The mythic Center is different for everyone. It’s a feeling of home for some, a step into the sacred for others, a magical place within, for still others, where everything flows and connects. It’s wherever and whatever enlivens a person and allows them to feel fully connected with their real selves.

We all go searching, as Phil Cousineau says in his Once and Future Myths, “following a golden thread in search of a hidden gate. . .  We ache for the mythic home, paradise, the garden, the green land where we will find love, find ourselves, make the hard sacrifice, and, finally, do the right thing with our lives.”

That “hidden gate”, for me, lies in the center. I find my personal center when I feel deeply rooted in some trustworthy, archetypal spring within myself that flows from a sacred source beyond my personal will and understanding. I feel held and empowered from some greater source. It’s the connection that’s important, as if I already possess what lies on the other side of that gate.

The notion of home, for me, suggests that sense of feeling held. Nature holds me, and soulful words. A genuine smile from someone I care about holds the deep moment we’ve just shared and binds us together in unspoken union. It holds us both. A spontaneous telephone call from one of my children holds me with bouquets of memories of past togethers.

I read an article some time ago about Temple Granvin, a well-known scientist who is brilliant and somewhat autistic. Unmarried, without ties, she ached for the normalcy of feeling held. She remembered, from her childhood on the farm, how cows went through what they affectionately called the squeeze machine that held them still, quieted them, while they were being branded.

She created her personal squeeze machine in her home, a container in which she lay down at night and pulled the two wooden sides together so she was enclosed, held, stilled. The comfort this allowed her, the holding it provided, brought her into herself and connected her with that deep, still place within. She knew the importance of being held, contained from within on a soul level, and she created this possibility for herself.

I think Temple experienced center, somehow, with her squeeze machine. She was not seeking containment from without but from within. She did not need to be constrained or held back from anything, but released and freed up by something that nurtured and fed her spirit-potential. Any tightness and need for control was rocked away in invisible arms.

The ritual she created — the coming-out-of in the morning and the returning-back-into in the evening, along with the feeling of being held in a deep way – recreated the movement of center. The Center is that from which we’ve come and that into which we will return at death. It holds us, grounds us, centers us in something larger than ourselves as we live on the earth.

Center is that source out of which come all the metaphors we use to express the true, all the energy out of which we dance out the divine in us, the Alpha and Omega of everything whole we experience from womb to tomb. Our center is that becoming point in each of us.

The trick is to find what holds us, really holds us. Some look to alcohol, others food, others, whatever addiction seems to create the feeling of being held, quieted, returned to a primordial unconscious, free of anxiety. The only physical realm in which there is no anxiety is either the original womb or the final tomb. There are no opposites, no duality, no choices in these two.

All new energy entering us brings with it an element of anxiety. Anxiety is the price we pay for consciousness. There are two types of anxiety – the anxiety of dread and the anxiety of anticipation. If I am not connected at my center and aware of the larger field in which I move and have my being, new and unfamiliar experiences will cause a sense of dread and fear in me.

If I am connected at my center, new and unfamiliar experiences will fill me with the anxiety of anticipation. What is occurring in my life right now that is inviting me to learn something new and important? What new thing is happening that is pushing me to outgrow the limits of my present boundaries and comfort level? The anxiety I feel is a signal for new growth.

There is something innate in us that knows when we’re at this center point, on the beam, and when we’re not. Joseph Campbell says it happens for him, “when everything is in harmonious relationship to what I regard as the best I’ve got in me.” We experience the totality of our being at that moment and it flows easily, from a source we know not, into whatever we touch.

Some say Tiger Woods swings a golf club out of his center. He consistently swings out of some place of wholeness, from a source he welcomes but cannot control upon demand. The task, for us, is to discover that center within and to order ourselves, align ourselves to it; to create a spiritual practice by which we align ourselves to the best we’ve got in us.

Certain things have to be aligned in me before I can experience the rapture of being centered. I have to be in a place I feel one with life, comfortable with who I am and what I have to contribute to the whole. I have to feel grounded in my feelings, in touch with my needs and how to meet these needs, not empty or compulsive. I have to experience enoughness.

Like the rifle I was taught to aim as a child at summer camp, when I line up these qualities, ground myself in a readiness to receive the new energy pouring through me, and slowly squeeze the trigger, I usually find my center and the grace to handle whatever is before me.

Like thread through the eye of a needle, energy from an archetypal source threads its way through our soul at our center, our core, our soul’s eye. This thread, this soul energy, weaves through us, pulls us in and pushes us out into life, from our center. When we are centered in a conscious manner, we are in touch with our moving both in the eternal and in the temporal. 

We allow something larger and deeper than our known capacity to stir us. Others feel it. In the words of W. B. Yeats, from his Celtic Twilight:  “We can make our (center) so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own image, and so live for a moment with a clearer – perhaps even with a fiercer – life because of our quiet.”