try bringing your awareness to your centre point

Any object, including a human body, has a point somewhere which is its gravitational centre – the effective centre of its mass. It's the point about which the object would spin, if it were spinning in space. In the human body, this is somewhere deep in the abdomen, deep in the belly, lower than the navel, and of course inside the body. You might associate it with the hara, the energy centre used in the martial arts.

Here, though, I'm suggesting that you use it as the object of awareness for a meditation. And the reason for doing this is that this central point can also represent the centre of one's being, as if it's not only a kind of gravitational centre, a centre of mass, but also the centre of all one's energy, including one's consciousness.

So bringing one's awareness to this point, it's as if we're focussing all our energy back onto that central point. It's as if we're going back to the source. Just as one could imagine rewinding the universe to the moment of the Big Bang, when all the energy was at a single point, so we can do that in meditation with our own energy. We can draw it back together, using awareness, until we are focussed completely at a single point: the source.

So to do this, find a quiet place to sit in meditation. Close your eyes. Take some slow, deep breaths. And you might like to start by bringing the awareness to the diaphragm, to the slow rise and fall of your belly as you are breathing. That's already getting quite close to this area of the body.

When you're feeling relaxed enough, bring your awareness even deeper, down into the belly, deeper, until you can imagine this centre point – the point right at the very centre of your being. And simply bring all your awareness to this point, and stay there.

For me, this centre point has a tremendous significance. It's the point where I feel completely still, where I feel an intensity of silence. And sometimes, if one practises with this a lot, one can begin to sense this still point even as one is going about other activities, and even as one is moving physically. For example, one might be dancing, and one might still, even in that flow of movement, have a sense of a point of stillness within oneself.

So it's well worth playing with this object of meditation. Give it a try. Try bringing your awareness to your centre point.