Center of gravity

On an aikido mat, you learn very quickly that strength does not decide who falls.

A large, powerful person can be thrown by someone half their size. Not because the smaller person is stronger, but because the larger one has lost their center. Their weight has drifted past their feet. Their attention has gone to their grip, their opponent’s face, their anger. In that moment, the lightest touch sends them down.

What physics says

Every object has a center of gravity, the single point where its weight can be treated as concentrated. An object standing still is stable as long as that point stays above its base of support. A lower center of gravity and a wider base make it more stable. Once the center moves outside the base, gravity does the rest.

For a standing human, the center of gravity is roughly in the lower abdomen, a little below the navel. This is exactly where Japanese martial arts locate the hara, and where Koichi Tohei, one of aikido’s great teachers, placed what he called the One Point. His first principle of mind and body coordination was simply: keep One Point.¹⁷

Among the qualities Tohei described in a person who keeps One Point: calm breathing, the ability to accept whatever happens without losing composure, and, as a result, the ability to do your best at any time.¹⁷

That is not a description of strength. It is a description of a center.

The center that holds a life

Lives have centers of gravity too.

Whatever carries the most weight in a life becomes the point everything else balances around. Money. Reputation. A relationship. A grievance. A child. A job.

This is the second story from the opening of this book. No one in our family ever declared that a job in Montreal would be our center of gravity. But it carried the most weight, so everything else balanced around it. The move we wanted kept sliding past the edge of the base. Not because we stopped wanting it, but because it was not where our weight was.

A center of gravity does not need to be chosen to be real. That is what makes it so powerful, and so dangerous.

The double-minded

The Letter of James says that a double-minded person is unstable in all their ways.¹⁸ In physical terms, that is exactly right. A body trying to hold two centers at once cannot be balanced. It wobbles between them, and the smallest push topples it.

Søren Kierkegaard wrote a whole book on the opposite condition. Its title is its thesis: Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.¹⁸ He did not mean that a person should do only one activity. He meant that a heart is pure when all its willing is gathered toward one good, rather than split among many masters.

A body with two centers cannot balance. Neither can a soul.

The center outside the self

Here is where The Godward Way makes its most important claim.

The human tendency is to make the self its own center of gravity. My comfort, my goals, my peace, my growth. Spiritual practice can even reinforce this: a calmer self, a more balanced self, a more enlightened self, but still the self at the center.

The Godward Way proposes that the soul’s true center of gravity is not inside it at all. It is the Father.

That sounds strange until you remember the aikido mat. A practitioner who is centered is not rigid or self-absorbed. They are relaxed, open, aware of everything around them, and almost impossible to knock over. Their center is low and quiet, and it gives them freedom of movement everywhere else.

So it is with a soul whose center is the Father. The job, the family, the house, the plans: all of them can move. The soul can move with them, adapt, change direction in the world, and not fall, because none of those things holds the weight.

The Godward Way explores this idea at length in the series The Center of Gravity of Consciousness.

The question is not whether your life has a center of gravity. It does. The question is whether you know what it is, and whether it can hold you.