Why “Centered Self”?

Names matter to me.

There’s something so satisfying about landing on the name that perfectly captures the personality of a pet, the core idea inside an essay, or the philosophy behind a new business. When I had a farm with forty chickens, every single one had a name and a reason. Take Doris, the Polish chicken with the bouffant hairdo. My friend from Alabama took one look at her and said, “She looks just like my meemaw with her hair did!”

It’s no wonder I took so much care in coming to the name Centered Self. My coaching colleagues may have rolled their eyes at me a little bit as I talked it through in training sessions. But before I found the name, I uncovered its meaning.

Studying the hexagram, I came to realize that Zhong Fu is not just a state of being but the act of returning to center again and again. Like wind moving across a lake, events in our lives disturb the surface. Water moves with the wind but remains intact, just as we are shaped by circumstances but not undone by them. The more we practice moving with the ripples, the better we become at stilling the waters. That practice is how we grow.

But what to do when the disturbance is beneath the surface? In my life, that centered stillness had been elusive. Instead of a whole being, I felt fractured into many parts all caught in the crosscurrents.

I remember the first time my therapist invited me to name one of those parts. “The judgmental bitch,” I called her. That was the very beginning of something that would be, to put it dramatically, life-changing. Identifying parts led to the table exercise (what I later learned was called Fraser’s Dissociative Table Technique) and eventually to Internal Family Systems (IFS). Richard Schwartz’s work and his assertion that there are No Bad Parts fundamentally changed my relationship with myself.

In IFS the Self is the benevolent center of a person. The Self is not just another part but the leader of the entire system. When the parts don’t trust the Self to lead, they take over, doing their jobs to protect the system because they don’t know what threats are real. They fight each other for control in an internal civil war.

I healed by learning to lead. The parts themselves taught me. When I began to listen to them, they told me what they really needed. When I listened to them, they trusted me to protect them. When I could hear them all, they stopped battling each other. The protector parts stood down to allow the calm, curious, courageous parts to step up.

My Centered Self is both the place I go to know myself and the Self I find when I get there. Centered Self is my work and the one who shows up for the job.