught to shut out his aches and pains, fatigue, or worry, and move on. Since his father was away most of the time and they rarely had time to meet his neighbors, his mother turned to him for help and emotional support. Because his wife was career-oriented and assertive about her needs, he had thought she was the opposite of his mother. But as is often the case, the superficial difference hid their underlying similarities. He found himself accepting and appeasing his wife just as he had his mother.
When he started working with me, Tony wasn’t aware of his repeating patterns. He only knew that he was worried because his career and his children were suffering, he had no idea how to alleviate the situation. He mentioned in passing that he had had a few accidents: a collision with a fender, a bad cut, and that he had fallen down the basement stairs. He did not make a connection between accident proneness and the stress he faced.
Central to our work together was discovering and making known how Tony relates to himself and the important women in his life. To know what to do to improve his life, he needed to learn to listen to himself and value his feelings and needs.
Tony’s main difficulty was that he couldn’t stay grounded in himself so that his perspective could remain congruent with his point of view. He needed to learn to focus.
Your center is the place where you are aware of your being: your sense of your true self that is deeper and more permanent than your self-concept, your thoughts, or even your emotions. It is where you contact your essence. Your center has a location in your body, in your energy body and in your nervous system. It can be developed, with practice, as more neural synapses develop, based on your attention. (This correlates with the brain activities of the Tibetan monks in chapter three.) When you are centered, your sense of self becomes completely satisfying. It becomes the axis around which the rest of your multifaceted self is organized. In fact, the more you practice, the more organized, realigned, and grounded, the rest of your experience and awareness can become. When we center ourselves, we are literally in the eye of the storm, the center of the wheel of life.
Let’s say that, during the course of the day, you find yourself repeatedly bewildered by an upset with your boss, or worry about a friend, or worry about that sudden jolt in old wounds that dislocated your sense of time from dealing with a moody teenager to be at the mercy of your cold and indifferent father. (People spend much of their energy on these background ruminations.) These thoughts, memories, and feelings are somewhere on the spokes of the wheel of your experience. External events that impact you occur beyond the edge, but your reaction, or the extent to which you are drawn in, draws that event into the spokes. Even the deep pains and flashbacks are in the spokes. They are not at the core of who you are. If they feel like they are, you are not centered on the axis and your attention has been drawn to their location. Your investment of attention and energy is somewhere in the spokes or the rim of the wheel. As the wheel turns, or the whirlwind rushes by, your sense of self swirls with the events on which your attention is focused. This feels chaotic and overly exciting, so you may tend to rush or hide, swept up in the chaos of events without a clear reference point or sense of calm. When you’re spinning, it’s much easier to lose your balance or lose your objectivity or not see your own reactions clearly. While you’re out there, you’ll tend to feel more at the mercy of external events or feelings from the past, as well as hit by the other things that hit you. You may feel victimized by others as your power wears off. You may try to block out your feelings and take control, reasserting some sense of control. Either way, many people spend much of their lives as if they were in the cyclone with Dorothy in it. The Wizard of Oz.
When you can seat your awareness on the hub, the wheel of experience can turn as it pleases. The axis remains motionless and oriented, knowing which way is up, which way is true north. The storm may rage around you, but you can still be composed. This is the still point that is at the center of all things. When you get there consciously, greater nurturing and calmness and creativity grows. You can see the whole cyclone of life spinning around you – look! There goes a cow! There’s Dorothy’s house! – All while you’re in your rocking chair. Or, you may slip back into the whirlpool by clinging to some idea or feeling that flashes by. The devil is in the cyclone. That’s where you are when you turn on yourself and judge yourself harshly and think you’re bad. It takes practice to stay focused. This is what Buddhism and Taoism talk about when they train people through the stages of development of the mind and spirit in the practice of meditation. Christian and Sufi mystics have found the same place. Centering is the core of spiritual practice.
There is immense freedom and empowerment (and relief!) in being in the still point in the middle. Just seeing that the feelings (those terrifying feelings that you were afraid to address because you were sure that if you went into them you would find that they really define you, so you can never get out of them) are not really at the core of what you are. being frees you to relate to them differently. So it is possible not to drown in them or have to avoid them. They can be experienced, curiously observed and released.
You’ll discover how to really focus and what happens neurologically as you practice – how you can change your preset buttons, when my new book, Discover Joy: The Path Beyond Pain, Trauma, and Self-Destructive Patterns, Using Energy Dynamics, is published soon. In the meantime, sign up for the book’s newsletter and his blog, where you can find excerpts. For being more empowered by being more centered in your true self!