A Culture of Being Off-Center

Life Coaching Articles by Roman Oleh Yaworsky

Excerpt from Chapter: Being Centered: Living From Your Authentic Self,
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

More on Being Centered

To an ever-increasing extent, we experience being pulled away from our center in today’s modern world. We are at risk of being bombarded by so much information and noise in the form of advertising and bias from publications, television, the internet and other media.

We are told that we will be happy if we buy this soft drink, that we will be sexy if look a certain way, if we buy this car or use this deodorant. We are told that we are suffering because we are not taking this drug. Advertising is not only information; it is also often designed to mold us, to turn us into consumers, and in that process, to pull us away from what we wanted and towards what others want. Often the advertising is designed to pull us off center.
What we learn to believe about ourselves from our culture

Ironically, our own culture praises success, but underscores failure. We are rarely told in television commercials that we have enough, or that who we are is fine. Instead, we are told that we lack this to be happy, or if we get that, we will avoid embarrassment. We are willing to work long hours for a chance of joy in two week stints once a year. We are asked to postpone joy, until we can afford it, until we get married, have children, get an education, or retire.

We have to be very careful not to become a victim of being molded and pulled away from being centered. The path to being centered does not come through watching more television, by buying more products, or by trading what we want or who we are for something that might be in the future. We do not live in the future and although some of us try, we do not live in the past either. We live in the present. We live through our hearts and in being centered. This we have to protect. Otherwise our experience of living is diminished.

The advantage of pulling people out of their center

Why would anyone want to pull anybody else out of his or her center? It is the way most people argue, fight, confront or engage in most conflicts. It is what works most of the time!

Pulling someone out of their center is a classic way of defeating an opponent in martial arts or in a business confrontation. If you have ever watched two people grappling each other in a judo contest, you will see them trying to knock each other off balance while seeking to maintain their own. Each competitor will repeatedly try a move to throw his adversary when he senses that there is an opening, that the other is caught off guard. It is only when the opponent is actually out of his center, through losing his concentration, focus or balance, that the throw is successful.

High stakes business negotiations can be the same way. Each ‘opponent’ tries to show their own strengths while at the same time taking advantage of the weaknesses of the other. This is why the three-piece blue business suit or wearing black is important! It is a show of strength.

We tend to encounter many of these strategies of knocking the other off balance among kids. Children apply leverage through name calling, threats of exclusion from the group and by making fun of the other. In a sense this is done to establish who is important and who is off balance. The winner of this conflict becomes the leader of his pack. The loser’s defeat through loss of their center and connection to their core becomes a demonstration of the leader’s power.

Being centered is the best defense. The degree to which children are successful with their friends and peers has a lot to do with how centered they are, how they have been encouraged to be themselves and how they have resisted losing center and adapting to the wishes and needs of others. The enormous need that children have to fit in with peers and friends, challenges their inner strength and faith in themselves. How successful children become in retaining their center and faith in themselves has great bearing on their future choices and success in the world.

What happens when we are not centered?

When we are not centered, when we are not aligned with our nature and we do not experience that connection in our hearts, we also do not experience connection with the hearts of others. We move out of alignment with our friends, family, the people we interact with, and with the rest of the universe.

The consequences of this disconnection, are that we attract experiences that tell us the universe does not support who we are. When we are confronted with this lack of support, rather than addressing the dis-connection to our own hearts, we tend to act as if our feelings are a consequence of the actions of other people. In this way we begin to center on them and what they want in order to gain their support or we may blame them as the cause of our pain and disconnection.

Either way, our stance automatically makes others more important to us than we are to ourselves. We place ourselves in a reactive posture to the power of other people to affect us. As a result, not only do we give away some of our personal power, we also give away some of our sense of aliveness in the process. We make others responsible for our own hearts!
This is what happens when we are not centered.

When we don’t center in our own being, and in our own hearts, we are pulled to being centered to the needs and actions of others.