Centre Points..Home.

Re-reading The Mists of Avalon (first one to snigger gets summarily beheaded) and I'm struck, as always, by Marion Zimmer Bradley's apparent handle on agoraphobia.

In this book,she paints Gwenhwyfar as an agoraphobe, just as I was for many, many years, before it all disappeared in the crisis of my shamanic (ie human) initiation.

I understand by now that agoraphobia can be produced in an individual by a radical lack of a personal centre. For a long time, when grounding and centering was called for, I would send a shoot of my awareness deep into the Earth, and leave it at that - no real centering took place at all.

When eventually I learned to find my personal centre - that place in the earth body between the first two chakras and somewhat behind them - I wept with a recognition of Home. This was the place I was really supposed to live in when incarnate and not, as had usually been the case, in my head.

Almost paradoxically, the finding and recognition of a carnal centre point sheds light and understanding upon the fact that we are all, not just connected, but radically One Thing, each a part of a truly all-pervading Life which is called by some God, by others the Awen...and yes, By Many Other Names as well.


Sister Hecate has said she thinks of it like the sea, and we all as droplets of the water in it. Indra's Net is another attempt to articulate this reality. But I've recently come to envision it as a metal mesh, through which the amorphous and unformed mass which is Life is squeezing, appearing now in the world as discrete blobs of..people, and grass, and pitbulls, and quarks. Perhaps the metal mesh vision arises from my deep immersion in this machine culture, I don't know, but it works for me.The metal strands and wires apparently delineating each individual is composed of pain, and greed, and limiting self interest - and it makes us appear as separate islands, indeed. That is, until we see the mesh, and glimpse the stuff of Life beyond it, now bulging forth as each of us. Discrete, but conjoined from a place I have come to think of as the centre point of the All.

And as I tossed painfully on my bed in the throes of a devastating bout of 'flu (conceived through the tumbling of my immune system following a great crisis of Ancestors), I could feel this centre point of the All, flowing into and also from my own centre, in a dark river of tranquility, and patience, and fulfillment so deep that it swept all anxieties and pain before it, and I knew both my individual self and my True self more deeply, more thoroughly, more joyfully.

May the river sweep in like manner through you all.

Image: found here