What is Being Centered?

Life Coaching Articles by Roman Oleh Yaworsky

Excerpt from Chapter: Being Centered: Living From Your Authentic Self, pages 3-6 from Being Centered
Spirit Unleashed^TM Publications, Miami, 2007
Copyright © 2007 by Roman Oleh Yaworsky. All rights reserved.
$24.95 US, 292 pages. Acid free paper, Reinforced binding

Playing the drum

Playing the drum is one way that I have experienced a connection to my core. I remember when I first started learning to play the drum, it was a new experience and I practiced for hours and days on end, pushing myself to learn all of the rhythms and to get it right. When I began to play in a group, in front of people, I would start out so seriously, with such a sense of responsibility. I was careful not to make mistakes, and so I concentrated on being a good musician. Unfortunately, I was trying to play the drum from my fear. I felt like someone holding on tightly to the reigns of wild horses, afraid to let go. It was my own fear that I was about to make a mistake, that stalked me and held me back.

Then, after a while, I took a risk. I relaxed. I let go. I stopped playing from my fear, and I began to play from my heart. The things with which I had learned to hold myself back, vanished. In their place was the spontaneity of the moment. My fingers would play rifts and rhythms I had not even heard before. The playing flowed. It took me deeper into the moment.

Taking the risk of playing from my heart, of choosing the courage of being in the moment, also had an effect on others and soon a feeling of immediacy and power would fill the room. Time changed. I was no longer playing the drum, my heart was playing. Not just my heart; I could feel every other heart in that room. The playing was effortless, transformative and full of joy and heart.

It is to re-experience this state, to be fully centered and immersed in my heart, and to share that passion with others that I love to drum.

The magic of being centered

There is magic when we play or act from our heart. It doesn’t even matter so much how much skill is being expressed. What matters is that connection that we make within ourselves. That is what the audience comes to feel. People are drawn to experience the transformative power of a performance that arises from the heart of a musician or actor. This is what we are willing to line up for and pay money to experience. We seek that connection and courage in others to help us reconnect to our own center, heart, joy, immediacy and power.

There is magic when we live from our hearts, when we experience life by being open to it and when we are able to fully receive what is offered to us. That openness, that trust, extends to the world around us and also to ourselves.

The magic of that trust in the world is that it invites grace and luck. It helps to align us with the experiences that we need, and it helps us to recognize what we need when it comes along in our lives.

The magic of that trust in ourselves invites faith in our own spirit, in our own core. It helps to align us with the experiences that we need on the inside; the answers, revelations and visions that help us live greater lives. It helps us to reconnect to the ‘universal heart,’ to that sense of deep connection with the world around us. That magic is positively contagious.
Why is being centered important in today’s world?

Being centered saves you from giving your life away.

Centering is vital. There is no choice in being alive other than to be centered in something. The ideal center is you. In this book I will stress that the heart is the means to regain that center.

When you are not in that ideal center, when you are off-balance, when you are not in your heart, the need to center pulls you to center in things and people that do not connected you to your core, that do not connect you to your heart.

Bob Dylan wrote a song entitled "Gotta Serve Somebody". Some of you may be familiar with it. The song says that you may be this or have this or that, but that ultimately you still have to ‘serve somebody!’

One way of interpreting what the song said is that no matter whom or what you identify with being, you serve what you center on. Where you center can take you to your highest, or it can bring you down. It is your choice what you center on, but you can’t escape the fact that you have to center on something. And that is what you serve, that is what you place your energy behind, and that then determines your fate.

Therefore, center on your own highest good, and to get there, start with your own heart.

Centeredness is not selfishness

People often confuse being centered with being selfish.

Being centered, means taking care of ourselves and being responsible for our own happiness. Who else is going to be responsible? Being centered is about being honest and real. It is about being real with ourselves and with others. It is about being real with our feelings and with what we want.

Selfishness is about trying to fill a void. It is about trying to fill a need by not taking into account the honoring of others, nor the honoring of oneself. It is about putting the need ahead of the heart. It happens when you’re not in your heart. It happens when you are not honest or real with yourself because you are disconnected from your heart.

When you are centered, you are in your heart, you do not identify yourself with a void, and so there’s nothing to fill.

Often children get confused over selfishness when their intentions are misunderstood or misrepresented by their parents. This can occur when a child asks for a toy and instead of the parents saying “We don’t have enough money for that” they say “You are being selfish.” Now the child has come to understand that if they ask for what they want, they are being selfish. This is very unfortunate. We need to clear this misunderstanding, so that we can act for own best interest. We must be centered, so that we can be in our hearts, in our true feelings, and open to being in the moment and to the experience of joy.