Staying Centered in an Uncentered World

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt totally La-de-dah and like the cat’s meow, and then…

Something happens! Something is said, or is not said! And in a second you feel an emotional sea-change taking place inside of you.

A true story — or as they said when I lived in Washington DC: “Not only is the story true, but it actually happened!” A good friend had just bought a new luxury convertible. It was a beautiful day and the top was down.

He came over to give me a ride. I got into the car, and as I closed the door, a bird was flying overhead — this fine feathered friend let go of a big one that splattered all over my friend’s new car, and some of it even landed on my friend’s head. Needless to say if this were a movie, the background music would have changed quickly.

Life can be that way; one minute we feel like singing "La Vie en rose" with Edith Piaf, and the next minute, we feel like something out of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s amazing how these emotional roller coasters can happen so quickly. They can really knock us off course in a nano second.

That is why I was really interested in an article recently posted by Rev. Kaji Douša, who is the Senior Minister at The Park Avenue Christian Church in New York City. She writes about getting really interested in the figure skaters at the Winter Olympics.

She saw several of the Olympians take big falls and slips on the ice. After practicing for many hours, how does such things happen, Rev. Kaji wondered. What she learned was that when a skater's bodyweight is perfectly balanced on an axis, they can jump in the air and land perfectly back on the ice.

“But in a split second, we’ve all seen it: something can pull them off their axis. Their center shifts just enough, and gravity does what it does,” she notes.

“Our lives can be like that, too. A lot of times, we don’t get pulled off center all at once. Pressure slowly reshapes us. Like the pressure to live up to someone else’s expectations. To overdeliver. To keep carrying what God never asked us to hold in the first place. To bend ourselves to the point of breaking… just to survive,” she adds.

Rev. Kaji suggests that we should be in touch when we first feel ourselves being pulled off our axis. This is a warning sign that we must spiritually realign or else we are going to fall flat and hard on the metaphorical ice.

The metaphor I like to think of is that of a guided missile. Inside of such contraptions, there is a gyroscope — or at least there used to be a gyroscope. If the missile starts going off course, the job with the gyroscope is to realign the trajectory so that the missile, rocket ship, or airplane is back on course.

Unity’s second principle is that there is a divine Spark inside of us all – and that is who we really are. Well, we can also think of it as a divine gyroscope. Through spiritual disciplines and practice, we can get much better at detecting when we are out of sync with this divine gyroscope. When we do realize we are in this condition, we can use Unity’s third principle about the power of thought to realign us back to the correct trajectory or axis.

These principles really do work and can save us from doing dumb things and having to apologize for things we regret having done. Eventually, we can reach a point where we are even able to show serenity in the face of calamity.

We can remain balanced, no matter how unbalanced the outside world becomes. The further blessing about this is that we do not have to go out and actively proselytize. When people see us behaving this way, they will come to us and ask, “How did you stay so calm and centered when all of that happened?”

A recent entry for The Daily Word makes a very good suggestion about how we might get back on track if we start falling off the beam. The Daily Word was: LET GO AND LET GOD.

The Daily Word suggested that in a situation, we do the next right thing – as we think Spirit would have us do. But then after that, we let go and rest in faith that these spiritual principles will pull us back on course. Our spiritual gyroscope really can work if we give it half a chance.

Let me tell another true story. Another dear friend had bought a townhome that had a nice garden in the backyard. He planted carrots in that garden. I kid you not, but every day when he got off work, he came home and pulled out the carrots to see how much they had grown during the day. Then he would put them back into the soil.

Needless to say, those poor carrots died in the process. I believe there really is something to “letting go and letting God.”

For better or worse, we really do live in a world which often seems unbalanced. If our serenity is going to be based on the world, becoming balanced, then I think we are going to face a lot of disappointment.

However, when we spiritually grow to a point where we can be in balance despite what is going on outside, then we become not only a blessing to ourselves – but we also become a blessing to the world.

All the best,

Rev. Rick