It's one thing to find your 'center' while detaching from the world. It's a whole other thing to find it at the heart of the world. For years, I left the world to find my 'self'. This was an essential step, because I was not yet self-connected enough to find my center in the heart of society. I was too light, too soft, too traumatized. But then I came to realize that if I couldn't hold to my center in the world, then I didn't have much of a center. If all it took was a few days in the marketplace, on urban streets, dealing with humanity, before I had to run back to the woods, to find myself... then what had I found?

A very fragile, hollow center. So the work continued this time in the world itself. No easy feat, because of my trauma history, but the truest work I have ever done. Because now, I can sit in the middle of hell, and feel my core. Because now I can stand amid the fires of distraction, and sustain my focus. Its one thing to find your center while hiding from the world. It's quite another to find it in the heart of the everything. Because the wholly grail is YOU, unstoppably solid in the heart of the madness. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations