Seeing Clearly 2 - Relaxed Eyes

Seeing Clearly - Lesson 2 - Relaxed Eyes

How rolling your hands like a massage tool can totally relax and release your eyes


Is anyone else 'languishing?" An article in last week's NYT by Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, described what may be the dominant emotional state of 2021:

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.

Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. It appears to be more common than major depression — and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness.

[Naming languishing] could give us a socially acceptable response to “How are you?” Instead of saying “Great!” or “Fine,” imagine if we answered, “Honestly, I’m languishing.” It would be a refreshing foil for toxic positivity — that quintessentially American pressure to be upbeat at all times


Going into "flow" is the prescription for languishing. This eye series is, therefore, just what the psychiatrist ordered. "Seeing Clearly" is an Awareness Through Movement® program developed by Buddhist, Bates Vision and Feldenkrais Method® Practitioner David Webber to deal with, and even overcome, severe ocular disease. The themes of Relax, Refocus, Realign, and Receive are core to this series. In other words: flow.


Lesson 1 set the tone, creating deep relaxation and gradually adding in movements of the eyes, head and hands. The idea is to build awareness of how the eyes move with and in opposition to the head and torso.  We also had a little bit of science nerdiness, catching a few videos on the optical nerves' anatomy and function .  Here are a few videos i found interesting.  Don't worry if you are not a fam of science.  You don't need to know this stuff to get the lesson!


Lesson 2 is, delightfully, one long self massage.  The eyes barely move, but as the whole system relaxes, the optic nerve quiets.  The optic nerve is also located quite close to the vagus nerve, which balances the 'fight/flight/freeze' and 'rest/digest' states.  When the optic nerve relaxes, it seems to have a calming effect all around.  

Awareness Through Movement is more about managing the nervous system than the muscles the nerves enervate. The optic nerve is one of the 12 cranial nerves.  Three cranial nerves activate the "larger" external eye muscles that move the eyes side-to-side, up and down and diagonally.  They also activate the movement of the tiny muscles that dilate or close down the pupil depending on the amount of light, and the muscles that focus the lens to adjust for near and far sightedness. Relaxing the nerves that activate the eye muscles help your eyes to relax.

Take your time with this one. Go for flow and maybe you'll see things a little differently when you let those relaxed orbs gently open.
 

Jacki Katzman