Finding the Calm Center

Finding the calm center can challenge anyone of us that is living a full life in the ‘90’s. For a woman with ADD, it’s especially challenging to center herself amid the chaos, to step out of the chaos and into calmness, to step out of the often frenetic activity of her daily life and into the flow of her life.

Most of us know that being calm, centered, and positive in our lives, particularly when under stress, is beneficial. Yet learning about centering is not enough, experiencing being centered is what makes it come alive. By practicing centering regularly, you can reach a point where you can choose centering at any time you wish. Creating an environment in which you can take a short break and breathe, to ground yourself whenever you need to, is a great way to begin. By finding an approach or two that works well for you, you’ll be on your way to more centered living before you complete reading this article!

Centering brings us back to ourselves. It allows us to hear our inner voice more clearly, for some, even to FIND our inner voice. We can look inside and know what is most important right in that moment. Often, a woman with ADD may feel her world spinning around her. Decisions, both large and small, that she must make NOW are spinning in her mind, and figuring out what her priorities are sends her spinning emotionally. Being centered is not spinning. Being centered is soothing, calming, and nurturing. Many women with ADD have no idea about how to center themselves, or if they do, they don’t know how to remember to center themselves, and/or they lack the needed skills to set up a structure to center themselves and to follow through with it, no matter how much they want it. Centering ourselves is like exercising or eating a healthy diet -- we wish we could magically acquire the discipline to do it regularly, but it takes intention and focus.

To be effective, centering for a woman with ADD has to be extremely appealing. Otherwise, odds are she won’t do it! Appealing goes way beyond knowing, "I’ll feel better if I get centered." Of course you’ll feel better if you’re centered. It’s no different than a girl with ADD knowing that she’d feel better if she completed her homework....that alone is usually not enough to convince her to do it. So often a woman with ADD is caught in the space between knowing exactly what she needs or wants to accomplish and actually accomplishing it. That space at times is a wide gulf. A woman with ADD knows about many things that are good for her, and somehow she manages not to do most of them -- like taking strong-tasting vitamins, developing an exercise routine or a new eating regimen, studying for an exam, going to bed early enough for a good night’s sleep, weeding the garden, preparing lessons, practicing a new skill, balancing the checkbook. All of these things are "good for you," yet rare is the woman with ADD who easily starts and finishes tasks like these.

If you’re a woman with ADD who wants to be more centered, and who wants some space and time for yourself, how do you do it? One method that works for many of my clients is to make this "task" compelling. Here are a few questions to help you look at how to do that.

If food’s not your thing, how about wearing centering clothes? Choose an outfit where the clothes are constructed or decorated with a center: a dot, another color, an open midriff, a special belt or sash, a piece of jewelry, a colorful scarf. Try to come up with a few more ideas of your own.

What about cosmetics? Try eye shadow with a different center color, nail polish with a different center color, or paint your middle toenail on each foot in a different color nail polish than the other four; try it with your fingernails…paint the center one in a different way.

Here are some structures my clients have used successfully:

Some other structures that work in daily life:

Being centered is holding on to what matters, and gracefully letting go of the rest. It’s also knowing what matters. As Phil Jackson, the coach of the Chicago Bulls team, says, "Never forget that a wheel is made not only of spokes, but also of the space between the spokes. Sturdy spokes poorly placed make a weak wheel. The essence of wheel-making lies in the craftsman’s ability to conceive and create the space that holds and balances the spokes within the wheel." Centering helps us to create the spaces in our lives that hold and balance all that we do.

Here’s an easy and quick way to center in just a couple of minutes. Use this exercise as a framework. The bare essentials of the framework are always available to you, any time, anywhere. You can elaborate on this exercise with music, visualization and other activities you enjoy. With this type of exercise, the actual process of getting centered can take as little as a moment or two, or it can expand into a long and luxurious ritual, depending on the time and energy you have available.

Shaped by your needs and preferences, your ways to your center are uniquely yours. Some of the helpful elements to remember are breathing, creating structures, meditating, connecting with others, and finding a compelling path to center. Some techniques you might use are listed in the table below.