thewayisee

There’s a popular YouTube video (see below) of a baby named Piper squirming as her parents fit her first pair of glasses onto her face. Initially struggling, she settles, and Piper's head swivels back and forth between her off-screen mother and father, mouth gaping in sweet and silent surprise.

Watching this  scene over and over, I wept; remembering, I suppose, how I must have felt at 18 months old and severely farsighted, to put on my first pair of glasses and see my family clearly for the first time.

That initial year and a half of my life, seeing the world the way I did—out of focus and impressionistic—was a great gift. I believe it awakened my body to a felt sense of being in the world, allowing me to see/feel spatial relationships in a different way, and awakening me to the background of the world.

I also generally have a good sense of my body in space (aside from a couple of concussion-inducing incidents) and because I don't rely on my eyes to tell me everything, I have a kind of 'felt memory' that helps my hand go right to my water glass in  the middle of the night. 

The world we live in prioritizes vision over other senses. This makes some sense when we realize that our eyes send 10 million bits of information per second to the brain.1  But when we focus primarily on the visual, we neglect a whole galaxy of information and sensation. Did you know that the body processes a million times more information than the conscious mind?  A MILLION TIMES more information! There is a vast knowing in the body and yet we tend to shut ourselves off from the energy and intelligence of the body. We're left with no option but to buzz around inside the head like a wasp caught in a bottle.

There is also how we see. We tend to see with a kind of acquiring gaze, skipping over what we think we know and just categorizing and labelling things. But when we drop our awareness out of the eyes, out of the head, and see and feel and listen and know from the deep reservoir of spaciousness within, the radio static in the head grows quiet and the calm possibility of connection, appreciation and relationship emerges. We can see with a felt sense of being embedded in the whole, such that the background holds the foreground and the foreground integrates with all around it. 

Want to experience this for yourself? Set up a free call and I'll guide you through an exercise to help you discover the grounded calm of your being.