← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 8/164
Open centre
An open centre is one of the nine centres of an Embodied Energy Chart with no complete channel running into it. On the drawing it is left unfilled. The tradition reads it not as something missing but as somewhere you are porous: you take in whatever the people and places around you are carrying in that area, and often feel it more strongly than they do.
Its opposite is the defined centre. Most charts have several of each; a Reflector has all nine open.
What makes a centre open
A centre is open whenever none of its channels is complete — that is, whenever no channel running into it has both its gates lit. It may still carry lit gates. Those are hanging gates: particular themes that are live in that open centre and reach for their partner in other people.
Some teachers in the tradition distinguish an "undefined" centre, with some gates lit, from a "completely open" one, with none. We treat both as open, because both lack a fixed mechanism, but the difference is visible on the chart: an open centre with gate numbers around it has particular themes it keeps returning to; an open centre with none takes in whatever arrives.
How it is read
The tradition makes two claims about open centres, and both are worth holding together.
It is where you are most conditioned. An open centre takes its cue from the definition of whoever you are with. Over years, that can turn into habits that are not really yours, built to manage a pressure you never generated. The open Will centre may learn to keep proving its worth; the open Drive centre to rush in order to be rid of other people's urgency; the open Feeling centre to smooth things over so the room stays calm; the open Head to chase questions that were never its own. That process is called conditioning.
It is also where you are most perceptive. Because an open centre reflects rather than generates, it can read a quality in other people very clearly — sensing the mood of a room, the pressure in a team, the conviction or lack of it in someone's voice. The tradition describes the open centres, once noticed, as the source of a particular kind of wisdom about people.
So open is never a weakness and we never read it as one. It is usually the part of the chart people recognise themselves in most quickly.
A question for each
For each open centre our readings offer a question to try against experience, such as:
- open Head: am I trying to resolve questions that were never mine to carry?
- open Mind: am I performing certainty I don't actually have?
- open Throat: am I talking to be seen, or because there is something to say?
- open Self: whose life am I currently heading toward?
- open Will: what am I proving here, and to whom?
- open Vitality: do I know when to stop, or do I stop when the energy runs out?
- open Feeling: is this feeling mine, or am I carrying the room's?
- open Instinct: am I holding on because it's right, or because letting go frightens me?
- open Drive: am I hurrying to be rid of the pressure, or because it's genuinely time?
They are prompts, not tests. None describes a fault, and none is about health: the centres take their names from the body only as symbols.
In your chart
An open centre is drawn unfilled, and in the figure drawing its glow stays small. The numbers around it, if any, are its hanging gates, marked with a *. A reading of the chart gives the open centres more room than the defined ones, because that is where most of the day-to-day recognition lives.