The Nine Centers

This is the chapter to read with your own free chart open.

A center on the bodygraph is a hub. Energy circulates through the graph, and centers are where it is received and transformed into something the body can use. Each one has a biological correlation, which is worth holding onto, because it keeps the whole thing attached to your actual body rather than floating off into metaphor.

The nine

Head is pressure. Mental pressure: inspiration, doubt, the itch of a question. It corresponds to cranial pressure. It is the pressure to think, and it is not the thinking.

Ajna is awareness, and it is where thinking happens: conceptualizing, analyzing, holding an idea steady. Nervous system and cognition. This is the center Chapter Three described as carrying part of the mutation.

Throat is communication and manifestation. Everything in the graph is trying to get here, because this is where things become speech and action. Thyroid, parathyroid, vocal cords.

G Center is identity and direction. Who you are and where you are going, which are the same question asked twice. Blood and liver.

Heart, also called Will or Ego, is the willpower motor and the smallest of the four. It makes promises, keeps them, and demands rest afterward. It governs the material plane and the felt sense of worth. The heart muscle itself.

Sacral is the life-force motor: work, vitality, reproduction, sexuality. It is the loudest engine in the graph, and its response is the ground under most people’s decision-making.

Solar Plexus is both a motor and an awareness center, which is an unusual combination and a significant one. Emotional tides, depth, spirit. The solar plexus nerve bundle. Chapter Five explains why this one is the pivot of our whole transitional situation.

Spleen is the body’s oldest awareness: instinct, intuition, timing, taste, immune intelligence. It operates only in the present moment and it says a thing once, softly, and does not repeat itself. Immune and lymphatic intelligence.

Root is pressure and a motor at once: adrenalized drive, stress, the push to get on with it. Adrenal system.

One note on the picture. The Solar Plexus and Spleen sit to either side on the graph, which does not match where they are in the body. They are drawn that way so the streams of awareness running through them are legible.

Defined and open

Now the part that makes the chart yours.

On your graph, some centers are colored in and some are white. A colored center is defined. A white one is open, or undefined.

Definition comes from channels. When a channel between two centers is complete in your design, both centers at its ends are defined. This is worth being precise about, because it is commonly muddled: individual gates are activated in your chart, and activated gates are not the same thing as definition. Definition belongs to channels and to the centers they connect.

A defined center is consistent. It runs the same way for your whole life, it is reliable, and it broadcasts. It is a fixed part of who you are.

An open center is where you are not fixed. It takes in what is around it and it amplifies it. This is where you are receptive to other people, which is the same as saying it is where you are conditioned by them. It is also where you have the potential to become genuinely wise, because you sample the whole range of what that center can be, across everyone you ever spend time with, rather than being stuck with one setting.

Open does not mean broken or missing. It is where the world gets in, which is useful and worth knowing about, and it is the mechanism the rest of this book keeps returning to.

What to look at now

Find your white centers. Those are the places where the seven-centered software described in Chapter Six lands hardest, because they are the places you are built to take things in rather than to hold a position.

The full reference for all nine, defined and open, is at the centers.