is especially true for all people whose lives are disrupted by gastrointestinal symptoms. You, like so many others, may put great effort into appearing balanced and in control. You may use words like struggle, battle, and try. Natural, elegant, and easy are probably not words that come to mind. By centering, however, balance is inherent.
Centering is the foundation and the goal for everything you will learn throughout this book. Let us begin our healing journey with centering.
1
Find Your Center
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.
—Chuang Tzu, Chinese philosopher
Your mind and body make up an integrated system, and when it goes out of balance, you become dysfunctional. The results of this imbalance are obvious in people who perform for a living. An Olympic gymnast who is uncentered crashes on the floor. An actress forgets her lines. A juggler drops the balls. A batter can't hit the baseball. That's why such performers always prepare themselves with some sort of centering technique before the curtain rises or the first pitch is thrown. They get psyched up before the big game to keep their mind calm and focused, and their body flexible and alert. The mind and body must become one. When they stay centered, they perform perfectly—the slugger gets a hit and the gymnast gets a 10.
You need to know where you are headed—and why—before you can become centered.
It's no different if you suffer from chronic intestinal distress. You have an imbalance in your body/mind system, and you can only find lasting relief by becoming centered. No one sees your problem, but you know it preoccupies you way too much of the time. Whenever you walk out the door to go to work or out on a date, you are on stage. The problem is you don't always understand how to center yourself beforehand. You lack the techniques to keep your mind sharp and your body under control. You have been given various pills and been told to relax, but it doesn't exactly work. You never stop worrying, and you never feel in charge of your life.
Centering is the first step in our CORE program. You need to know where you are headed—and why—before you can become centered. That's why we begin the CORE program with centering.
Uncentered Kevin
It was hard for Kevin to make it through his day's work because he just couldn't concentrate. His mind was preoccupied with the dread of an imminent attack of gut pain, bloating, diarrhea, or constipation. It was hard to sit still, and if he did sit still and happened to notice a sensation in his gut, he'd get quite angry. He would urgently start strategizing how to respond to this latest attack. Should I take a laxative? Should I go for a walk? What the heck am I going to do?
He was so off center that he couldn't even focus when he was at home with his family. His anxiety and worry about his symptoms took over his entire day. All he could do was anticipate the worst.
His bloating was so bad, he bought extra pants to accommodate his expanding waistline. He had a thirty-six-inch waist, but he kept a thirty-eight- and a forty-inch pair on hand to wear on any given day, depending on his level of bloating.
Kevin increasingly saw himself as being damaged. He had no hope that his symptoms could get any better. These cumulative anxieties kept stirring up his nervous system and made the bloating and the pain even more intense. Kevin was totally off balance, but he never even thought about it that way. His physician kept giving him medications for his symptoms and his psychologist kept telling him to relax. Nothing worked, and that just made it worse.
Becoming Centered Is a Process
Telling people to relax doesn't make them relaxed, unless they already know how to relax. If an angry parent is yelling at his son's little league coach during a game and you tell him to relax, he's more likely to punch you than to mellow out. But if you ask a Buddhist monk who has practiced meditation for thirty years to relax, he could easily produce ultra-calm theta waves within a minute or two. Likewise, you can tell a professional opera singer to get centered, and she could become poised with a few deep breaths. But if you told Kevin to get centered, he'd only get more frustrated. He'd be more likely to resemble the angry parent than the Buddhist monk.
Learning how to become centered requires a change of attitude and the acquisition of new skills. It's not a mere intellectual process that only requires thinking—it's an experiential process, an activity. The Olympic gymnast may not be able to verbalize what it is to be centered, but she certainly knows how it feels. Being centered is a psychophysiological state—both physical and emotional. It is also embodied; you can feel it in your gut. If you keep thinking too much and a worrisome dialogue keeps replaying in your head, you're never going to finish your routine.
If you are a gut sufferer and find yourself in a hopeless dead end, the most important step on your path toward centeredness is to learn to trust your gut. This means getting a new attitude to replace the current mixture of hate and fear you have for your gut. As we mentioned earlier, ancient wisdom tells us that the gut is the seat of the emotions and the focal point of human energy. We can all learn much from this idea of the gut as a kind of second brain.
The Ancient Wisdom of the Gut as Center
Our everyday language uses phrases that depict the gut as a source of power, emotions, and intuitive intelligence. We say a person with a strong will has a lot of guts. A brave person performs gutsy actions. We praise one's intestinal fortitude. But those who show great fear and run away at the sight of danger are gutless cowards or yellow bellied. Even a slight fear such as stage fright before a performance can give you butterflies in your stomach. And when we know something through an intuitive hunch, we attribute it to our gut feelings or our gut instinct.
When you exercise or play sports, you can feel that your gut is your center of gravity. Balance is everything when you perform well. In traditional Asian medicine, the gut is the center of the body in another way: it is the source of your life energy. That center also requires a balance, because it is when our energies become imbalanced that we become ill. The gut is our battery, and we must live a lifestyle that keeps it well charged with energy. Because everything in your body/mind system depends on this energy, a lack of chi can affect your mood as well as your performance. In Japan's kampo tradition of medicine, the diagnosis of all illnesses begins with examining the gut.
If you've ever done yoga, Tai Chi, or any of the martial arts, you know what it is to feel that energy course through your body. It has different names—prana in Sanskrit, chi in Chinese, and ki in Japanese—but it all means the same thing: the vital, life-giving, and life-sustaining force necessary for health. This flow of energy from the center is the basis for success in the martial arts, Zen meditation, flower arranging, Zen archery, and every other mindful activity. Centered practitioners perform in a relaxed and effortless manner with calm and focused minds. Like the best actors and dancers, they make it look easy and natural.
Asia wasn't the only place where the gut was seen as a major center of vitality and emotion. Some translations of the Bible also depict the guts as the seat of strong emotions such as compassion, mercy, intuition, and empathy. For example, in the story about the wisdom of King Solomon, in which he proposes cutting a baby in half to solve an argument between two women who both claim a child, the Cambridge edition of the King James version says “her bowels yearned upon
