Tony is a powerful man behind the scenes in Washington, DC. He had been a strategic advisor to several senators and later became a project consultant. His wife threatened to divorce him because of all his business trips. He was the one who had really wanted children, and was hardly home now, he said. When he got sick, she was indifferent. As he struggled to be more at home and help with the children, he felt torn by the jobs he rejected and worried about what she would do when he traveled.

Tony was an army brat who grew up and moved a lot. Your past is one that many people have had. He hadn’t been abused or tormented, but he developed some patterns and beliefs about life that led him to act as if he had no say in how things were going, that he had to put up with it and shut up; that to be loved you had to keep your head down, work hard, and follow the line. They had taught him to disconnect awareness of his aches and pains, fatigue or worry, and move on. Since his father was away most of the time and they rarely had time to meet his neighbors, his mother turned to him for help and emotional support. Because his wife was career-oriented and assertive about his needs, he had thought of her as the opposite of his mother. But, as so often happens, the superficial difference examined their underlying similarities. He found himself acceding to and appeasing his wife just as he had his mother.

When he started working with me, Tony didn’t notice his repeating patterns. He only knew that he was worried that his career and his children were suffering, he had no idea how to alleviate the situation. He mentioned in passing that he had had some accidents: a hit on the fender, badly cut himself and had fallen down the basement stairs. He did not make a connection between being accident prone and the stress he was under.

Central to our work together was discovering and sharing the way Tony relates to himself and the important women in his life. To know what to do to improve his life, he needed to learn to listen to himself and value his feelings and needs.

Tony’s main difficulty was that he could not remain grounded in himself so that his perspective could be congruent with his point of view. He needed to learn to focus.

Your center is the place where you are aware of your being, your sense of your true self that is deeper and more permanent than your self-concept, your thoughts, or even your emotions. It is where you contact your essence. Its center has a location in your body, in your energy body, and in your nervous system. It can develop, with practice, as more neural synapses develop, depending on your attention. (This correlates with the brain activities of the Tibetan monks in chapter three). When you are centered, your sense of self becomes completely satisfying. It becomes the axis around which the rest of your multifaceted self is organized. In fact, the more you practice, the more organized (realigned and settled) the rest of your experience and awareness can become. When we focus, we are literally in the eye of the storm, the hub of the wheel of life.

Say that, over the course of a day, you find yourself repeatedly baffled by an annoyance with your boss, or a concern for a friend, or a concern about that sudden jolt in old wounds that dislocated your sense of time from dealing with a moody teenager. to be at the mercy of your cold and indifferent father. (People spend much of their energy on these background musings.) These thoughts, memories, and feelings lie somewhere on the spokes of the wheel of your experience. The external events that impact you occur beyond the edge, but your reaction, or the extent to which you are drawn to them, draws that event to the spokes. Even the deep pains and flashbacks are in the rays. They are not the essence of who you are. If they feel that they are, you are not focused on the axis and your attention has focused on its location. Your attention and energy investment are somewhere on the spokes or rim of the wheel. As the wheel turns, or the maelstrom is thrown, your sense of self swirls with the events in which it catches your attention. This feels chaotic and overly exciting, so you may find yourself tending to rush or hide, swept up in the chaos of events without having a clear point of reference or a feeling of being settled. When you are spinning, it is much easier to become unbalanced or lose your objectivity or not see your own reactions clearly. While you are out there, you will tend to feel more at the mercy of external events or feelings from the past, as well as being hit by the other things that hit you. You may feel like a victim of others as your power wears off. You can try to block out your feelings and take control, reaffirming a sense of control. Either way, many people spend much of their lives as if they were in the cyclone with Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

When you can seat your awareness on the hub, the wheel of experience can turn all it wants. The axis remains still and oriented, knowing which way is up, which way is true north. The storm may rage around you, but you can still be serene. This is the still point that is at the center of all things. When you arrive consciously, greater nutrition, tranquility and creativity grow. You can see the whole cyclone of life spinning around you, look! There goes a cow! There is Dorothy’s house! – all while in your rocking chair. Or you may be drawn back into the maelstrom if you cling to some idea or feeling that passes quickly. The devil is in the cyclone. That’s where you are when you turn on yourself and judge yourself harshly and think you’re bad. It takes practice to stay focused. That is what Buddhism and Taoism talk about when they train people through the phases of mind and spirit development in the practice of meditation. Christian and Sufi mystics have found the same place. Focusing is the core of spiritual practice.

There is immense freedom and empowerment (and relief!) In being in the middle. Just seeing those feelings – those scary feelings that you were afraid to address, because you were sure that if you immersed yourself in them, you would find that they really define you, so you will never get out of them – they really aren’t. at the core of who you are frees you to relate to them differently. Then it is possible not to drown in them or to have to avoid them. They can be experienced, curiously observed, and released.

You’ll discover how to really focus and what happens neurologically as you practice – how you can change your preset buttons, when my new book, Discover Joy: the path beyond pain, trauma and self-destructive patterns, using Energy Dynamics, is published soon. In the meantime, sign up for the book’s newsletter and blog, where you can find excerpts. This is for more power by being more focused on your true self!