Become A Still Point Inside Instability (+ Audio & Guided Meditation)
rooting into your centerline in times of personal and collective upheaval
I last wrote about spiraling through transformation. Sometimes that spiral feels like chaos, especially when there’s intensity and momentum to it. We’re experiencing this on a number of levels as a human society right now.
Inside moments of personal or collective instability, it’s essential to remember that we have choice. We have agency and free will in how we relate to what’s arising. We can listen and sense for an opening toward genuine breakthrough, or, we can collapse into chaos.
The path we take depends on our capacity to be with what’s present, which requires slowing down enough to fully experience the moment, making space to allow it in, and having the power to meaningfully alchemize the energy and momentum toward coherent aims.
This is what I call energetic discernment, the ability to track and shift energy, sensing coherence and incoherence with refined sensitivity. It’s the difference between being swept away by the spiral and becoming the still point within it.
I share this with deep appreciation for how challenging this can be when you’re really in it, feeling a crest of intensity or personal impact of a larger breakdown, especially if you’ve been systemically under-resourced.
Here’s an essential consideration: we aren’t meant to go through these moments alone. This is the great reframe of the heroine’s journey. She knows she is meant to journey through transformation in relationship, with others, and in doing so, she discovers she is not separate and finds her place in the great web of life.
We need communal spaces where we can raise our hands if we’re tired, over-burdened, and need support. Where we can meet others who have excess resource to give. Sometimes we need a still point to resource us; sometimes we are that still point.
So for those of you who have enough resource right now to become that ground and gathering place in service of those around you, this invitation is particularly for you.
Becoming the Fulcrum
A fulcrum is a point of support that enables flow and movement without force. It’s the stable point that makes all motion possible. In living systems, a fulcrum allows everything to reorganize itself naturally, without being pushed or controlled.
Imagine: the trunk of a tree and how it allows all the branches and leaves to move and rotate as the wind blows through, staying connected and in harmony with itself.
To serve as a fulcrum, we must know and be in conversation with our own center. Not intellectually…intimately…viscerally, because that center is not floating in abstraction. It’s rooted. Connected to the ground beneath us. When we know and remain in contact with our center, we become a conduit to a much larger ground.
In connecting to this center, I'm not suggesting you repress or deny being with emotions, or preference calm over big feelings when situations genuinely warrant it. Emotions are energy in motion. Moments of upheaval and transformation necessarily move tremendous energy through and around us. Where we have agency is in how and where that energy is directed as it moves.
By staying connected to your center, your embodied ground, you stay in conversation with your felt experience as it moves through you. So, for example, when a surge of rage arises in response to personal or collective violation, you know it's there, you can feel its full force, and you have the capacity to alchemize that energy toward truth, justice, and liberation. Centering doesn't dampen intensity. It gives you the ground to metabolize it and direct its expression without being overtaken or consumed by it.
A Practice: Embodied Inquiry
Right now, as you read this…
How much of your awareness is in your body?
How far does each breath travel as you inhale?
Are your feet touching the ground?
Are there physical sensations or emotional signatures present that are trying to communicate something to you?
It’s a simple but profoundly powerful practice.
As you continue reading, can you maintain some of your awareness inside your body; some connection with the Earth? Maybe you’ll have to slow down and pause more often. Maybe you’ll feel what’s beneath these words.
Life entrains to life.
This is why women’s cycles synchronize when they spend time together. Why a baby’s heartbeat regulates when held against a calm chest. Why a room shifts, subtly but palpably, when one nervous system settles into presence. We are always influencing and being influenced by the fields around us. The question is whether we’re doing so consciously.
Your connection to center (your midline; your spine; the energetic column that runs from head to tailbone) is your internal locus of control. It’s what you can shift and sustain now. As you deepen this connection, your center becomes a fulcrum for your environment to harmonize with. You can regenerate an entire conversation, meeting, or encounter by shifting the quality of your presence by deepening your connection to this space within you as you engage with the world.
Don’t take my word for it. Feel for it: pause once more and notice what happens if you feel your own spine for a moment and then return to reading this while keeping part of your awareness within your body. You might notice that over time your spine feels less like a dense, tight chord and more like an oceanic column that breathes life into your whole body, opening up your field of perception more widely.
Roots: Connection to Power
This centerline has roots, just like the trunk of a tree. Deep roots that connect each of us to an immense ground: the living Earth herself, which holds true power. Vast reserves of energy and electromagnetic fields run through the Earth. Ancient cultures knew this. Indigenous peoples still know this.
When we start grasping and reaching for something outside ourselves…money, status, validation, likes, views, more, more, more…it pulls us off this centerline, and breaks connection with this ground.
Notice what happens in your body when you grasp for an answer, for an outcome, for certainty. There’s a quality of leaning forward, reaching, leaving yourself. The jaw might tighten. The breath becomes shallow, held high in the chest. Shoulders creep toward the ears. There’s tension along the midline…in the throat, in the sternum, down into the belly. The feet lose contact with the ground. Energy scatters upward and outward, diffusing into a thousand directions at once. This is the somatic signature of disconnection from the true reservoir of power and abundance.
Contrast that experience with groundedness: Feet rooted, receiving support from below. Breath deepening, dropping into the belly. Shoulders softening, draping down. The spine lengthens as if drawn by an invisible thread from crown to tailbone. There’s a waterfall of energy flowing down the front of the body, settling into the center. Presence coalesces rather than scatters. From this place, you can feel the immense power beneath you from the Earth herself, solid and generative, offering support that never wavers.
When you root down into this ground, something wonderful happens. Like water finding its level, energy naturally flows from the vast reservoir below into the places within you that have been depleted. You become replenished not through effort, but through opening to what’s already here, waiting to fill you.
And once you’re filled, you naturally become a resource for others. Not from your own limited reserves, but as a conduit for the same inexhaustible ground. This is how one person’s centered presence can shift an entire room. How a facilitator’s groundedness can hold space for a group’s unraveling. How a leader’s rootedness can stabilize an organization in chaos. They become a doorway back to the ground of Earth, which can instantly vitalize a space.
The beauty is this: the reservoir you’re connected to is vast beyond measure. It aims to redistribute energy throughout the web of life, and you are one of its pathways. So you can relax into offering your presence abundantly, knowing you’re not depleting yourself. You’re participating in a beautiful circulation of energy that inherently replenishes. You are part of a mycellial matrix of energy that wants to flow through you and everyone you encounter.
In Practice,
Whether you’re in a difficult conversation, facilitating a process, navigating uncertainty, feeling the immensity of the collective grief and outrage that’s building, or simply moving through your day trying to tend to your responsibilities, the question remains:
Can you return to your ground?
Not just once during your daily meditation. But over and over and over and over. Each return strengthens the pathway. Each return makes you more available as an orienting force for yourself, for others, and for the systems you touch.
This is the practice and opportunity: becoming so intimate with your center that you can find it amidst total chaos. Rooting so deeply that when the spiral intensifies, you don’t scatter or compensate. You become the point around which everything reorganizes.
A Guided Practice: Finding Center, Connecting to Ground, and Becoming A Still Point
Here is a guided practice for you to explore and directly experience this possibility. You can also find it on Insight Timer.
Go into the chaos,
until you find
the still pillar
around which you swirl…
If this practice resonates, I want to invite you into a space I’m opening this spring. Coming Home to the Body is a 12-week live journey into embodied presence and somatic foundations. This is for those ready to move beyond managing life from the mind and into the full intelligence of their body. We will build this capacity together through sensation, nervous system awareness, emotional alchemy, and creative expression in a small, intentional group of eight. This is the work of becoming your own still point…
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