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Doing this mindfulness exercise, people often notice that they have more stability, better balance, and more physical power. They also discover that resting in the hara affects the mind. It becomes quieter, more focused, and the field of awareness widens. We might be sitting in a meeting, caught up in a heated discussion, but when we drop awareness into our center, we notice more of what is going on in the entire room as well as all the people in it, the sound of a ticking clock, or someone’s nervous cough.

If people practice mindfulness of the hara long enough, they often find that there is also a stabilizing effect on their emotions. When a difficult emotion such as anger arises, if they drop their awareness into their center of gravity, the emotion stops growing and soon begins to fade. When you rest in your hara, you are like one of those blow-up toys with weight at the bottom. You can be pushed sideways or knocked over, but you will always bounce back and right yourself.

DEEPER LESSONS

If you ask someone to point to where in their body they “are,” most people in our culture will point to their heads. In Asian countries people tend to point to their chest (heart) or to their belly. My first Zen teacher used to walk by people and say, “You’re up in your head.” He could see when someone was lost in the confusion of whirling thoughts, and was reminding them to drop their awareness into their hara. My second Zen teacher tells his students to imagine that they have a second “head” in their belly, and to listen, speak, and move from that lower center. You will find that the mindfulness practice of absorptive listening (chapter 38) is enhanced when you listen from your center of gravity.

The center of gravity is very important to Japanese people. They have many expressions related to it, such as hara no hito, which refers to a person of hara, a person who has courage, integrity, determination, strength of will, and good character. Conversely, hara ga nai describes a person who has no courage and lacks determination. Hara ga oki means a person with a big hara, someone who is generous, compassionate, and broad-minded. Hara o suete means to settle the hara, to become calm and steady.

Although the hara is not an organ in the body, it is an energetic center, one that can be strengthened with persistent, mindful attention until, over time, it becomes a physically palpable quality of strong presence. I have met Zen masters who have developed so much hara-strength that it feels as if there were a huge boulder sitting in the room with you.

As you do the mindfulness exercises in this book, you may notice that many of them are based upon moving your awareness out of your head and thoughts and into your body. Our thoughts can never be about the present moment, because the present moment is an instant of pure physical sensation. For example, say our eyes catch sight of streaks of brilliant color in the sky. As soon as we have a thought about it, we are a split second removed from the pure sensation. When we think, “Oh, what a lovely sunset. Remember the one I saw in Arizona last year?” we are no longer just experiencing color and light. The mind has moved away from the experience to name what we see—“a sunset”—and is generating thoughts, memories, and comparisons about the sunset.

The thoughts aren’t nearly as pleasant as the original experience—the sudden glimpse of red and purple in the sky. In fact the thoughts about the sunset can be very annoying, because they separate us from the natural pleasure of just seeing vivid color. This essential gap, the feeling that we are wrapped in a kind of cotton wool, that we are not really experiencing anything directly, is at the source of much of our discontent in life. It is also the reason people try to amp up the intensity of everything, from the saltiness of potato chips or the caffeine jolt of various drinks to the volume of the car stereo.

The gap between us and everything else cannot be closed by adding intensity