A few years ago I discovered a movie called Hollywood Homicide (2003).  As its scintillating title indicates, this movie is a great big fat dopey melodrama containing every cop cliché in the book.  What's interesting about it (apart from our hero Harrison Ford, of course) is that the female lead (Lena Olin) is a psychic.  And she's not a sleazy con-artist psychic, either:  she's smart, gorgeous, and uses her psychic ability to save the day for the good guys.  I guess that long ago and far away are the days when psychics in Hollywood movies were always low-life creeps, like the hooker Marlene Dietrich plays in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958).

Predictably, the Lena Olin character doesn't have any problem taking money for her psychic skills (which is a colossal no-no in my eyes), but I find her likable nevertheless.  She is honest enough to admit that sometimes "I just make shit up", but she does seem to have genuine psychic ability.  Towards the end of the movie, when she has to discover the whereabouts of the bad guy, she zeroes right in on him.  But before she can do it, however, she takes a few moments to get herself "centered".  She knows that her psychic ability will not work unless she is centered and balanced first.  She does this by closing her eyes, humming, and rocking back and forth on her sofa.

Well, okay--almost.  The screenwriter who came up with this humming and rocking stuff was onto something, even if he didn't quite know how to show it.  If you want to be psychic, you need to know how to center yourself.  In other words, you don't have any chance of accessing your intuitive information unless you are in a balanced and tranquil state of consciousness first.  For that matter, if you want to live your life with any kind of success, you also need to know how to deliberately go into this kind of centered consciousness any time you want to.  People who go through their lives with a certain amount of effortlessness always seem to have this quality, when everything about their being--mind, body, and spirit--is flowing harmoniously and naturally. These are the kind of people who can easily focus, who can apply their minds to the task at hand without mental wandering, who operate at a full potential. Their creative abilities come to them naturally and without much effort.  This kind of centered feeling can be one of the most exquisite sensations we can ever experience.

Centering is something that people do all the time, although they probably don't call it centering.  If you've ever paused to take a breath before giving a speech or sitting down in the dentist's chair, you've centered yourself.  You've used your breath and your body to come into a kind of unity so that you can deal with a person or a situation.  Indeed, any time you pause and focus on what is before you in the present moment is a kind of centering.  But just taking a deep breath here and there doesn't really get to the nitty-gritty of centering.  After watching Hollywood Homicide, I started to wonder if there was anything I could deliberately do to bring a sense of centeredness into my life.  This seemed a perfectly reasonable goal, something which could not only help me develop my psychic abilities but help me to live more in harmony with the world around me.  You must understand that I am the sort of person whose energy is always scattering every which way, without any kind of rhyme or reason, and my monkey mind is always churning up tornadoes.  All of which means that I waste too much mental and physical energy, have difficulty concentrating my mind, and get easily stressed.  This is not the way that a rational human being wants to live.

I needed to find a way to bring a deliberate sense of centeredness into my life whenever I wanted to.  So I set off on a quest to find ways to center myself.   I figured there was probably lots of information about centering which I could find--all I had to do was a little searching, both at the library and on the net.  And the first thing I discovered... next

Centering   •   M.C. Richards   •   Tea   •   Stones   •   Exercises   •   Meditations   •   Breath   •   Chakras  •  
Four Elements  •   Daoist Scriptures   •   Cult of Tranquility   •   Etc.