Your Center, Part I

When you are dancing, you are moving from your center.  In order for the dance to be fully experienced, the movement flows from within you to outside of you.  Sometimes I can get confused and think that this one space on the floor is where the center is, but it isn’t. It might be the center (or the place I begin from), but it’s not my center.   My center is within me, not on the floor.  If I think it’s a space on the floor, I can’t take it with me and I move much differently when I’m focused on a center that is outside myself.  I’m then afraid to let go of that spot and that constricts and narrows my expression.  The boundaries are then too rigid.  And no fun.

When I basically forced marriage counseling on a man I am no longer married to, he was very angry with me as we went to our first appointment.  I felt frightened.  As we sat silently in the waiting room, I picked up a book, The Language of Letting Go, by Melody Beattie. I flipped to a page and read something like, “You know what the truth is.  Do not allow somebody else tell you you’re wrong or crazy.”  This was a good thing for me to read because my whole life, well-meaning people had been telling me that my feelings weren’t valid.  I learned to not trust my gut.  I accepted it because the repercussions of not toeing the line were so scary.  Weirdly, but predictably, I recreated that in this relationship.

In the therapist’s office, when my then-husband was speaking, I was very happy I’d read that passage of the book.  The life he thought we were living together was in a different universe than mine.  But instead of pretending that his perception was mine (which I might have done, so as not to embarrass him or rock an already sinking boat), I was able to say, “I understand that’s how you see it, but this is how I experience our life.”  I now know that he wasn’t lying.  He just saw things differently. (Reason number 323 that we are no longer married or even live in the same country.) Here I had a choice to make another person my center or to realize my center is within me. 

We all have to go to our core to find our truth, no matter who does or does not share that truth. 

Coming from your truth expands your boundaries and your field of expression.

And the best thing is it is always with you.  You don’t have to go anywhere.  Your truth lives in your center.

Dance from there.