This saying doesn’t mean that we should avoid health practitioners, hospitals, or remedies when we need them. What is the message here, though? What is the “center,” how do we find it, and how does finding this center bring us the healing we need?

Over the years I’ve had ample opportunity to explore these questions as I’ve addressed several kinds of sickness: an eating disorder, chronic fatigue, diminished immunity. This is what I’ve learned:

If you are sick: I’ve learned that sickness follows from abandoning the core of who I am. Illness occurs when I leave home to live on the periphery of my life, believing that the essence of who I am isn’t good enough, isn’t lovable enough. The origin of my dis-ease is ignoring, neglecting, fleeing from my center of being.

I tilt off-center when I seek others’ approval. I leave home when I ignore my gut instincts, attempting to please others, to play by their rules. I abandon my essence when I disregard my inner source of wisdom and power, searching elsewhere for the guidance and strength I need. I vacate my core via thoughts, actions, and attitudes that diminish my sense of self. I drain my soul-power when I give away my birthright to value and validate myself. I starve my soul when I forget to feed my senses with beauty.

Do not seek a cure: When I’m living on the periphery, I try to fabricate a feeling of fullness by filling my belly with food, filling my time with work, filling my mind with the fantasies displayed on TV. Whatever addiction we choose, the fixes we find promise yet always fail to give us the feeling of fullness we crave. Such “cures” lead us further away from center rather than toward it.

Find your center: Find my what? For decades, the idea of possessing an inner source of wisdom and power was totally foreign to me. While I was able to read the words “the source of fulfillment is within you,” the concept didn't make any connection to my personal experience.

Can you relate? Our culture doesn’t advertise or train us to discover the source of fulfillment that dwells within us. Understandably so. The contentment that comes with living through this source, free from addiction, does not drive a market economy. The autonomy that follows from living through this source does not support a social order based on race, class, and gender injustice.

So where is this center of being, this center of healing? Call it what you will—inner source, soul, essence, self—I’ll tell you the secret: the treasure is hidden in plain view. You’ll find this pearl of great price in our culture’s least-valued container. Our center of being coincides with our body’s center; the site of our soul-power is sheltered within our belly.

Surprised? With good reason. Our culture shames the belly—especially woman’s belly. We’re told in many ways, including through scripture, that the belly is dangerous: dark, lusty, outrageous, wild, uncontrollable.

I’ll tell you the truth: the energy of the center is as untamable as the Power of Being unfurling through the universe.

The energy of our center—call it what you will: God, Goddess, Great Spirit, Source Energy, Shakti—is also radiant, playful, singing, soothing, glistening. The energy circulating within our center is kin to all the currents that create, sustain, tear apart, and regenerate our world.

Over the years, responding to my own need for healing, I’ve developed a daily practice—a sequence of belly-energizing movement and breathing exercises, drawn from yoga and other healing arts—that keeps me coming home to center. Narrated by the Rite for Reconsecrating Our Womanhood, these power-centering gestures enact the story of returning to the source. As presented in the Rite for Invoking the Sacred Feminine, they are body prayers addressed to the Source Energy within and surrounding each of us.

Developing and sharing this Honoring Your Belly practice has become my sadhana, my spiritual journey. The process affords me infinite opportunity to entertain all the impulses that lead me off-center; mercifully, it also provides the route for returning home.

You will be healed: I suspect that this adventure of being human is all about moving off-center, feeling the pain of that separation, finding our way home, moving off center again, finding our way home. It’s not an exercise in futility, though. Each time we return, the scope of our understanding expands and becomes more inclusive. In other words, our consciousness actually evolves.

The body prayers that accompany the belly-energizing gestures teach me about healing as this process of expanding consciousness. One of the moves, for example, enacts this invocation addressed to the Divine:

Come, awaken your presence within me. Teach me to embrace the interplay of opposites in the compassionate circle of your love.

These words remind me that moving off-center follows from identifying with “this” as opposed to “that.” I want health, not sickness; success, not failure; approval, not disapproval; acceptance, not rejection; joy, not sorrow. Constructing a barrier between “this” and “that,” then choosing sides, exiles me to the periphery of my life.

Returning to center requires that I find a way to embrace both “this” and “that.” Our capacity to do so, to embrace the interplay of opposites, dwells within our center. Each time we open our arms to make that embrace, we return to living through our center of being.

The point of healing is not to find the center once and for all—as if that were even possible. The essence of healing is knowing what takes us away from center and how to return home, again and again.