The beginning of a new semester teaching pottery on the wheel brings seemingly endless talk of centering. Learning to center, both on the wheel and in life, is an intimately personal practice.
In the studio, I show students how my own hands smoothly guide the clay up and down and attempt to explain the technicalities in detail: you put your hands like this and then you feel a connection with the clay and then there’s something to do with physics, I inform, as if that illuminates the whole process. I offer books to read, though I know my students will end up mesmerized by spinning potter’s wheels on TikTok. Only when they are willing to get their hands dirty, to fail again and again and keep trying, to sit with the frustration of watching my hands easefully guide my clay to center while theirs wobbles, are they going to be able to move through and find their own center.
Similarly, in my virtual office, I gently guide my therapy clients in finding their own center, providing tools and creating a safe space and acting as a consistent anchor of support. Yet only when they are ready to put in the work and be willing to fail to learn and lift themselves up, will they begin making their way toward their own center. Showing up in the space with me is the first step, a hard one, on a painfully beautiful journey I’m always honored to be part of.
When my clay and my clients find their way to their center, the true work can begin - the shaping and healing and formation of the full life they deserve to live.
May we all find the courage to work toward finding our center, over and over again.
My website was feeling busy and not very much like me, so I spent an evening last week re-designing and paring it down. I’m content to be feeling more in tune with the simplified internet version of myself.
I’ve been dreaming of attending an artist retreat and have my eye on mar’s beautiful new offering of space.
I’m deep in EMDR training for my therapy practice, so naturally I can’t wait to attend this event at Pioneer Works with friends this week.
I’ll leave you with a few words from others on centering:
‘As you go out, you come in, you always come into center, bring the clay into center; you press down, squeeze up, press one hand into the other, bringing your material into center … Then the miracle happens: When on center, the self feels different: one feels warm, on rayonne, in touch, the power of life a substance like an air in which one lives and has one’s being with all other things, drinking it in and giving it off, at the same time quiet and at rest within it’
- M.C. Richards, Centering In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person
‘... you are not the center. You contain a self-defined center, but you as a soul-holding, breathing person are not the center … nothing is out of place; everything is on time … no matter how many times you get far away from your truth, there will always be a path to get back to it … or … carve out a new one.’
- Marlee Grace, Getting to Center