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.

“… I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me.”

– Marcel Proust

Have you ever noticed how alive children are to their senses? I’m visiting my nieces this weekend and when I mentioned my sense of smell (cause I’m writing this newsletter!), the younger one said: “I love how my mama smells! It’s very distinctive!” Her whole body and face expressed this feeling this bring her…and then of course, her mom was right there, so she could get a nice reminder by snuggling close.

Smell takes us quickly into a dream state, a restful and imaginative swoon. That’s because the first cranial nerve, called the olfactory nerve, goes straight to your limbic system, the “emotional” center of your brain.

The oldest of our senses, it’s a direct way into a kaleidoscope of emotions, the flavors of life. I’ve come to think of my olfactory organ as a kind of “core” part of myself that I can always rely on when I want to tap into emotional mobility. I want to let feelings flow.

You have to breath to smell, so it also cues you in to the autonomic rhythms of your body. You can access the flow of sensory experience without trying to exert control. You can let the most subtle emotions flow this way and that, catching the wave of energy and nuance that it provides.

The olfactory organ sits on top of a very small, porous, and detailed bone called the ethmoid that is basically right in the middle of your head. Look at the beautiful animation above, and you will see that this little bone sits centrally in the front of the brain pan, surrounded by all the other bigger, more famous bones of your skull. For the anatomy geeks among you this short lecture about the 3D animation will be helpful, as it shows the bone from all angles. It’s incredibly detailed and kind of looks like a space ship.

When we grip our jaw, tighten our neck, squint our eyes…all of those actions bring pressure to bear on this breathable, core place. I believe that giving delicate, internal places like this space to move affects our emotional state.

What if this beautiful bone could just float in there, right underneath your brain, nestled between all the other skull bones but separate, breathable, slightly mobile. The top of it is called the cribriform plate, which has a bunch of beautiful little holes through which the tendrils of your olfactory bulb dangle, kind of like a kid sitting at the edge of a river with their feet in the water.

This is just one of the 13 explorations that you will experience in a Cranial Nerve Sequencing package – click here to find out more!

Is it hard for you to put your awareness of your body, and your care for its needs, first?  When you try to do that, do you find yourself running up against resistance in others or even yourself? I’d like to suggest that whatever your challenges, it’s worth it. It’s the medicine we need on a personal and a societal level. 

Cranial nerve sequencing, which I’m focusing on in these newsletters, is the simplest, most direct self care program I’ve created to date. One nerve at a time, you get lovingly familiar with your own embodied brain. You can quietly care for yourself anywhere, anytime.

Why do we study embodiment anyway? In my case, it was at first selfish. I needed healing badly, and the Alexander Technique showed me that healing was possible. It was only much later that it occurred to me that I could be medicine for others through taking care of myself.

Maybe you have been there yourself. You start changing your behavior – like say, taking more time for yourself within your family, holding better boundaries. You start realizing when you are uncomfortable with other people’s behavior, and you start letting them know. When I first started doing this, my body screamed at me “this is risky!!!”

When you start putting yourself first and standing up for yourself, folks can have a range of response:

confusion

disappointment

anger

or even appreciation!

but you have to step into that risk zone to make a change, and your body needs extra support to take you there.

This past three weeks, I was asked to work with the cast of a medicinal play that does this for the audience. What To Send Up When It Goes Down was written by a black woman, for a black cast, for a black audience. While non-black folk are welcome, they are not central. 

The play expresses rage, historical bitterness, hurt, grief, but also joy, determination, and love. It is a healing celebration of blackness, brilliant and biting. This is what self-care looks like.

The actors were already familiar with The Alexander Technique from their training, so establishing a common ground for communication was easy.  Place your needs first. Take care of your back, your knees, your breath, as opposed to the needs of a the audience for example, or a larger racist society outside the theater.

This play gave me the gift of viscerally feeling the pressure of that racist society bearing down on me like a ton of bricks. So much so that when all the non-black folk are asked to leave the theater so that black people can conclude their healing ritual in safety, I was crushed. Not by being excluded, but by an embodied understanding of what that means. My heart is just broken.

And my body is the source of the medicine I need. My 600-million-year-old nervous system is right there, waiting for me to appreciate and use it wisely.  Thank god I’d been teaching the Alexander Technique for 3 hours before seeing the play!

It’s my favorite kind of problem solving to find simple ways that each individual performer can do that within a larger theatrical structure. It always serves the play, it always improves the performance, without fail.

I believe that if a performance is crafted in such a way that the performers are challenged but also deeply cared for, it will physically affect the audience and imbue the work with secret healing powers.

Right now, as you breathe through your nose, and let the air wash over the olfactory organ that lives in the space between your two eyes, allow your own attention to settle on your own body. Breath as quietly and softly as you can.

This area between your eyes is incredible expressive. If you look at other people, you’ll notice how much emotional information you get from seeing their eyes, noticing their breathing patterns, and the expressions made by the muscles around eyes and nose. 

Touching this area with your awareness right now, it may help you settle into whatever emotions are present for you, no matter how subtle. For me, as someone who lived my earlier life in a pretty shut down state, each breath and each emotional color or tone is a gift. I savor it.

I hope you hear a message from your own body – and follow it. We all need you on board the medicine train!

And if you live in the NYC area, please help these beautiful black actors sell out the fall run of Aleshea Harris’s play at Playwrights Horizons. It’s an incredible show.