Eyes left and right, palming the eyes, 34 min
This short eye lesson drops the anxiety level right down as you palm the eyes and look at the closed eyelids. It also frees the neck and head to rest easily on top of the spine. I feel my face soften and the eyes just rest, even if I didn’t know I was straining.
The ultimate purpose of the visual process is to arrive at an appropriate motor and/or cognitive response to the world. Unfortunately, strained eyes add strain to the whole self.
Test it: Strain to see something and sense the breath, chest, and throat.
If I strain to see something on the other side of the room, my stomach contracts and my throat pinches. I’d rather let the visual field just arrive. Use this lesson to do that and let go of strain.
(version of AY10)
Notes on self-image
The self-image is defined as the parts of ourselves that we have learned to sense.
“Learned sensing” slows down by the time we’re about fourteen. As adults, we live with an incomplete self image and rarely make a point of clarifying our sensations, with the consequence that we often intend to do one thing and in fact do the opposite.
I see this all the time with clients—and with myself. We try to move, but we can’t sense what we’re moving so we have no idea how to find it!
You might think, “Oh, that’s not me!” until you are challenged to move something you can’t find or feel (often in a Feldenkrais lesson), and confusion runs rampant. It’s pretty frustrating to feel that “clunky.”
Plus, it’s easy to “lose” parts of ourselves due to injury, pain, or trauma, or by pushing sensation away for many other good reasons.
In truth, we are all stuck in an out-dated self-image because we cannot sense all parts of ourselves equally.
We can improve our clarity in moving by testing and sensing, testing and sensing, over and over, like we did as children.
This is cool. Test the correlation between your sensations and your action:
Close your eyes and point your index fingers at opposite eyes, then open the eyes and note the crossover point. Is it centered?
Close your eyes, hold your index fingers as wide as mouth. Are they accurate?
Close your eyes, with your hands indicate the thickness of your chest front to back, or top to bottom.
More lessons:
This lesson is from Destress and Calm under the Seven Best series in the Feldenkrais Treasury.
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Quote of the week:
“Friendship with oneself is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.”