Have You Found Your Center?

There is something reassuring about being asked to find one’s center. Whether it comes to us through a yoga class, a wellbeing book or an old friend, the call gives us permission to pause and breathe, sit for a moment and observe ourselves until we feel more at ease. It reminds us that, regardless of any momentary stress or dissonance, it is always possible to return to a more settled state of being. 

When asked to find our centre,  we implicitly understand that what is being gestured towards here is something of a subtle and somatic quality. We are being softly guided to a certain feeling of centeredness that can yield a sense of calm and most of the time, that is exactly what we need and there is no need to inquire further.

Yet if we do let the question linger for a little longer, we notice there is in fact something perplexing about calls to look for our “center”. I have for long felt quietly conflicted about how to locate and approach my own center, including whether it has a deeper substance beyond those fleeting sensations of calm. While I’ve grown curious about traditional concepts that denote vital centers within the living human body—from the yogic chakras to the Daoist dantian (or tanden) and the Japanese hara—something in me has resisted adopting these notions and practices wholesale. Perhaps the issue lies less in the underlying embodied traditions and more with how connecting with one’s center has become framed in contemporary usage. 

Many of us find it incredibly difficult to achieve a sense of security and wholeness at a day-to-day level, which is why we are rendered susceptible to various forms of guidance that promise to bring us precisely those things. The advocates of diverse “centering” or “grounding” methods reassure us that no matter how lost or frazzled we might feel, each of us ultimately possesses a stable and inalienable center that can be recovered. Yet, when caught up in this dynamic, do we slip into a strange trap where an “I” pursues a seemingly separate “center”, preventing us from journeying towards genuine unity?

Consider how this pattern might affect us when we begin to pursue centeredness through notions such as tanden and hara. While I find enormous value in studying embodied practices founded upon ideas of ki energy and I see plenty of value in cultivating the hara (the lower abdomen) as a fundamental seat of one’s energy and existence, complications emerge when such cultivation transforms into a pursuit of a separate center-as-an-object within ourselves. If we begin to obsess over one important somatic experience or center, it is at the expense of the totality of which they are part. 

The same tension surfaces when thinking on the notion of jiku (軸; literally, an axis or a wick). Its common connotations as a virtuous quality of personal firmness or strong posture in social interactions means that we can feel the need to intentionally develop our own jiku in this sense or even be ordered by others to cultivate it to reach a higher degree of maturity (as in, “grow a stronger backbone!”). However, jiku can also be treated as an integrated and far less fixed dimension within our being. By approaching it in this way, it can be cast as a fertile starting point for sensing into one’s state of being amid continued outer and inner change. Trying on this fluid perspective, the rigid commonplace connotations of jiku—as an unyielding rod-like core we ought to cultivate—all but dissolve, drawing us to the realm of the holistic and the sensorial.

This shift recalls the work of philosopher Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) for whom any notion of centering or finding one’s existential ground was ultimately rooted in something called “pure experience” (junsui taiken). Drawing on both Zen Buddhism and contemporary Western thought, Nishida viewed pure experience as tantamount to an undivided way of being, manifesting vividly in moments of beauty such as when we observe a butterfly flutter through the fragrant air around us, or immerse ourselves in the flow of a captivating story or a song. It is something that requires no justification, for no abstract theory or explanation could be more real than that experience itself. Pure experience, in my own understanding, consists of the experiencer experiencing themself and the seamless flow of life around them as one unified whole, without separation or fixed boundaries. In pure experience, our awareness unfolds as a single field of light where the body, the mind and our environment are felt to be integrated and nothing can be reduced to any subordinate phenomenon or focal point at the expense of the whole. 

This leads us to a vital insight with regards to the question of our center. The point is not that we “possess” a center or that we should single-mindedly cultivate a specific core part within ourselves. It is rather that we are a center. In meditation, we feel this truth when the physical sense of sitting and breathing transforms into an effortless quietude or a glow that envelopes us entirely. In martial arts, we experience it when we move as one unified entity, where the movement and our being become inseparable. Exploring a forest path, we detect it when, rather than being focused on the weight of each step we take, movement occurs seamlessly as our bodies blend with the environment. Such experiences show us we are but one unified, embodied whole, anchored in our own totality as well as the world around us. The relational nature of our existence notwithstanding, we exist as an integrated individual center of awareness and experience. 

It is this simple realization that captures the deeper learnings concealed within the popular notion of centering. “Finding one’s center” now means nothing less than a return to wholeness through pure experience, based on a profound sense of being a sovereign center of awareness. Having taken this step, I am thankful for having encountered casual approaches to centering for they prompted me to explore further so that I could arrive at a more deeply rooted understanding that better aligns with my own felt reality.

Allow me to leave you with the words of Nishida himself whose philosophy, as set out in An Inquiry into the Good (1921/1987), suggests that if you find your center, you may have discovered not just your undivided self but also your true personality along with its unifying powers:

“The true unity of consciousness is a pure and simple activity that comes forth of itself, unhindered by oneself; it is the original state of independent, self-sufficient consciousness, with no distinction among knowledge, feeling, and volition, and no separation of subject and object. At this time our true personality expresses itself in its entirety. Personality therefore is not found in mere reason or desire, much less in unconscious impulses; like the inspiration of a genius, it is an infinitely unifying power that functions directly and spontaneously from within each individual. [I]f we assume that phenomena of consciousness are the only reality, then our personalities are the activity of the unifying power of the universe. In other words, our personalities are the particular forms in which the sole reality—which transcends the distinction between mind and matter—manifests itself according to circumstances (130-131).”

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