3/2/06
Lift Your Eyes to Enhance Your Life
The next time you’re out strolling around, in town doing errands, or perhaps walking up to Poet’s Seat Tower, notice where your gaze is set. Are your eyes trained on the ground in front of your feet, or are you looking up, checking out what’s going on around you?
Our bodies typically are focused forward: working at the computer, driving, adjusting the tv volume, answering the phone, cooking, doing crafts, fixing things. Throughout the day, we look at what’s right in front of and usually down from us. When our movements are so limited, when our world fits into such a small box, not only do we lose our innate capacity to move with ease, our worldview diminishes as well. Raise the head and eyes – and a whole new world opens up.
Try it, and see what happens in your own body. From standing or sitting, look down at the floor or to the ground about five feet in front of you. Notice how your upper body starts to follow the line of your vision: your head comes forward, your shoulders round in, which contracts your lungs so it’s harder to take in air, the organs in your belly get smooshed, and your neck and low back lose their natural curves.
Stay like this for any length of time, and you may notice that you’re not breathing very well, your shoulders and neck are tightening up to try to hold your head up, and your upper and lower back are starting to ache.
It takes a lot of effort to be hunched over, and it doesn’t even feel good! So, please, now go the other way. Lift your head and look at something above the level of your eyes. Let your head balance on top of your neck. Take a nice breath in, and let your shoulders drop away from your ears. Draw your shoulder blades towards each other, and down your back. Imagine the bottom tips of your triangular shoulder blades moving forward along your diaphragm, lifting your heart and front ribs to the glorious wide open sky.
Now when you take a breath in, your lungs can fill with air. In addition, the muscles of your shoulders, back, hips, and legs don’t have to work so hard to keep you from toppling forward. It may feel strange at first, as your muscles get used to operating with less effort, but they’ll prefer it, believe me.
Years ago, taking horseback riding lessons, the most important instruction I received while trotting around the ring was to sit tall in the saddle and aim my attention ahead of the horse, rather than at the space between her ears. The point was to communicate to the horse where I wanted her to take me (through subtle shifts in my body positioning), by setting my sights on my goal. I was amazed at how much easier and smoother the ride was, when I lifted my eyes to look into my future.
To have a chance of getting where we want to go in life, we need to look up, forward, and around us, because we can’t get there if we don’t have any idea what the path ahead looks like. We need to know what to walk around, when to lift our feet, when to diverge momentarily for the sake of the larger picture.
So raise your head, lift your spine tall, and breathe into your lungs everything that life has to offer, if we just lift our eyes to see it.
Click here for a printer-friendly version of this article.
© 2009 Jenny Chapin
Top of This Page277 Main Street, 2nd Floor, Greenfield, MA 01301
413-522-3816 Email: jgchapin@crocker.com
Directions/Map
© 2009 Jenny Chapin