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 her son” (I Kings 3:26). In our effort to restore your faith in your gut, we are harking back to the wisdom of the ages.
| CENTERED | UNCENTERED |
| Relaxed | Anxious |
| Effortless | Struggle |
| Focused | Scattered |
| Functional | Dysfunctional |
| Aware | Confused |
| In control | Out of control |
The Breath Connection
Everyone knows that the gut is the center for the ingestion and digestion of the essentials for life—food and water. But the gut is also the center of our breathing apparatus. Sure, the lungs are what fill with air, but the abdominal muscles are what provide the strength of the bellows that keep us alive. If you watch a baby breathe, you will see her belly expand and deflate. That is natural deep breathing. Asian medicine acknowledged this truth by naming the energy that flows from the center after the breath. Chi, ki, and prana all literally mean “breath.” Actors and singers around the world are taught to breathe from the gut. They know that you get more air that way and need to pause for a breath less often. Breathing from the chest is a human invention that takes in less air. Gut breathing is deep breathing, while chest breathing is shallow.
Breathing is one of the few bodily processes that run automatically when we are not paying attention, but yet we can take control of our breath when we want to. This is useful because our rate of breathing correlates directly to our state of mind. Deep breathing makes us calmer and more centered, but when we are uncentered, confused, and anxious, our breath rate and pulse both become more rapid. This breath connection is evident in the case of Carol.
Carol Gets Calmed
Carol was a senior executive who suffered from a long list of medical conditions—constipation, bloating, fatigue, poor concentration, and much more. She sought the advice of many doctors but to no avail. She felt hopeless, and she blamed herself for her condition. “I am a mess. My gut is a mess,” she said. “After I eat, I bloat so much, I look six months pregnant. I am so sensitive to everything—if I could just get calmed!”
She was finally referred to Dr. Plotnikoff, who had Carol keep track of her diet and symptoms for two weeks. When she began to read her notes to him, she was so scattered and nonlinear that her efforts to please even sent Dr. Plotnikoff off center. He was too distracted by her frenzied effort to hear what she was trying to say.
After ten