Being Centered:
Living From Your Authentic Self 

by Roman Oleh Yaworsky
Excerpt from Being Centered, Published 2007, Miami, Spirit Unleashed TM
Copyright © 2007 by Roman Oleh Yaworsky. All rights reserved.

Being centered saves you from giving your life away.

Centering is vital. There is no choice in being alive other than to be centered in something. The ideal center is you. In this book I will stress that the heart is the means to regain that center.

When you are not in that ideal center, when you are off-balance, when you are not in your heart, the need to center pulls you to center in things and people that do not connected you to your core, that do not connect you to your heart.

Bob Dylan wrote a song entitled 'Gotta Serve Somebody'. Some of you may be familiar with it. The song says that you may be this or have this or that, but that ultimately you still have to ‘serve somebody!’

One way of interpreting what the song said is that no matter whom or what you identify with being, you serve what you center on. Where you center can take you to your highest, or it can bring you down. It is your choice what you center on, but you can’t escape the fact that you have to center on something. And that is what you serve, that is what you place your energy behind, and that then determines your fate.

Therefore, center on your own highest good, and to get there, start with your own heart.

Centeredness is not selfishness

People often confuse being centered with being selfish.

Being centered, means taking care of ourselves and being responsible for our own happiness. Who else is going to be responsible? Being centered is about being honest and real. It is about being real with ourselves and with others. It is about being real with our feelings and with what we want.

Selfishness is about trying to fill a void. It is about trying to fill a need by not taking into account the honoring of others, nor the honoring of oneself. It is about putting the need ahead of the heart. It happens when you’re not in your heart. It happens when you are not honest or real with yourself because you are disconnected from your heart.

When you are centered, you are in your heart, you do not identify yourself with a void, and so there’s nothing to fill.

Often children get confused over selfishness when their intentions are misunderstood or misrepresented by their parents. This can occur when a child asks for a toy and instead of the parents saying “We don’t have enough money for that” they say “You are being selfish.” Now the child has come to understand that if they ask for what they want, they are being selfish. This is very unfortunate. We need to clear this misunderstanding, so that we can act for own best interest. We must be centered, so that we can be in our hearts, in our true feelings, and open to being in the moment and to the experience of joy.

A culture of being off-center

To an ever-increasing extent, we experience being pulled away from our center in today’s modern world. We are at risk of being bombarded by so much information and noise in the form of advertising and bias from publications, television, the internet and other media.

We are told that we will be happy if we buy this soft drink, that we will be sexy if look a certain way, if we buy this car or use this deodorant. We are told that we are suffering because we are not taking this drug. Advertising is not only information; it is also often designed to mold us, to turn us into consumers, and in that process, to pull us away from what we wanted and towards what others want. Often the advertising is designed to pull us off center.

What we learn to believe about ourselves from our culture

Ironically, our own culture praises success, but underscores failure. We are rarely told in television commercials that we have enough, or that who we are is fine. Instead, we are told that we lack this to be happy, or if we get that, we will avoid embarrassment. We are willing to work long hours for a chance of joy in two week stints once a year. We are asked to postpone joy, until we can afford it, until we get married, have children, get an education, or retire.

We have to be very careful not to become a victim of being molded and pulled away from being centered. The path to being centered does not come through watching more television, by buying more products, or by trading what we want or who we are for something that might be in the future. We do not live in the future and although some of us try, we do not live in the past either. We live in the present. We live through our hearts and in being centered. This we have to protect. Otherwise our experience of living is diminished.

The advantage of pulling people out of their center

Why would anyone want to pull anybody else out of his or her center? It is the way most people argue, fight, confront or engage in most conflicts. It is what works most of the time!

Pulling someone out of their center is a classic way of defeating an opponent in martial arts or in a business confrontation. If you have ever watched two people grappling each other in a judo contest, you will see them trying to knock each other off balance while seeking to maintain their own. Each competitor will repeatedly try a move to throw his adversary when he senses that there is an opening, that the other is caught off guard. It is only when the opponent is actually out of his center, through losing his concentration, focus or balance, that the throw is successful.
High stakes business negotiations can be the same way. Each ‘opponent’ tries to show their own strengths while at the same time taking advantage of the weaknesses of the other. This is why the three-piece blue business suit or wearing black is important! It is a show of strength.

The Key issue is how centered your company, employees and management are in the first place.

Being centered is the best defense. It is also the best offence. Why? Because when you or your company are centered, actions do not come from weakness, need or reaction, but from strength. Pro-action is much more effective than reaction.

Customers follow those companies that act out of their center. Centeredness is what defines a leader or a leading company. Centeredness brings success.

All of this becomes possible when at least one person in the company is centered. Why is that? Because it inspires others to become more alive and effective.

That process is outlined in my book: Being Centered.

What happens when we are not centered?

When we are not centered, when we are not aligned with our nature and we do not experience that connection in our hearts, we also do not experience connection with the hearts of others. We move out of alignment with our friends, family, the people we interact with, and with the rest of the universe.

The consequences of this disconnection, are that we attract experiences that tell us the universe does not support who we are. When we are confronted with this lack of support, rather than addressing the dis-connection to our own hearts, we tend to act as if our feelings are a consequence of the actions of other people. In this way we begin to center on them and what they want in order to gain their support or we may blame them as the cause of our pain and disconnection.

Either way, our stance automatically makes others more important to us than we are to ourselves. We place ourselves in a reactive posture to the power of other people to affect us. As a result, not only do we give away some of our personal power, we also give away some of our sense of aliveness in the process. We make others responsible for our own hearts!
This is what happens when we are not centered. When we don’t center in our own being, and in our own hearts, we are pulled to being centered to the needs and actions of others.

10 Hints that you have lost your center

Here are 10 hints that you are off balance or not centered in your interactions with others. Are any of these your pattern?

Hint 1: You seek others to be your center. When you lose connection to your own core and heart, you seek others to be your center. When you seek to lean on the people in your life instead of taking responsibility for your own healing, you leave yourself open and vulnerable to be manipulated by their needs and for them to define your worth and who you are.

Hint 2: You start to feel powerless. When you lose your center, you feel powerless. You start to feel that you cannot change your situation for the better, or to say what you feel or what you want. You begin to believe that you are not important, that you don’t matter. Then it becomes okay if someone ignores your best interests, or if you do not get your needs met.

Hint 3: You try to adjust to the needs of others. You try to please them or make them like you, because in losing your center, the hearts of others become more important than your own. You then center on their approval and their acceptance of you.

Hint 4: You begin to blame other people. When your attempts at adjusting to others fail, or you make them responsible for your loss of center, you begin to blame others in your life.

Hint 5: You become irresponsible with your heart. You begin to honor others more than yourself. You may act totally responsible in your duties at work and seemingly in your dealings with others in your need to be accepted, liked or approved of. At the same time, you ignore your own best interest and feelings.

Hint 6: You begin not to take care of your feelings, your heart or your best interests. Instead your focus shifts to taking care of other things. You begin to put inconsistent value on the people and things in your life in direct proportion to their hold on you. You become more reactive and more easily ruffled and you increasingly act out of your fear.

Hint 7: You begin to be more pessimistic about the future. Your experience of losing your center is a contraction. As a result, there is less expansiveness towards the future.

Hint 8: You often ignore what happens inside of you. When your focus is on your reactions to others, you tend to ignore yourself. However, what happens inside of you is far more important.

Hint 9: You begin to lose trust in yourself as you become disconnected from your center on the inside. You often experience that separation in your heart, in your own sense of value, your sense of worth and in your own will.

Hint 10: You begin not to like yourself. Having lost your center, you begin not liking the choices you are making with your life. In time you may experience difficulty in liking yourself and whom you have chosen to become.

All of these things happen as a result of losing your center. In this way, you become contracted to your own spirit and to your own energy. These inward disconnections are primary. When you do not address them, you form emotions and negative emotional states. And then you begin to define yourself by these very disconnections.

How do you regain center?

You never lose your core. You never lose your center. You never lose your heart. What you lose is your connection. And in order to regain your center, you need to regain your connection. How do you do that? You do it by reconnecting to the place where that relationship was first lost, where that separation was first felt, and that place is in your heart.

How do you reconnect to your heart?

In order to reconnect to your heart you need to stop avoiding your heart. What do I mean by that? Well, we often edit, ignore, avoid, or try to control what comes from our hearts.

Have you ever had the experience of being asked how you feel about something, and you find yourself lying because the truth is not what someone else wants to hear? When you start down this path, you often begin to lie to yourself also. Then your own internal dishonesty begins to separate you from your true feelings.

We have to learn to stop doing that. We have to become aware of our feelings and of what our heart is trying to tell us. And we have to learn to take care of our heart. As we do these things, our connection to our heart will increase and this will pull us back to center.

The heart of the company is often ignored

The heart of a company is not management or a vision statement. The heart of a company is the combined expression of the aliveness and enthusiasm of each employee. It is management's role to encourage and focus that optimism.

Unfortunately, in most companies, that enthusiasm and willingness to contribute is squashed early on by forcing employees to adapt to the system that each company has developed. In the way this happens, in most companies, only a fraction of the enthusiasm is left and it is that fraction that is paid for by the salary.

What is lost is the ability of the company to be a tribe, that welcomes each unique contribution. Those companies that have established themselves as tribes, have attracted a following in clients that seek to participate in that energy and sense of belonging.

Many of the commercials on television tend to broadest that sense of belonging to something greater. There is an imitation of the spark that creates a following.

Much more effective is the company that becomes know and admired for that very essence, because it defines itself through its pro-active actions. This company attracts a following because it acts from its core and center. It is not defined by others. It owns its power, and thus expresses its enthusiasm, and this is contagious.

You can order Being Centered  
from www.amazon.com