Help! Too much internal awareness! I’m self-conscious and uncomfortable!

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I whipped this out for my SFSU students. Perhaps you will find it useful.

Sometimes in Somatic study, we can feel destabilized by too much internal awareness – especially if it is negative. If you are feeling this, you are not alone. It is something that happens to everyone at one point or another. We focus too much on the feeling inside and lose sight of the whole of our being in relationship to the world.

Somatic study is relational. Our bodies, our emotions and our neurological mapping of ourself includes the space around us and other people. Scientifically this is called “peripersonal space” and “interpersonal neurobiology”. You can look it up. It’s fascinating.

But what can I do on a practical level if this is happening to me?

Expand your field of vision. Allow yourself to see off into the distance and far to the sides as if you were standing on the top of a mountain or at the beach. Letting your sight be far, free and wide will have a relaxing effect on your mood and breathing.

Look around and orient to pleasant things in your environment. Looking up at the sky is a good quick tip.

Practice sensing the space above you, behind you, to either side, below you and in front of you – kind of the way you can sense the edges of a swimming pool when you are standing in it. Do you have a favorite direction, that feels especially good to you? Indulge in that. Try sensing the space at 3 feet distance, and then expand it to the edge of the room. See how far it feels good to go. Some people go out to the edges of their perceived Universe. All of this can help take the focus off too much inner sensation.

Expanding spatial awareness will also expand your body physically – alleviating some of that unpleasant too-much sensation. Our body expression follows our attention. If we focus inward, we contract; outward we expand. In the future, if you are sensing inwards, keep some part of your awareness outward as a tether. See if you can do inner and outer at the same time, for a 50/50 awareness split.

Prof Elyse

p.s. you can also try this with hearing

p.p.s.Photo of Sky Dragon/ Sea Horse. Magical messengers are everywhere if we look. Photo by Elyse Shafarman

in transit

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A bizarre evening. Transferring at MacArthur back to SF a tall red headed woman and I looked a few beats too long at each other. Something about her caught my eye. She looked like someone I knew but had since misplaced all identifying details.

Later, I went to sit at SF Insight, something I rarely do. As I sat, the quiet put me in touch with my anger. I tend to be more depressive than angry, but here I was, along with the entire country, brimming with rage. I was irritated at the people near me clearing their throats, angry at the people who had brought their support dogs, disgusted by the terrible smell of socks – until I realized that was coming from my own guilty feet. Perfect metaphor, no? I sat in my anger, with no attempt to change it, and a commitment to feel. This is how it is. This is how it is. 

At break, I looked over and there was MacArthur Bart woman ahead of me in the tea line. “I think I saw you on Bart today,” I said.

“It’s you?” she said. “You were on my train.”.

“I almost said something because I thought I knew you,” we both said. 

“Exactly.” 

“And here we are.”

And here we are.

Eyes Free and Wide to See from the Point of Vision

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Elyse Shafarman

Eyes free and wide to see from the point of vision — Countess Kitty Wielopolska

Sometimes, the Alexander Technique eye direction is described as a Zen Koan. What is the point of vision? No one knows. I imagine that the point of vision is the occipital cortex, the location in the back of the brain that does the job of seeing. Knowing that my brain can work helps me to relax my eyes. Sure, the optic muscles have plenty to do in terms of focusing and orienting, but it helps to remember that the eyes are light receptors, and it’s the visual cortex that sees.

A little history: The eye direction was originated by Countess Kitty Wielopolska, an American who attended FM Alexander’s first training courses. To say that Kitty lead an interesting life is an undersatement. She left the Alexander training course due to a schizophrenic break and spent time an institution. Her illness remitted, she became a nurse and eventually married Count Wieloplska. Later in life, Kitty completed her training as an Alexander Technique Teacher. She mastered the schizophrenic voices that still spoke to her by using the Alexandrian process of inhibition. When she heard voices, she was able to inhibit an automatic response to believe or obey them. For anyone who remembers, “A Beautiful Mind,” the story of the Nobel prize winning mathematician John Nash, this conscious route to self-healing will sound remarkably familiar. Kitty created the “eye order,” as a creative response to her sister’s narrowing vision from cataracts. Kitty observed that directing the eyes seemed to have a global effect on her quality of attention and freedom.

The direction, “Eyes wide to go apart,” frees the forehead, lips, tongue, shoulders, neck and even hips. For anyone familiar with modern research into the polyvagal theory, the connection between calm relaxed attention and freeing of key structures associated with head orientation and communication should be no surprise. Kitty and her collaborators surmised that the eye order seemed to signal her nervous system to come to a state of openness.

No doubt that what we do with our eyes and face has a lot to do with social signalling. Often we tighten our eyes to indicate that we are listening, paying attention, or even putting on our compassion face (you know what I mean). You can probably name the myriad of “faces” you wear to be liked and accepted by the tribe. Sometimes it’s a good idea to check in and ask if social signaling is replacing genuine felt emotion, and what the cost might be to your use. By “use”  I mean the total sum of your mental, emotional and physical responses to life.

An expanded visual field is conducive to psychological openness. It’s trite but true to say that with open awareness we are more likely to see more than one side to a problem. In contrast, narrow vision is correlated to problem solving and heightened vigilance (aka stress). Obviously, concentration is necessary in the short term, but when employed unremittingly, as we do in our small screen culture, it will effect the quality of our use – and perhaps our cultural behavior.

I could write more about this, and probably will, but for now, play a bit with thinking, “Eyes free to go wide”. What happens to your seeing, your breathing, your state of mind and state of heart?

To support this, here’s a practice to relax the facial muscles:
Relax Your Face, Elevate Your Mood

To learn more about Countess Wielopolska:
Here’s an article that I originally read as a xeroxed sheaf while a student at the Alexander Training Institute: From a lecture by Countess Catharine Wielopolska, Certied Alexander Technique Teacher

This book, by Kitty and interviewer Joe Armstrong is a fascinating catalog of Kitty’s life and one of the rare explorations of the relationship between the FM Alexander Technique and mental illness Never Ask Why, by Kitty Wielopolska