The Eyes of March

I am in Calistoga, CA at the MBS Academy Feldenkrais® Training. Today we did a very subtle lesson with the eyes. We paid attention to how we were lying on the floor during a scan. Then we worked with the right eye moving it back and forth noticing how the tone in the body changed or if there were places that started to hold while moving the eye particularly the jaw and neck.

What was fascinating is that I could not move my right eye to the upper right quadrant (9 and 10 o'clock). I would jump across the clock instead of going around. Once that got easier my right shoulder and hip let go. We took rests covering the eyes with both hands. Leora said that if you see black your nervous system is resting. After a break we did both eyes comparing the right and left.

Just before coming out here I worked on several horses who were anxious by covering their eyes one at a time. I cupped my hand over the eye so that I didn't put any pressure on the eye but simply blocked the vision. The horses relaxed and got calmer. One horse started out with trying to only use the left eye. As I continued to cover one and then the other she went from her eyes jumping back and forth to smoothly panning across from right to left. This is so similar to the lesson we did today.

I wonder if the horse's experienced the same kinds of things in their bodies I felt in mine. I do know they got calmer so there is some effect on calming the nervous system. I will have to continue to explore this idea as it was such a powerful lesson today.