‘The Eyes Have It’ Exploration
Hello—
Welcome!
I’m putting together a series and exploration about the shift from a peripheral gaze (encompassing your whole environment) to a foveal gaze (a very concentrated, crisis-preventing view).
The series is designed—will be collaboratively designed with your help—to have you be more aware and more in choice about when you shift from a peripheral-ish state to a foveal-ish state. This awareness would be of benefit in two broad categories: to people wanting to have an enjoyable hour of slow gentle movement that improves their vision and balance and brings a measure of peace to their breath and gut, and to dementia navigators and care partners who wish to understand, perhaps slow, and certainly find adaptations for their clients or partners as the person living with dementia becomes more dominated by foveal patterns.
You might be attracted to some of these benefits, but curious or maybe even a little scared by this strange list. What do gut tension, breath, balance, vision, dementia and, for that matter, enjoyment have in common?
For all humans, the switch from peripheral to foveal vision carries many implications for the nervous, immune, endocrine and cardiovascular systems, and may affect the fascia as well. In this class, learn how to navigate, in choice, from one state to another.
In dementia, the reduction in peripheral vision eventually declines to binocular vision. The person living with dementia is, over time, reduced to monocular vision. The practical implications are immense for professional care and care partners, but what about the more subtle internal changes to the systems in the person living with dementia–how does loss of peripheral processing affect mood, resilience, social interaction and other processes? This class will get at that.
The method I use, Feldenkrais®, pioneered the idea of neuroplasticity. The lessons in this series are ideal for encouraging cognitive resilience and slowing the decline in peripheral acuity.
There is an increasing consensus about the relationship between the skull and the pelvis, and the way changes in one are mirrored in the other. This isn’t (just) wuwu. Research backs it up. Tension in the eyes, skull, face and neck affects the gut and vice-versa. In this class, you’ll access your own inner teacher and adjust your gut habits as you wish, for yourself.
Many Feldenkrais lessons include variations that use differentiation of the eye muscles as a way to facilitate a reorganization elsewhere, and this is especially notable in the connection between the eyes and pelvis.
Feldenkrais is about widening our repertoire, restoring our breadth of choices–including the choice to be in peripheral vision mode or foveal mode or the choice to clench the belly or let it soften. This class is fundamentally about understanding that choice, which also means better understanding the experience, the life, of someone who has lost access to the state of being that is the peripheral experience.
It seems to me that we might use the Feldenkrais approach to explore some of the relationships: how we transition from peripheral to foveal modes, how this affects cognitive and emotional resilience, implications for memory care (whether from the perspective of staff, care partners or people experiencing dementia) and finding some ease in the amazingly persistent habit of the gut clench. These are all connected!
Every once in a while a really resonant Feldenkrais® lesson will come along and I might sit (and move) with it for a couple of years. So far that seems to happen with lessons that aren’t actually that good, that hint at something but the instructions are jumbled or they don’t quite get there. They jam too much into one lesson.
The lesson I am obsessed with now, Lines and Eyes, is that way.
But oh the promise!
Lines and Eyes is a simple on-the-back eye lesson where you mostly use your imagination—the only instructed actual body movement is to feel your face occasionally. You think in order to trace lines through your pupil and around your eyes. It is a classic ‘remap’ lesson, where now you are noticing the muscles that rotate your eyeballs but also, to some extent, the muscles within your eye. And of course, all the other muscles that are entangled! When you imagine your pupil, it is likely that the tone of your neck, face, palate, eyes, forehead, throat and tongue all change, subtly, and you may even move your eyes or your head in noticeable ways—contract your muscles not just change the tone. And then… there is the relation to the breath and the belly, which is astounding.
The amazing Teepa Snow, revolutionizing how we approach memory care, uses this knowledge of peripheral vision loss to help understand how one physical approach or another—I mean a literal physical approach—might frighten or reassure a person who is losing peripheral vision. To a Feldenkrais practitioner, peripheral vision suggests so many connections throughout our organismic systems—not just neural but immune, cardio, and especially endrocrine—we might imagine all this interoceptive (inner sensation) information jangling up through a maybe torqued fascial communication network. To lose peripheral vision has so many consequences beyond the obvious visual field. Can we slow the loss? Can we help the adaptations? Might it be helpful for the care partner to do peripheral vision -ish Feldenkrais lessons partly just for the sheer calm it brings but, also to help them get the ‘oh, now I see why the person living with dementia is changing in this way…’ at even an unconscious level?
When I look at the imperfect, brimming-with-potential Lines and Eyes, this is what I see: a way, if approached with care, to take the hints in Feldenkrais’s lesson and refine it: find a more gentle way to
Integrate current science about gut-eye and pelvis-skull connections with Feldenkrais’s astonishing insights.
Explore and perhaps expand Teepa Snow’s insights about vision and dementia;
Get a hint of some of the likely changes throughout the organism when peripheral vision is lost;
Offer support for care partners;
Create an avenue for building cognitive resilience;
Deepen peer learning—(my classes tend to be very community-building);
And of course the usual Feldenkrais benefits: pleasure and calm, efficiency and power…
And I also see
Help people find a little grace around the gut clench
Improve balance
Find greater emotional temperance
Less strain in your vision
Relaxed face and belly
So this is what I’m dreaming of:
half a dozen collaboratorsr to explore Lines and Eyes, drag it into the 21st century, partition it into much smaller doses and take it from one promising but imperfect lesson—a source of inspiration—to a useful and accessible series.
People who can (usually) give me two half-hour zoom sessions a week (but w/o guilt if occasional skippage has to happen) over six weeks.
at least two people working in the Memory Care field.
Care partners.
Some students who are familiar w Feldenkrais.
Some who are new to it..
Ideally, we would have at least one person living near Savannah who would be willing to come in person so that I could demonstrate with a real body for the zoomers.
I’d love to start in spring.
What participants would get out of this:
Potential improvements in vision and balance
Benefits to cognitive resilience
Awareness and reorganization of the way you carry your gut
Each class tends to be innately enjoyable, an amazing way to find your reset: calming and rejuvenating.
Community
Together, we can build something here that is for the good
What I would ask:
Regular-ish attendance w/o guilt, ~twice a week for half an hour by zoom (It is absolutely ok to skip! That is real life.)
Feedback immediately after the lesson together and in the days following by text or email or phone call
If you are in the region, come in person to some of the classes
If you want to make a donation, great! Sliding scale is $0 to $65/month.
This exploration needs you. Call, text or email me if you are interested in joining!
Carie
503 231 6557 yourbodywisdom@protonmail.com