Would you believe I had nearly forgotten what my center feels like? I have been on my Witchy little path for 25 years. For the past three years, I have dealt with cancer and its treatment and the aftermath. While I have certainly been doing the work for my healing, it changed my picture of who I am much more than I thought it possibly could. I truly didn't realize how much until just a few minutes ago. I sat to meditate, centered, and felt something I haven't felt in... well, three years. I've meditated, and centered - but I didn't quite feel like me.
So what is it to center? I've had countless discussions with very wise people from many spiritual paths. I've read book after book after book - and the best verbalization came from a fantasy novel by Mercedes Lackey. (I want to say Arrow's Flight. In fact, I'm 98% positive that's the book.) She referred to "the shape within your skin". By this she meant the feeling a person gets by being him or herself, as hard as possible. Paradoxically, you are yourself the most when you're trying the least - when you are simply totally involved in what is going on within you and without you. (Which was the title of a Beatles song, wasn't it?) When what you are doing or feeling gives that moment of being completely comfortable with being you; when you know that it is just so right that you ARE at that moment - you are at your center.
So, why center? On the surface, it gives us a chance to collect ourselves - to gather our feelings and thoughts and sensations and align them with each other, to focus on what comes next. Below that, it allows us to know what is ours - as opposed to what we have taken on from other people. We all take on so much - other people's problems and hopes and emotions and opinions. It's easy to become overwhelmed, to lose track of what we each feel. I need to know what I know within myself before I can offer healing to someone else. Or teaching. Or love.
We start from our center. Whether we are looking for God (by whatever number and name), or looking for self-actualization, or healing the planet, or deciding who to vote for, or hoping for the perfect mate - we start with ourselves. Centering is the first step to to recovering who I am.
Beautiful post. I find I am most Centered when I am in the woods, big surprise there. Perhaps, it's nothing more than knowing that there are no expectations to try and live up to when I'm there. I can simply take of the mask of what is expected and be what and whom I am. It also might explain the drive to strip down and run naked through the woods...or maybe that's just my own weird quirk.
ReplyDeleteAnd having checked, I was, in fact correct. The brief quotelet above is from the book "Arrow's Flight" by Mercedes Lackey.
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