School of the Trees: Eye Movements
As a long time practitioner of EMDR Therapy, I have contemplated the origin story of Dr. Shapiro’s eyes moving side to side as she noticed the trees on a walk.
Here on the land, new ideas and experiments, explorations and insights have come from gazing upon the trees at different times.
The eye is connected to our sense of I. The optical cortex and how the seeing happens, and then how the gaps in seeing are colored in by conditioned patterns are areas for research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology and such. Some of these experiments have helped me learn more about my sense of I and to recalibrate it from time to time.
Here are a few eye experiments that I have found beneficial in restoring ease in my nervous system, especially when I feel restless or disturbed, unable to focus due to mental overload.
Tracing the tree line: Similar to drawing a city skyline, try to trace the tree line wth your eyes. Start anywhere and imagine that your eye is drawing the overall shape from one side of your visual field to the other.
And then reverse the direction and do the same exercise. Once should be enough. Make some mental notes about how this exercise was for you.Color in the landscape: Sit in one spot and start to notice the different shades of green all around. When a pop of color in the landscape catches your attention, offer one cycle of inhalation and exhalation to that observation and then continue to let your eyes move through the environment in a leisurely manner.
Cloud Gazing: Leaning back against a tree trunk, or better yet, laying on the ground, allow the eyes to notice the clouds as they move through. Nothing to do or make or think, just noticing.
Pretend Telescope: There is an interesting rock that I use as a pretend telescope in the landscape. Gentle toggling between one eye and then the other helps to activate varying focal lengths in our eyes, shifting some conditioned optical patterns that reflect our device usage.
Additionally, I use the pretend telescope to challenge the fixed narratives in my brain because what each of my eyes can see is NOT the same, therefore I am asking my brain to work in new ways rather than conditioned patterns.Bark Contemplations: Our brains are so keen for pattern recognition, and our device usage may be deepening this groove more than necessary at times. Contemplating Madrona Bark, or wood chips on the ground may sound boring at first, but by refusing the brain’s addiction to constant stimulation, and engaging in a seemingly meaningless task, there is the possibility of downshifting the nervous system.
After some time, arising from a more spacious internal state is the evolution of new thought, new creativity, new impulses that are generated from a calmer and more integrated state of relaxed awareness.Radiating Awareness: Our visual field informs so much of our perception and therefore our cognitive patterns and biases. Imagining ourselves at the center of a Clock face, and with our eyes open or closed, noticing the clock dial is an interesting exploration you can build on.
Shifting focal lengths: Choose objects at varying distances and let your eyes travel back and forth between them. Change objects and try again. Look at layers of objects through living hedges and alternate seeing them with one eye and then the other. Simply put, our eyes spend a lot of time seeing things on a flat screen a fixed distance from the head. By varying the distance between our eyes and the objects they are beholding, and my having many layers of objects through which we are looking rather than seeing what is being projected on a screen, we allow our eyes to use more of the range of activities they were designed for. This expansive allowing of movement starts to free our eyes up to see and perceive more, thus affecting our brain’s ability to think more freely.
When you do a few of these explorations and then return to Tracing the Tree Line one more time, what do you notice?
What is your relationship to this activity and to your internal world now?
