Your body's center, sheltered within your belly, is the one-point through which you address your body as a whole. It's a principle of physics: A motive force applied to your body's center moves your entire form.
As I write in The Woman's Belly Book:
What happens to the center happens to the whole.... When your belly center leads you into action, your whole body moves easily, gracefully, almost effortlessly. The whole of you moves as one.
Your body's center is also your center of being, the one-point where the matter and energy of who you are converge. It's the one-point from which your physical and emotional expressions emerge.
The best actors enact this truth. They entirely embody a character, bringing the physicality and emotionality of a particular — however fictional — person to life. They deepen into their body's center and bring forth an individual. They don't give us an impression; they give us a genuine experience of another human being.
Tom Hanks is not my favorite actor, although I think he did a splendid job as Chuck Noland, the stranded FedEx exec in "Cast Away."
Whatever my opinion, he does know acting.
In fact, he revealed acting to be a body-centered practice when he said this (at 1 minute, 2 seconds) after receiving the Kennedy Center honors in 2014:
"I hope the look on my face was reflecting the honor and pleasure I had inside my belly."
