The Three Centers of Being - Striking a Balance with Your Mind, Body and Spirit

Through Ray’s inspiration from some of Gurdjieff’s Enneagram work, I’ve come to gain a greater understanding of how different people are and are not. Basically, Gurdjieff divides the “human engine” into three different centers – the intellectual center (the mind), the emotional center (the heart) and the instinctual or gut center (the body), which correspond with the trinity of Mind, Body and Spirit, where mind is Mind, gut is Body and heart is Spirit.

Now all of us have all three centers and we function from all three, but the difference among people lies in the varying extent one is driven by each. The Mind thinks, the Heart feels, the Body acts. The Mind also fears, the Heart also grieves, and Body also expresses anger. Without balance, the person is likely to express the shadowside of the center he/she functions excessively from or the center he/she represses the most. Balance is key. The repressed one often brings us greatest troubles, therefore always seek to bring whatever that is repressed to the light; and that shall be your key to balance. Oftentimes, we simply need to be aware, and with self-awareness, we can use our free will to let centers which we normally use less of, guide and teach us from time to time. And by knowing which one we’re most driven by, we can also, once in a while, choose not to listen to the center which normally drives us. There are too many combos of perceptions and experiences you can choose from to live your life. Why not let yourself try something different?

Most importantly, there is no right or wrong to how we perceive reality and how we choose to live our life. All of life comes from the same Source. Whatever belongs and does not belong, belongs. The knowledge of this work really opened me more to compassion. I hope this will inspire you and bring you greater awareness of your self as well.

For me, I discovered that I’m a lot in the heart, and very repressed with my gut instinct (I simply can’t hear my gut, let alone express and assert myself), which I discovered, is caused by having a lot of unexpressed anger sourced from deeply rooted self-judgment from past situations. As I became more aware of this imbalance and allowed myself to feel my anger, I started to be able to hear my gut and assert myself accordingly more. A repressed gut also leads to a lack of discipline, will and action, as the gut, which comes more from the body, is oriented towards action, which is the fundamental expression of matter or the physical. Bringing my gut center to balance allowed me to be grounded in the physical, leading to a greater will to act and for me specifically, an increased capacity to experience present moment awareness.

Beyond our mind, body and spirit, lies a greater Force that drives us in our everyday reality. You can call it our higher self, or our Source self. Therefore do not worry that you need to change yourself if you discover that you’re more in one center and less in another. Simply grow in self-awareness. For it is in knowing the small self, often called our “personality”, that we may ultimately know the big Self – the pure consciousness in All.