STAY IN YOUR CENTER

Stay in your center as everything falls apart. What is this “everything”? Well, it’s every belief that filters how you see the world, it’s every notion you hold tight to in order to pretend you will not eventually meet death, it’s every psychological structure that upholds your sense of self as a separate entity that needs to defend itself from “what’s out there”.

Stay in your center — what does it mean? Well, it’s an invitation to rest deeper than any thought or feeling or emotion, to fall into the open awareness at the core of your very being, to know the stillness of presence around which every experience revolves.

Every “thing” and every “experience” circles around the core of the “I” that perceives it. Everything in the world of appearances is constantly in motion, it comes and goes, it rises and falls, it is created and destroyed — whether this is a thought that travels like a train into the stream of consciousness, a wave of intense feeling that surges and recedes, a cherished teddy bear that arrived early on in your life and now is gone to dust, the sun that appears over the horizon to light up your day and disappears as it bows before the stars, a minuscule cell in your body that lives and dies in order to keep you in homeostasis, or the galactic cycles heralding the transitions through life stages from youth to maturity. Everything keeps changing and moving, birthing and dying. Try to grasp any of it and you are caught in the web of samsara, going round in circles chasing certainty, comfort and satisfaction.

Be still, my friend, and fall into your center. Your center is not another hiding place for self, not another temporal home to barricade yourself in whilst the enemy rages out there, not another platform you stand on to proclaim your opinion or your hope or your fear. Your center is an open space, without walls and without floors or ceilings. Your center is an unending presence, a stillness without limits or conditions.

Be still, my friend, and fall open into the very essence of things — the infinity of awareness itself.

(image by Guillaume Preat from Pixabay)