Embodying Buber

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9. Gather yourself

Published by James Knight

| 4 min read

Summary

  1. Breathe a long, slow inhale up the length of your back, feeling it encourage your head higher.
  2. Allow a long, slow exhale to stroke down your front, releasing your ribcage, and encouraging a soft smile.
  3. Reach out to the corners of the room in front of you, as if welcoming friends to your party.
  4. Allow your arms and body to settle whilst that expansive state continues.

Having found the up and down directions of the vertical axis and the outward reach out into the world, we centre ourselves in the middle of that.

Centering, I say, is the discipline of bringing in (i.e. of sympathy or empathy) rather than leaving out. Of saying “Yes, Yes” to what we behold. To what is holy and what is unbearable. ~ Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person, M.C. Richards[1]

Everything's spinning

We are such small dots on this planet that we lose sight of this fact: everything is spinning. Our world is spinning on its axis. Our solar system is spinning around the sun. Time is cycles of days and seasons. Our focus is so myopic, and our interest in ourselves is so all-engaging, that we miss all the spinning.

Each one of us is standing right in the middle of all the spinning.

Returning home

Having lengthened and released our verticality, and reached out horizontally into the world, our final step is to re-gain that Centre[2]. All our efforts have been outwards so far, so this final step reminds us that we have a Centre in the middle of all that.

Many of us are reaching outwards and forwards towards other people, other things, other times[3]. Constantly doing so embeds imbalance into our physical and psychological structure. We become what we constantly do.

It is vital to our well-being that we regain equilibrium in our systems, to compensate for the forwards-ing and outwards-ing that we find ourselves doing most of the time.

Steps 1-3 have reached up, down, and out. Step 4 provides balance to all that: without collapsing or releasing the expansion, allow your arms to settle and momentarily place your attention at the centre of your abdomen.

We are not letting everything we've just done go; we are ensuring that we remain at the centre of all that extension, that we are not pulled off-kilter by it.

The discipline of bringing in

Wheel-potter M.C.Richards, whose quote is at the top, had a very clear experience of the effect of centering on the clay, on her poetry and on her life.

For in centering the clay on the potter's wheel, one centers down, yes, and then one immediately centers up! Down and up, wide and narrow, letting focus bear with it an expanded consciousness and letting a widened awareness (empathetic) have the commitment to detail of a focused attention.

She also wrote of the work required of us; centering is not just for feeling good, but being able to act under the pressure of anxiety or distraction, of refusal or demand.

We must be able to let it live in our bodies, in our hands, through our hands into the materials we work with. I sense this: that we must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration .. to dance and yet stand upright.

As inside, so outside

When we greet the world, we are declaring two distinct facts: this here is my space and I am friendly. They are distinct, but related. I can afford to be friendly precisely because this is my space[4].

In a world that is engaging and distracting, that is demanding our attention all the time, returning to our Centre offers us stability. It actually offers the world stability too. Hello world; welcome home becomes our embodied statement because we can find home wherever we are. That is clearly a gift to ourselves and others at the same time.

When we have a clear sense of Centre within us, we can allow the world to reach us there with all its excitements and troubles. The world is just offering us information. We can learn to receive it from a centred and balanced place, rather than recoil from it or push forwards to meet it.

Whilst it's a good idea to meet the world, many of us tend to leave ourselves behind when we do so, and then find we are at the mercy of incoming pressure. I encourage you to touch in with your Centre when you face the world.

The incoming pressure will reach you anyway, how do you want to be when you receive them?

Part 4 of 4

Footnotes

  1. Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person, M. C. Richards, 2nd ed. 1989, Wesleyan University Press. ↩︎

  2. I am capitalising Centre when I mean referencing a specific place in my body, and the specific feeling that comes from doing that. The place is pretty much in the middle of my lower abdomen, a couple of inches below my belly button. The feeling may emerge as peacefulness or tenacity and connectedness. ↩︎

  3. I spend a lot of my thinking time in the past or the future, either wishing things had been different or imagining how things will be different. When I catch myself, I realise that it is an unconscious avoidance of the facts of how things are now. The more time I spend away from the present, the less practised I am to staying with things when they get tough. ↩︎

  4. I wrote these two lines a couple of days ago, and think they're worth repeating here. I can be friendly to the world because I have a space of my own. At its most pared down, my Centre is my home in my body. Legs are busy driving us from A to B, arms are either pulling in or pushing away. My mind is calculating and cogitating. We can miss the quiet fact that there is a space within that is always peaceful and welcoming to us. ↩︎