Which is the most important centre of the human body?

We all suffer from stress, anxiety, tension, anger etc. Sometimes we think we’re relaxed, but this is just a notion; the reality is we are only less stressed. We confuse a state of reduced stress with peace.

We think the head or the heart are the most important centres of the human body. We give great importance to the intellect and to emotions. IQ and EQ have become parameters by which we consider each other to be superior and inferior to one another. Thinking and feeling are regarded as the most important activities of life, thereby we believe our heads and hearts to be primordial.  But this is incorrect, the most important part of our body is the navel. It is not thinking or feeling that are primordial, but being. Our roots are at the navel. When we are being formed in the womb, our navel is formed first, then our heart and finally our brain.

We remain active in the head at all times, forever thinking and imagining. Most of us generally only use the body for pleasure and aescetics. And what have we achieved today? The majority of society’s ailments at present are of the mind, in fact all of us have some disorder of the mind. We are all prey to anger, stress, anxiety, tension, etc. Sometimes we think we’re relaxed, but this is just a notion; the reality is we are only less stressed. We confuse this state of reduced stress with peace, but there is still stress, and this will continue to be the case as long as we overemphasise our brains.

 

Breathing is the key.

If we observe our breathing, we will find that we continuously move our chest. At night however, if you observe a person sleeping, you will find that it is no longer the chest but the navel that moves due to breathing. Similarly, if you watch young children, it is their bellies and not their chests that move up and down. This is because they are still close to their navel, they are more engaged in being, rather than thinking or feeling. And young children have no stress, no tension.

 

Going back to the Womb

In the womb we were fully connected by the navel. We lived in our mother’s womb and we received her life energy and nutrients through the umbilical cord. A few months later, we were born, we experienced a shocking pain when we were separated from our mother; she was our home and giver of life energy. The source that fed us was suddenly taken away; the shock level was tremendous and the doctors had to make sure we cried so that we could breathe, so that we could survive.

After birth we got our oxygen supply through our lungs and we got nutrients from our mother’s milk, from her chest. So our second connection to our mother was at the heart. That's when our heart centre truly stared developing; our awareness flowed to the heart centre and our capacity of love started developing.

 

The Brain Obsession

As we grew older we learnt how to eat by ourselves and the attention was then transferred to our abilities and our learning. Everything was about the first word, learning how to crawl, how to walk, how to behave. Then it was all about kindergarten, school and for many, eventually university. The focus of life suddenly moved to our brains and it never stopped.

 

Give your Brain a Break. 

Today we believe that thinking is everything. But none of the major processes of life are carried out by thinking. Breathing, digestion, elimination, reproduction and sleeping don’t happen by thinking. In fact, these processes are often hindered by thinking. We desperately need to think less and live more. Our vision and our clarity are obstructed by our continuous and overflowing stream of thoughts, most of which are irrelevant.

 

How do we learn how to think less and act more?

The answer lies in the way we breathe. We must breathe deeply and fully from the navel, not from the chest. We must go back to the way we breathed as children. As the navel moves up and down, and the breath gets fuller and fuller, we start to think less and less. We find that our states of stress and anxiety reduce, and we find greater harmony. This is because the flow of our breath and the flow of our thoughts are directly related. When we increase our thoughts our breath becomes more shallow;  as we deepen our breath our flow of thoughts decreases. With time, we will find we have more clarity and greater energy, less thoughts, a deeper connection to our emotions and our heart centre, as well asimproved systems of digestion, assimilation and elimination.