COMING BACK TO OUR CENTER:

Finding Our Inner Centre

What does it actually mean to find our inner centre? It's about turning attention inward — towards the central part of ourselves. Towards the inner core of our torso. Some people feel it closer to the centre of the chest, others in the abdomen, and for some, both at once.

How did I come to feel and recognise this inner place in myself? Through meditations in which the invitation was to imagine a hollow centre — like a bamboo cane, a cup, or a beam of light — or alternatively a solid, opaque core, feeling myself as a tree and sensing its trunk and its innermost part. Each person will find the image or suggestion that best allows them to connect with the deepest centre of their body.

I understand this can be quite difficult to perceive for some people, as it is rather subtle and subjective — it is not as tangible as feeling a hand or a foot. It is about noticing that inner space that remains still even as various bodily sensations or emotions come and go.

For me, connecting with this inner space — or "trunk," however I happen to feel it — allows me to return to myself. When I am with other people and I get drawn into their stories, needs, and emotions, or when my mind travels to the past or the future (wonderful or catastrophic), it is finding that anchor in the body that brings me back.

When I need to make a decision, this is the place within me that I consult. When pain overwhelms me, this centre is the foundation beneath whatever emotions I am feeling — the place I seek and try to hold onto while the emotional wave passes.

Connecting with this place is what allows me to feel authentic. It is what allows me to access my own truths and to recognise whether or not I am living in alignment with them.

It is that intimate place where I meet myself — where I can hold myself, cradle myself, appreciate myself, or embrace myself, depending on what I am going through and what I need in any given moment.

One of the most important things that meditation and Gestalt Therapy have taught me is how to feel increasingly at home within myself — to connect through the body with what it actually means to "be inside," and to slowly practise feeling that, and honouring it in my actions, more and more.

I believe that connecting with our centre is also essential because it is in our body that we come to feel our own worth as human beings. Not only through what our mind tells us we have achieved, or what we are supposed to have done "right or wrong" — but rather through the ability to connect with a kind of tenderness towards ourselves simply for existing. That gentle sense of "how good it is to be me and to be here" — our value as a human being, which goes beyond anything words can fully express.

It is so important that we are able to feel this — and the good news is that if we don't feel it yet, we can practise this connection, gradually feeling it more and more.

Connecting with our centre and our intrinsic worth also allows us to feel satisfaction and fulfilment. "We are already enough." "We are already worthy." We don't need to keep chasing the carrot, endlessly adding to our list of tasks or achievements before we allow ourselves to feel our own value. We can practise every day to connect more deeply with that feeling, rather than constantly pushing ourselves to accomplish things, earn recognition, or receive love from others in order to feel worthy. This doesn't mean we will stop doing things, setting goals, or engaging with others — but it may mean that we do so from a place of pleasure, genuine desire, and abundance, rather than from a sense of unworthiness. And as you can imagine, the result can be very different.

I also believe it is vital to connect with our centre so that we have somewhere to hold on to when things don't go as we'd hoped — when the outside world hurts, frightens, or angers us. It is this centre we can anchor ourselves to when there is no one else, and when we realise that most of what happens outside is connected to what is happening inside. When the outer world shakes, or when what we see in our relationships, in life, or in ourselves is not what we'd like, the only safe place to return to is this centre. That place deeper than our own judgements and those of others — deeper than life's uncertainty, deeper than everything that wobbles or presses in on us. Returning again and again to the centre, that epicentre of our being. The place where the hurricane cannot reach, where we can feel a little safer and let the storm pass. It is in this epicentre that we settle, with ever-growing ease, trust, and humanity.

Returning to the centre — beyond identifying this inner bodily space — also carries the dimension of finding our balance. Bringing attention and priority back to ourselves when it has been focused outward, or on others. And though we use this as a metaphor for finding equilibrium, I believe it becomes much easier in our lives when it is also more clearly felt within the body and within our interoception (our inner perception).

So let us keep practising, again and again, this return — to feel centred, to reclaim our worth, our calm, our sense of safety, our support in the face of adversity.