The way you use your eyes can have a significant effect on your ease of movement or sitting, indeed your entire well being.
When someone arrives for a lesson you could say metaphorically they don’t arrive in one go, they may have all kinds of things whizzing around in their head, it takes time for their system to fully adjust, decompress and so to really arrive and actually be in the room. They untangle themselves from the things that ten or twenty minutes ago were occupying their minds.
So when I am with a client who has just stood in front of the chair I ask them to pause, they already know that they are going to sit down in a moment, but instead of just cracking on I want them to pause and feel the ground beneath their stocking feet, to start to try and tune into the continual trickle of small, automatic adjustments that occur from their head to their toes as they balance on their feet, this is part of the process of encouraging them to be really present in the moment and in the room with anticipating doing something in the future.
Then I ask them to take an interest in their peripheral vision, I like to call it ambient vision, they don’t move their head or eyes to do this, it’s a matter of tuning in to what is already available, it’s our intention that makes the selection, as we become more aware of what is going on in our periphery vision it stimulates our balance system and wakes it up.
This is one of the reasons people slump in front of their computer screens, they have ceased using their ambient or peripheral vision, and so the balance system has gone offline, the part of the ‘image’ they are interested in is only the central part, the visual component of balance is lacking stimulation. In some ways this is an advantage if your are a computer programmer because it is precisely this kind of narrow vision that stimulates the focused, logical areas of our brain. There is a close correspondence between the narrowness of our field of vision and the narrowness or focus of the processes of the mind, or to put it in more positive way ‘wide eyes’ invites us into a state of wide mind.
We are predisposed to linear problem solving when our vision is tightly focused, this kind of mental and visual concentration is fine for a while but it makes it more difficult for our balance system because so much of balance is about visual orientation in our environment, our balance system craves wide vision, the big difference here is in brain patterns. Focused vision is fine for tasks that are sequential, your brain processes one thing at a time and you progress along a chain of tasks until you reach the end. Peripheral or ambient vision is better for processing a number of things at the same time but is much less focused and interested in detail.
The key thing to understand is that vision and mind co-ordinate. If your mind is tightly focused on one thing then even if you aren’t looking at anything in particular your eyes will tend to harden and tense as if you were actually looking at a small area of interest with great intensity, if on the other hand you are in a creative wide open state of mind then your eyes will tend to open up as if you were appreciating a wide scene.
Little wonder then, after an hour trying to solve a knotty problem on a screen a computer user will often start slumping, that’s a sign that the balance system has given up and the muscles are tired from bracing. The slump is the bodies last ditch attempt for keeping us upright in the chair, we become like potatoes settling in the sack immediately after it is put down on the ground which is not great for our internal organs.
So there is an intimate connection between the tone of our mind and the tone of our vision, when we see through a narrow corridor of visual awareness we see one thing at a time, our vision moves sequentially to different objects in the scene, it’s linear and encourages the mind into a similar state of processing one thing at a time, great if you have to add up some numbers but no so useful if you want to engage your balance system. When we soften our view, going into a wider visual awareness we improve at seeing the bigger picture, our brain and vision move from “one at a time” to “all at the same time” we begin to process the entire scene, just as long as we don’t get drawn into thought patterns that pull our mind and vision back into “one at a time“. The trick is to learn to soften and gently widen visual awareness and to start to enjoy the experience as the mind starts to care less about specifics and instead starts to simply be in the present moment.
So the eyes and the mind are intimately linked and so it’s a two way street! If we can persuade our minds to spread and become less tightly focused on one troubling detail then the eyes will soften and our vision will decompress and we will start noticing our surroundings. On the other hand if we soften our eyes then our concentration and focus on life’s problems softens. We need a break from troubling thoughts, when they loop endlessly we are not progressing with solving the problem. People report this kind of experience when they climb up a mountain and take in a majestic scene, the sheer scale makes them feel very small in a way that is strangely comforting, and of course great vistas of mountains encourage us into a wider less focused style of vision, it’s not a coincidence that we focus less on our problems in these places, they help disrupt unhelpful and repetitive patterns starting with the eyes.
But it doesn’t stop there because our balance system is also very sensitive to what the eyes are doing, if you are in any doubt about eyes and balance just recall the last time you visited a fairground crooked house or wondered whether your train has just started moving out of the station or whether the train on the tracks next door has just started moving.
Our balance system is frequently starved of the kind of sensory information it needs, what it craves is to know where it is, what direction ‘up’ is, the first step to balance is sensory (eyes, soles of feet and inner ear ) and in turn balance is the foundation of all upright or seated movement or posture.
If we are not in a state of fluidic, adaptive balance and yet still managing to stay upright or seated in an upright position then it is because we have been forced to use the strategy that statues use – basically rigidity or bracing the parts that are supporting us.
But of course we don’t expect to stand around like statues, we expect to be able to move around and so we end up asking our bodies to do two incompatible things, to be loose enough to move freely and to be braced enough to cope with gravity in a non-balanced way. We are never truly in balance, we are always approaching balance but for this to work properly we need to dissolve the tensions and fixations that stop us getting closer to a fluid balance, what we ideally want is to be fairly close to perfect balance and then just to allow the micro adjustments that then occur naturally to keep nudging us towards balance and this activity keeps the system alive and supple. Nurturing our balance system is mostly about getting out of the way of nature and learning the skills of dissolving unhelpful tensions and of course softening our eyes.
Hunter’s Eyes
This is a useful exercise to get your eyes and brain working together in a way that enhances awareness and will often help undo log jams of stress and muscular tension, if you prefer not to think of hunting animals as an early hunter gatherer then you could think of yourself as a wildlife photographer quietly waiting to film a small creature. In both cases a larger animal might be looking at you without you realising so it works both ways so awareness of what is happening is important.
The scene, forest, tall trees with 101 hiding places, the ground is not even so you need awareness to walk, there is a whole world above your head in the tree tops, you need to be aware what is happening up there as well.
Some people asked to think like a hunter/photographer will scan the scene with their central, focused vision guessing at possible hiding places anticipating a snout or pair of ears showing from behind a bolder or tree. The problem with this kind of vision is that it is a case of putting all the eggs in one basket we are preparing for something happening at a specific location when it will probably occur somewhere else. If you commit to moving to your left you will find a time lag and level of resistance if you are suddenly and unexpectedly required to move to your right, it’s the same with vision. This style of focused attention triggers our brains into an analytic or cortical style of thinking that is very good at processing one thing at a time in detail but not much good at tracking multiple things happening at the same time.
Another way of seeing is to take in the entire width and height of the scene, full panoramic vision and not to focus on any one thing, if we do then it will probably be the wrong thing to be looking at when the time comes, being prepared for anything means being prepared for nothing being empty and just fully aware. Investing in a guess at a single outcome sets our intention and movement system in a way that may be inappropriate for a different outcome, if we are mentally prepared to move left and it turns out we must move right then we have a physical and mental bias that needs to be first overcome before we can act effectively.
Instead we find a quieter, deeper and less analytic part of our mind that is capable of processing more things at once just as long as we stay in wide vision awareness, and trust our system will know what to do when the time comes, we do absolutely nothing to try and make this happen, all we do is stay with wide, non-specific awareness, not drift and not get fixated on any part of the scene. It’s a more effective approach because our brains have moved from being able to deal only with “one at a time” and can now deal with “all at the same time” just as long as we allow it to happen by leading our mental patterns with our visual pattern of non-specific wide awareness.
Its a matter of trusting lower level, more instinctive parts of our system to do their job and alert us when something moves. If you have ever noticed a deer looking at you from the corner of your eye when you were not even thinking of deer then you have tapped into this more primeval visual monitoring system.[1]
I don’t recommend that we go around with hunter’s eyes all of the time but it is a useful ‘reset’ button, an antidote to computer eyes and the way to untangling unhelpful habits in the way we use our eyes.
Another Experiment
When you do find yourself committed to a few hours behind the computer screen try the following.
When you are hard at work you may not even be seeing the frame of the screen, you might be focused on one or two words or a small picture so now and then take a minute to allow your vision to come out far enough that you see the whole monitor not just a part of the screen.
Now start to take an interest in the space immediately around the monitor, this is the space your arms and hands might extend into if you decided to pick the monitor up. You don’t necessarily move your head or eyes to do this, instead your central vision takes in the ‘object’ the monitor in this case and your more peripheral vision starts to take an interest and explores the space around the object, this is the space in which you or a part of you will use if you wish to touch or pick up the object. Seeing a whole room in ‘negative’ means trading focus on walls and objects in the room and instead being aware of the shape and volume of the void space between the walls and objects.
If you consider this from the perspective of our ancient ancestors, a hunter gatherer it makes perfect sense, a hunter cannot afford to focus exclusively on prey that occupies the centre vision, the hunter needs to be aware of escape routes and obstacles around the prey. In the natural world it is not a good survival strategy to be so immersed with a single object or thing that the surrounding three dimensional environment fades into a blur or becomes two dimensional and yet this is precisely what we do in front of a monitor.
What we really need is a type of visual awareness that allows awareness to fall without effort onto an object but without losing sight of the bigger picture, the space in which the object sits, showing interest in the “what” but also the “where”. [3]
Fell runners experience this kind of visual flow when they run through a path of scree rocks, each one being a potential twisted ankle, and have to allow their vision and system to automatically pick out safe places to place the feet without slowing down their pace, both types of vision work seamlessly together in a flow state.
Soft Eyes
Softening the eyes helps us dissolve highly concentrated patterns in the use of our eyes, just letting the eyes do their job reflecting that vision does not require work or tension, you don’t have to do to see, it just happens when your eyelids are open. Isn’t it strange that drivers in a hurry lean six inches closer to the windscreen as if pulled forward by their eyes in order to try and speed up their journey? Tension in the eyes sets up the tone for the whole nervous system, it’s almost impossible to be physically and mentally relaxed when your eyes are in hard narrow focus mode.
It’s not just a matter of thinking of the eyeballs being softer, think of the eyelids softening, the muscles within the eye orbs even behind the eyeballs, its amazing just how many of the small delicate muscles in this area become entrained and almost supportive of any tension, letting go and softening the eyes helps dissolve patterns of tension all over the body and mind.
Soft eyes does not mean fuzzy vision, letting it all ‘blur’ it’s not about zoning out, going back to the section ‘Hunters Eyes”, a hunter is very aware of everything that is happening around them.
Next time you find your eyes are hard just ask yourself if that eye effort is making anything happen faster, is it helping in anyway at all? Remember as long as your eyelids are open the light flows in without any effort, let the light come to you rather than reaching out with the eyes.
Seeing As If From The Back Of The Head
To try and unpack this rather strange statement, let’s just start by reviewing that the eyes do not actually ‘see’ the eyes take in light, focus it on your retina and convert this to nerve signals, it is your brain that takes those signals and creates meaning and much of the visual processing does actually occur at the back of your head, it is possible that this is a partial explanation for why people over time have discovered this principle (it can be traced back centuries to martial artists and others) but I think there is more to it than this.
I think the benefits of “seeing as if from the back of your head” have a lot to do with the way that we box ourselves in as a reaction to stress and tension, an English philosopher called Douglas Harding described his experiences of becoming aware that he was seeing out as if through two portholes in his skull, this being something that highly stressed people will usually be very familiar with.
In his book about stress Douglas asked us to make the shape of a pair of spectacles using our hands.
He then asks us to hold these ‘spectacles’ at arms length and whilst looking at them slowly bring the ‘spectacles’ closer to our face, eventually putting them on. Hopefully you found at some stage an impression of the two circles of vision you get when binoculars are badly adjusted and then as you got closer to your eyes you had the impression of only one circle of vision, the two circular frames of your ‘spectacles’ merge into a single circular frame.
People who are feeling stressed often want to withdraw and form a barrier from their internal experience and the unfriendly world out there the changes in the way they process vision follow suit and so it’s kind of safer to be inside their skulls looking through two circular port holes, of course they may not actually see two distinct circles of vision but subjectively it feels as if the eyes haven’t really united harmoniously it’s still a feeling of being inside looking out through two portholes. Their vision reaches out like two laser beams as if seeing is something that requires a kind of reaching effort rather than simply allowing the light to come them with no effort at all.
When we are more relaxed and grounded the vision tends to settle and merge into a single circle of vision, there is less sensation of having two separate portholes of vision, the world seems less remote, the vision from the left and right eye is being merged harmoniously, more properly integrated, the scene before us seems less remote and more immersive.
Finally when we tap into what people mean by “seeing as if from the back of the head” we find that our visual awareness seems to widen and expand again, its as if we have given up the notion of seeing through the front of the face, through the ‘portholes’ of the eyes, instead the subjective experience is as the “barrier to vision” of our skull has disappeared completely and instead we are experiencing the world as if we are immersed directly in the scene.
I hope the diagram above helps, we are looking down at someone’s head and shoulders.
The person on the left is quite possibly tense or stressed, their eyes and brain are not quite managing to give a seamless circle of vision, subjectively they may feel they are looking out through two portholes in their face. They may report that their eyes feel hard, in the sense of giving someone a ‘hard look’. The black arrows represent the subjective experience of two narrow, conical fields of vision. A few hours on a computer will often result in this kind of experience.
The person in the middle is enjoying a more integrated experience, subjectively they report only a single well integrated circular field of vision, we are more likely to experience this when on holiday or very relaxed in big open spaces.
The person on the right has let ‘go of their eyes’ it almost seems as if they are no longer playing a major role, instead they are registering the sensation of sight further back in their heads, it seems to them subjectively as if the field of vision has become wider still, it seems more integrated and a much more direct and immersive experience. It almost seems as if they are experiencing a scene that ‘sits’ directly at the top of their spine, as if the eyes have become redundant because they are experiencing the scene as if they are part of it. This immersive sense can be taken a step further by thinking of your awareness as being roughly 180 degrees at the front and using your ears as if to sense behind you giving a full 360 degrees of sensory awareness.[2]
It’s difficult to describe this without sounding “woo woo” but remember that the world we experience is what our sensory organs and brain create for us, vision, hearing, taste, smell are the sensations our brain makes for us according to what our sensory organs are picking up. Our mental state and tensions whether contracted or free and open can have a profound effect on the way we experience the world and can help relieve stress and tension or amplify it. So this more immersive way of experiencing the world is really what people subjectively experience when tensions are removed, when we take off the ‘blinkers’ of stress and tension.
Please avoid vision experiments whilst driving or operating machinery.
[1] I usually try and avoid using the term primeval or primitive to refer to the so called ancient parts of our brain in case they somehow sound less important even though we cannot survive without them. Yes those parts of the human brain are the oldest and are associated with survival skills amongst other things but not much in nature stays static, I prefer to suggest instead that all parts of our brains have evolved as required, it’s unfortunate we have adopted naming systems that rank parts of our brain as modern or ancient, they are all working here and now in the 21st century.
[2] Again on the theme of our ancestral origins as hunter gatherers, we probably relied on a very highly developed 360 degree sense of awareness, successful hunting is being able to spot camouflaged or hidden prey but survival demands you are aware all the time of being a hunter and not becoming the hunted. Using the sense of hearing to cover the zone behind us makes perfect sense.
[3] Vision scientists talk about “what” vs “where”, but as with many western discoveries of this type it was known much earlier in the east. If we learn to see objects without always forming associations or judgments (like, dislike, useful, heavy, light) our balance and visual system can stay wide, our brains don’t fall into analytic “one at a time” processing and so we can use them as reference points to help us locate ourselves in space, something our balance system craves. If instead of staying in wide awareness an object triggers us into past memories or judgements then our vision system collapses back into narrow focus, our brains stop being able to process “all at the same time” and so the task of balancing becomes harder.