‘The Eyes Have It’ Exploration

Jan 1

Hello—

I’m putting together a series and exploration that—stay with me here—would be of interest to people involved with Memory Care, those interested in improved vision and balance, and people with chronic gut clench that they’d like to calm a little bit. These things—vision, the experience of dementia, and how we hold our guts are all related. I’d like to build a team for exploring that relationship, finding support in our relationship and building something that would be of help to others.

Read on…

Backstory and Opinions about the Feldenkrais Method

In spring of 2021, or thereabouts—almost 5 years ago—I caught a glimpse of how I clench my gut. That I clench my gut. I could also see how to let it go. I called it ‘letting my belly slither down the front of my spine.’

And I did that over and over and over and over, each time melting the clenching habit a bit around the edges, or sometimes going as far as to slightly reorganize myself. I became less of a gut-clencher.

In those five years I have climbed a lot of treads on the spiral staircase of psycho-spiritual growth. Feldenkrais practice will do that to you. And each spiral up, there was a little bit about how I held my gut. How tightly I held it. How high. How untrustingly.

But I am a good Feldenkraiser so I didn’t insist. I trusted the distrust, if that makes any sense. Five and more years doesn’t seem like a long time to welcome this kind of change.

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. And often, IMO, Feldenkrais’s lessons—and his disciple’s lessons—yes I use that term advisidely—seem to be trying too hard. Like they are afraid to not be impressive enough.

The lesson I am obsessed with now, Eyes and Lines is that way.

But oh the promise!

Something else to keep in mind about Moshé Feldenkrais is how prescient he was. Browse pubmed and you will find cutting-edge research that dots the ‘i’ on something he innately knew. Scientists are still trying to catch up with him. The topic in Eyes and Lines? The connection between how you hold your belly and how you hold your eyes. Pelvis and skull. Search for research on that. It is there. It is not (only) a wuwu conceit.

Which also suggests that when you have eye problems, it affects you elsewhere. And vice versa.

Clients and Teachers

(so you know where I am coming from)

I noticed this when mediating, and psychologists and healers notice the same thing: whatever we’re going through attracts whatever clients are going through. This summer, in my role as a Feldenkrais teacher, I had two clients with the gut clench issue at the same time as I might have been approaching the big reveal on my own gut clench.

In the olden days, mediating, I thought this client/mediator reverberation was a bad thing, or at least a suspicious thing. Yes! It is important as a teacher or healer not to project. And I see the need to watch for somehow rushing students in their process if it resonates with me ‘too much.’ But I don’t think that the pattern of resonance between students and teacher, if there really is one, is something I can dismiss or prevent or do anything but be patient and caring about. Nor do I, for a minute, think that because a lesson comes along as ‘the lesson for me now’ it is ‘the lesson’ for anyone else. In fact, there is a good reason to think that every lesson is ‘the lesson’—or as Moshé is reputed to have said, there is good reason to believe it is all One Lesson. That is why it is so important to me to appeal to your inner teacher, that ‘my’ class is actually your class, and the one I really trust to teach you is… you. At your own pace.

So What About Eyes and Lines?

This 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 muscles that are entangled with the extra-ocular and intra-ocular muscles! 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.

Note: in the old thinking, ‘extraocular muscles’—the rotation of the eye—were considered ‘voluntary’ and the intraocular muscles were considered ‘autonomous’ but those distinctions are so layered with so much 20th century bullshit, please let them go. The intraocular muscles are harder to become aware of and to influence, but they certainly are influenceable. Just work with this lesson and you will see.

And the Connection w Cognitive Resilience

Finding Eyes and Lines and having maybe two gut-clenchy-transformation-now students feels connected to me. And then there’s my current special interest in memory care and cognitive resilience. I learned that many of the > 120 forms of dementia—maybe all—involve loss of peripheral vision eventually resulting in monocular vision, so that a person living with dementia eventually may see as though through one keyhole.

The amazing Teepa Snow, revolutionizing how we approach memory care, uses this knowledge to help understand how one physical approach or another might frighten or reassure a person who is losing peripheral vision.

As a Feldenkrais practitioner, I am immensely curious about this aspect of dementia. For us, peripheral vision suggests so many connections throughout our organismic systems—not just neural but endocrine, cardio, and immune—jangling up through a maybe torqued fascial communication system. To lose peripheral vision has so many consequences beyond the obvious visual field. Can we slow the loss? Can we help the adaptations? Wouldn’t it be helpful for the care partner to do peripheral vision -ish Feldenkrais lessons partly just for the sheer calm it brings but, also, w/o beating the care partner over the head with it, to help them with the ‘oh, now I see why…’ at even an unconscious level?

When I look at the imperfect, trying-too-hard, jumbled lesson Eyes and Lines, this is the potential I see:

a way, if approached with care, to take the hints there and find a more gentle way to help people with the gut clench.
An integration of current science about gut-eye and pelvis-skull connections with Feldenkrais’s astonishing 20th c insights.
An exploration and perhaps expansion of Teepa Snow’s insights about vision and dementia, to include more about the likely changes throughout the organism when peripheral vision is lost
Support for care partners
An avenue for building cognitive resilience
A deepening of peer learning
And of course the usual Feldenkrais benefits: pleasure and calm, efficiency and power…