Sense Gate 1: Eye Gaze, Habit, and Relaxation

Do you ever wonder why we do some of the things we do in every class? Like chanting “Om” together, focusing on different body parts when we breathe, trying to feel all your skin at once, smiling with the back of our mouths…. Or circling our eyes one direction and then the other? 

Most of these practices do one or both of two things: they help to soften habitual patterns of muscle use (aka, stress) and they stimulate the vagus nerve either directly or indirectly. 

Vagus nerve stimulation is important for self-regulation, or not believing everything every we think. When we are able to self regulate, our reactions are much less, well, reactive. We are able to allow space between any stimulus and our response to it. In this space creativity is possible, connection can be created and choices can be made. 

The key to any of these practices is repetition in a neutral state, which is why we do so many of them as we come out of Savasana, or Final Resting Pose. Savasana is the ultimate expression of surrender after effort and the embodiment of intentional sense withdrawal, aka pratyahara. Pratyahara is the 5th limb or activity of yoga, arising from asana (body posture) and pranayam (breath observation). 

Our senses are our connection to the world we share, the world of qualities: hot and cold, hard and soft, light and dark, pleasant and unpleasant, sweet and sour, rough and smooth. Our senses can determine what we see when our brains are focused on tasks or worries or plans. They can also provide us with fresh data that takes our mental processes in new and creative directions when we are in a relaxed state. The former is habit - or samskara. When we engage in the rest of pratyahara, or sense withdrawal, however, we have the opportunity to leave behind habits of anxiety or stress response.

We can function from one of two directions when it comes to our sensory experience. We can stay in the top down control that we use for so many instrumental tasks and to do lists, our ever vigilant brains determining what we see of the world, or we can regularly switch to an openness that actually allows us to live in creative communion with the full spectrum of what is. The former is a tool we can use helpfully for certain tasks and times. The latter is a more functional baseline state that allows us to reset and release the defenses we sometimes use to stay with a task for a purpose. Both are useful and neither is wrong in itself. But when we get stuck it’s usually in the habitual top down over focus that limits our ranges of response. 

The very simple technique of circling your eye gaze is a practical method for resetting your neck, head position and stimulating your vagus nerve. The vagus nerve helps form facial expression, support digestive patterns, calm heart beats and breath patterns and the muscles that create these patterns. Some of the muscles that you use to move your eyes up, down, right and left without moving your head go all the way back to the top of your neck and the best way to access them is through moving your eyes through all four axes: up-down, right-left, diagonally in an x (right top - left bottom and left top - right bottom). These are the same muscles that are used and strained in head forward posture. Head forward posture is both a stuck stress reaction and a cause of stress because the vagus nerve runs between these vertebrae - both branches, dorsal and ventral.

By rotating our eye gaze at the end of Savasana, we also turn it in directions that daily life neglects. If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time looking forward and down, maybe a little bit up. But we usually turn our heads or after our necks stiffen, our whole torso, to look right and left or up or down. This one simple maneuver that you’re used to coming out of Savasana helps to gently dissolve those habits, relax the neck muscles that can pull our heads forward, stimulate the vagus nerve and create room for it to pass with being pinched.

Why is the eye gazerotation the very last thing we do? Vision is often the dominant sense. How often do you look at your teacher to “see” what they are doing, even though you’ve done it before and they’ve just described it in words? Bringing it back online after Savasana last gives us another opportunity to dissolve habits of relying on vision and luxuriate in our sense of touch, hearing, taste and smell before our visual sense packages it all up into a world.

Our world expands when we loosen the grip of our habits. We don’t need to rid ourselves of them - they allow for a fluidity and comfort as we move through the world. And not identifying with them allows us a freedom that expands our worlds.