In 1960 German writer Karlfried von Durckheim published a wonderful book entitled The Japanese Cult of Tranquility.  One of the key concepts in the book is centering, and Durckheim understood very well why it is so important:

When we lose touch with the kernel of our essential being, we identify exclusively with our outer shell. When our sense of inner achievement becomes muted, we turn to the noise of the outside world and lose all sense of our living center. We are caught in the bondage of a hardened periphery; we are alienated from our spiritual powers, and we try to find fulfillment by protecting and indulging the ego, or in the excitement of cheap stimuli, or by satisfying instinctive desires, or we get lost in the sensations of the mind. We run from ourselves. We fly from life's calm rhythm to find refuge in the measured beat of organized existence, relinquishing contact with the indestructible within ourselves for security in the transitory world. We drown the quiet voices of being in the noise of worthless illusion.

Durckheim then goes on to give us directions for exercising the center, and they are some of the best ever written: 

The exercise of the center of being! To speak of center is to conjure up an image of a circle possessing a central point which is in a certain relation to the periphery. The periphery is outside, the center inside, representing depth as opposed to superficiality. All points on the periphery are related to the center equally; viewed from the center they are all eccentric. Movement from the center to the periphery is centrifugal, that from the periphery to the center is centripetal. The periphery can revolve in circular motion while the center remains motionless, governing all surrounding movement as a whole. We experience each of these aspects in the exercise of the center as they affect ourselves. We say of people that they are centered or that they are eccentric, meaning that their way of life is in harmony with their essential being, or conversely that a lack of proportion prevents them from being themselves and endangers their individuality. People all possess their own formula as to the relation between centrifugal and centripetal motion, but it seems to be generally accepted that the rhythm of such motion is to be determined from the center and not from the periphery.

If we should set about the exercise of the center in the same form of consciousness as we would any other task, in other words, with the ego asserting itself as the subject and accordingly determining and fixing the thing to be done as object, we will not be spared an unpleasant experience.

In our efforts to find the center within ourselves, the more determinedly our ego asserts itself and causes us to make ourselves into an object and to adhere hard and fast to this object, we will only reach a painful state of rigidity in which all life comes to a standstill. We would experience in an almost unprecedented manner in our own person the extent of the threat offered by the forces of the ego, which turn the living natural world into so many dead "factors." We are not concerned with the question as to how far the human mind and its talent for creative activity is rooted in this ability of the ego; we are only concerned with its negative aspect, that when we regard ourselves from the viewpoint of the ego we become the victim of our own reflection. But we are more than just an ego, and therefore, if we take ourselves and our ego's instinct to be the central point seriously while practicing the exercise of the center, we can perceive life coming to a standstill in ourselves.

This experience may be accompanied by a serious shock, when all of a sudden we feel unable to escape from the state of rigidity forced on us by the ego. It is not possible here to examine how this painful state may be overcome and gradual outgrown. It depends, in all cases, on people relinquishing their own small self as the subject of the search for a center. If we succeed in doing this through conscious meditation (not concentration!) we will feel the rigidity in ourselves giving place to some new center. This new center is quite distinct from that other one, which in reality was nothing but the ego, identical with itself and reflecting its own identity eternally. We can now experience the center of our being as something far more than ego, far more than just self. Having succeeded in attaining it will we now discover everything being submitted to it and being made a harmonious part of it in such a manner as to transcend the tension between subject and object. Everything is now centralized in perfect harmony with the systole and diastole of the universe.

We all know something of this state of being from those fleeting moments in life when we suddenly feel as if we were "rounded off" and perform whatever we have to do with perfect ease. Everything seems in its proper place and we can accept in perfect equanimity disturbances which at another time might have deeply distressed us. It is not until this sensation is destroyed by some sudden thought or emotion that we are thrown once more into the old decentric tension of subject and object, and it is only by sheer concentration of the will that we can master the situation. Life from the living center is replaced by life governed from the periphery. The exercise of the center aims at giving us as a lasting possession, something that we ordinarily only experience as a passing happy moment--occasionally, for example, on awakening--as the gift of chance, of whose significance we are hardly aware. This is the exercise of becoming a "hinge" which remains motionless even when the door is turning on it--to use an image from the German mystic, Meister Eckhart. The Japanese people to whom I mentioned this story felt it to be a perfect designation for what they themselves experienced in exercises of the center.

The exercise of the center is integrally linked with those of immobility and breath, and lies at the core of all Japanese education. The Japanese have a special word for the center of body and soul: hara. The number of expressions in which it is found indicates its importance for them. There are master schools that make hara the sole object of their exercise, while every master art in Japan considers that it is necessary to possess it in order to achieve success in whatever one is doing. To the Japanese, what we experience in the "center of being" is none other than the unity of life, bearing all, permeating all, nourishing and enfolding all. Our consciousness is ego-centered and thus separated from the true center: the purpose of these exercises of immobility, breath, and of the center of body and soul is to help us to regain it...

Well, there it is.  All you really need to know about centering in some very beautiful prose... next

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