Good and Bad Centres

January 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The term ‘centred’ in popular parlance tend to either feature within the term ‘ego-centred’ signifying an attitude and behaviour of a person who places their own personality, with its needs, desires, likes and dislikes etc, at the centre of experience, often to irritating effect; or it may signify a way of being which emerges from another entailment of the ‘centre’ metaphor. This second understanding of ‘centred’ recognises that a centre is also usually a point of balance or midpoint between extremes. In a physical object the centre point is where you would place a fulcrum if you wanted to make a scale or a see-saw. It is where you put the stick when you want to spin a plate. This physical property of centredness explains why we often use the term ‘balanced’ as a synonym for ‘centred’. In addition, this development of the metaphor results in an image of centre which connects the centre point to solid ground, and so, in this formulation, ‘centred’ also becomes synonymous with ‘grounded’.

However, the ‘grounded’ concept imports into the metaphor certain additional entailments which modify the ‘centre’ concept significantly. When something is ‘grounded’ it is no longer independent, or even truly central. An object which is grounded is tied to the Earth through the fulcrum at its centre, and in finding balance it loses its centre to this Earth. Also, borrowing from the electrical entailment, to be ‘grounded’ is to be connected to a conduit for the safe dissipation of energy. Both these entailments of the term ‘grounded’, connection to Earth and energy conduit, may be counter-productive in the development of excellence in performance. For this reason, the term ‘centre’, when applied within a performance training context, should be carefully articulated, and is most usefully disconnected from the image of ‘ground’.

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