Finding the Story of Centre

How true is our centre?

We all need a reference point, some way of knowing where we are now, so that we can locate ourselves in a place that makes some sense. We use story as a kind of map, and that helps us understand where we’ve been, where we are now and where we might go. But how do we know if the story of the map, or the map of the story is true?

‘Centre’ is a way we might describe how and where we might locate our sense of SELF in the midst of experience – where everything connected to that point, comes together as a unique and integrated expression of our life unfolding in that moment.

From this centre we get a perspective, and from this perspective we come to conclusions about where we are, and how we are.

The conclusions we construct however, depend on what sense we have come to make of the map – how we interpret it. For example, Dr Stephen Porges in his Polyvagal theory talks about ‘neuroception’, which is a facility of the nervous system to unconsciously scan the internal and external environment and then label the information as safe or threatening. The ‘lens’ of the system is ‘tuned’ by past experience.

We all see differently

This means that everybody ‘sees’ the map of the world differently, according to how it’s been so far for them. Threat and safety of course are only two ways of labelling the map but these concepts are of particular resonant interest to us. They function as polarities and so wherever we find ourselves on the continuum between the two, accordingly dictates the view. Am I safe here, or am I at risk?

If the story of our map tells us that the world is dangerous, meaningless or unfair, and that we are deficient or unworthy, then those conclusions become a perspective and our psychology and physiology will reflect that, we become accustomed to living with the stress response switched on, and our health will suffer.

As a clinician, people come to see me because something doesn’t feel right. Another way of describing it might be to say, looking for balance, health or centre.

So we could start by questioning whether the story of our map is true? Does it reflect a true centre?

Beautiful questions

This is what I call a ‘beautiful question’. Some questions, if asked gently and then held with care, have the potential to open us into something more expansive and wholesome.

I’m fascinated by the way that everything that happens seems to have a potential to either close us down into familiar patterns of fear and defence, or open us into growth and opportunity. It’s as though at every point we are faced with a choice, either to be trapped or to be free – how should we map our way to freedom?

The moment of choice

Maybe the centre we are looking for begins to establish itself with a simple awareness of that moment of choice. When something happens, can we accept it and take the responsibility to try and hold enough space and presence to breathe life into it, whatever it is. Within this, is the discovery and awareness that in every single moment everything is falling away just as everything is also arising. So the practice is to grow the place in which we can choose between the rising and the falling.

When up and down are the same

I love the way the writer Iain McGilchrist talks about the ‘co-incidence of opposites’, which describes the observation that everything exists as part of a polarity between one thing and another. Up and down, good and bad, light and dark, love and fear and so on. We are always operating somewhere along the continuum of multiple polarities at the same time.

It seems to me that the fulcrum that connects opposites is that place of stillness where each become one. The very strange thing about opposites is that one can’t exist without the other, each opposes and yet is dependent on the other. At some hard to imagine point on the see-saw, there is a point where up and down are the same.

Maybe it’s the same with locating the centre of our experience. If we can hold enough presence and stillness we might realise that we can sense the extremes of whatever polarity we bring attention to, and so embodying the fulcrum.

Presence as a shifting fulcrum

In this way, if we become the fulcrum for safety and threat, then in theory we become the space that holds both. If we keep that fulcrum as an embodied reference we can move up and down the continuum in the way that life always demands, and still retain the knowledge of each in the other. So we adopt the shifting fulcrum of experience as our centre, and we begin to feel the conviction of that as ballast.

Realising the phenomenon of ‘each in the other’ grants us wisdom, I think. We can move into fear with the knowledge of love to keep us courageous and open, and we can move into love with the knowledge of loss to keep us grounded in gratitude and clear.

To me this resonates as a true way of finding our centre and sense of self. And of course, once we can do that we start to feel safer and again, our biology and physiology reflect that, and will re-allocate energy and resources to heal, rather than defend.

Lastly, here’s a passage by Iain McGilchrist from his book ‘The Matter with Things’.

‘Dividing the united, uniting the divided, is the very life of Nature; this is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal coalescence and separation, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, and where our existence is woven.’

This is the territory within which I work as a Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist. If this post floats your boat, I’d love you to get in touch.