Welcome to this yearlong journey through the 12 cranial nerves. We are spending the month of August exploring the optic nerve, which allows us to perceive light (and therefor also darkness) via the retina.

Do you suffer from lack of sleep? So many people I know are struggling to get enough sleep since the increase of political & racial violence, accelerated climate crisis, and the COVID pandemic converged into one hot mess.

The ways that we used to sooth ourselves aren’t working any more. One thing I find myself doing to cope is being online more often, and later at night – which is really hard on your eyes.

Last week’s newsletter addressed eye strain and posture – you can view the video exercise HERE. This 4 step exercise is a great thing to do just before you go to bed – instead of beating yourself up for being anxious and online too late, why not do this instead? If you understand how your retina, and the optic nerve, is deeply connected to other systems in your body, there are other things you can try as well.

Are you like me (if you are sighted) – wide awake as soon as the sun rises? I have to go to bed pretty early, say around 10 or 10:30, if I am going to get eight hours of sleep. If I need to sleep past sunrise, I have to put a black piece of fabric over my eyes that is very soft and takes the contours of my face so that it shuts out light. I’ve just accepted how light sensitive I am. We also have good dark curtains.

Light perception produces hormones in your body that affect your circadian rhythms. Light speeds you up, dark slows you down and induces the production of melatonin, the hormone that helps you sleep. During the day, when you feel energized, move as much as you can. Exercise also has been shown to increase melatonin production. Doesn’t that make total, beautiful sense? You wore yourself out, so you will need to rest! Come try my Tuesday dance class if you need some encouragement.

Dark is so important because melatonin is produced at night. Furthermore, more melatonin boosts your immune system, and less of it weakens your immunity. That’s why getting enough sleep is so important.

I started practicing Cranial Nerve Sequencing in order to find peace in this moment. Not later, when I am a better person, when I do the right thing, but now. Right now, when I’m being human, vulnerable, and stressed out. It’s helped me get so much more out of my meditation practice as well.

Each nerve could be a messenger for peace – for harmony with all that is – because that is how it evolved. The message from your retina for this week is – “I was born in relationship to the sun and the moon. I need light to wake up, to move, and to grow. I need darkness to rest and recuperate for the next day.”

Book a free 15 minute consultation today if you want to explore Cranial Nerve Sequencing and The Alexander Technique. Let me help you develop healthier coping mechanisms for the challenges ahead.

Thank you for joining me on a journey through the cranial nerves. Today we have arrived at the second, or optic, cranial nerve.

Do you suffer from eye strain? I have one student who always leaves her private lesson without her glasses on – because her eyes feel better and she can see more clearly. She isn’t directly aware of the strain until its gone.

Do you wear glasses that add a little bit to that strain? Have you ever tried taking them off and just seeing fuzzy for a little while just to get relief? I highly suggest doing so (why is explained just a little bit further on). I also suggest taking some play time (meaning movement) with your eyes closed. Every day. Just to remind your body that it has other ways of orienting itself.

Your visual system is so complex, trying to learn about it could give you eye strain just from the concentration required! So…lets take it easy and do it the Embodied Learning Systems way. That means that we play and experiment through awareness of our own body, before we try to cram our brain full of facts about it.

Just take a look at this:

Watch the video first, before you read on. You can close your eyes and learn through listening, instead of reading! Because while eye strain doesn’t cause permanent damage to your eye, it does cause head and neck tension, and that can really mess with good posture, movement, and coordination, causing a cascade of health problems.

When you wear glasses, they focus all the light on only about 5% of your retina. The optic nerve, however, supplies special cells that take up a full two thirds of your eye-globe. That means that when you wear glasses, most of your eye is being light-deprived. The exploration in the video will guide you through a purely sensory exploration of the whole eye, so that while you are gently moving your body, your eye is just resting. You simply allow your retina to be bathed in light through a closed eyelid.

From the moment we open our eyes in the morning, to the time we close them at night, they are working so hard. We ask them to focus, focus, focus on small things like computer screens all day, but they actually evolved for a much more spacious and colorful life.

Now that you’ve done the exploration, gift yourself with a little information so you can use your own mind and attention to bring some ease into your visual system later on. The optic nerve, a bundle of more than one million fibers, is purely sensory. It carries visual information received by the retina of your eye to the visual cortex, which is in the very back of your brain.

This nerve was born before it’s organ during our evolutionary journey. It arose from light sensitive proteins at one end of a tubular animal. In the earliest organisms, when sunlight touched those proteins, electrical impulses were generated that caused movement through the water.

Think about that for a moment. The reception of light (not muscular action) caused motion. So it makes sense that our visual system can affect our movement and posture for better or worse. Easy, fluid eyes = easy, fluid perception and movement. While there is a great variety of sightedness among humans, ranging from slight loss of peripheral vision to total blindness, the ease of motion of your head on top of your spine still affects coordination profoundly, and you can access it through other sense because the brain is so adaptable to circumstance.

Motion in turn caused more evolution…and lets hope that it still does cause we really need it! If you suffer from eye strain, headaches, and the neck and shoulder tension that often come along with them, I hope you will reach out and connect. That tension can really interfere with balance and coordination.