CENTERING

Centering is a quieting state of harmony and peace in oneself.  One’s center is not a location, but rather a state of being.  Although anxiety is a universal human experience, it robs us of our power; centering turns off the anxious state.  Centering is being in the moment and is associated with an absence of anxiety.  This timelessness of centering means we are not allowing our thoughts to go to the future, the originator of anxiety.  So when we are centered, we cannot be anxious.  Since natural science has demonstrated the correlation of anxiety with illness, the absence of anxiety that characterizes centering is likely correlated with health.  Health and illness are not separate states.  Illness is simply one manifestation of a person’s health that may, on occasion, occur.  Health, like centering, exists in the now, not as something that existed in the past or that may be acquired in the future.  Being centered is essential for the Therapeutic Touch therapist to be effective during the Therapeutic Touch process.

My imagery teacher in Jerusalem, the renowned Colette Aboulker-Muscat, developed a series of breathing exercises that I have found to be useful for myself and the people I work with to bring one to that centered state of well-being.  Try them for yourself.

Breathe out one time through your mouth with a long, slow releasing breath followed by a briefer in-breath.  This is referred to as BO1X.  Feel and know how by breathing out you are allowing your sense perception to be carried out and you are experiencing being free.

• BO1X.   Sense the intimate connection of your breathing with your two nervous systems, the voluntary consciously directed one, and the automatic one that works without our direction, but can be put to work or hindered by our state of being.

• BO1X.   Sense, feel, and know how the breath forges a bridge between the conscious and the so-called “unconscious.”

• BO1X.  Know that by making the breath a bridge, you learn how to assist a normally automatic function in doing its work.

• BO1X.   Know how by watching the working of the breath, you learn and teach yourself how to exclude interference and help a self-regulating process such as yawning before becoming overtired, sighing before becoming overly restricted.