Step off the advice treadmill into the serenity of somatic practice with cranial nerve 6: the abducens

Are you exhausted by the never ending treadmill of apocalyptic events…followed by advice on how to deal with it all? It’s so stressful! More and more things to do! I have discovered that not giving advice is the root of serenity for me. Maybe it could be for you too.

Instead, I offer you an invitation into the serenity of somatic practice.

Out of this, humane, doable positive action arises naturally in the flow of life!

Follow along with this video about lateral eye movement and let go of having to know what to do next, if only for a few minutes. You don’t have to “take advice” and “get it right.” You don’t even have to cognitively understand, at least as a starting point.

A different kind of understanding comes after kinesthetic, felt experience.

Cranial nerve 6, and eye movement in general, is a tool used by several therapeutic methods for healing trauma. There is a huge body of scientific inquiry around understanding why bilateral eye movement is helpful in this regard.

Here is what cranial nerve 6, the abducens, looks like:

Motor control of eye movement originates in the superior colliculi, a special part of the brain stem.

There is new evidence that this structure is also responsible for categorization of what is seen also. This was previously thought to be a purely cortical activity.

That makes sense, as it would increase chances of survival and conserve energy for us to categorize what we see as quickly as possible. Even a tenth of a second increase in response time is significant. But this throws into question our understanding of what thinking itself is!

Here is what the brainstem looks like as it flow upwards towards the limbic system, above which the cortical structures live. You can see the abducens or 6th cranial nerve clearly labeled as well. It’s nestled in the crease between the medulla (the bottom part of the brainstem) and the pons (the little bulb that sits on top of the medulla.)

Meantime, we can experience and explore somatically and let understanding comes when it comes. We can give our predictive brain a little rest by doing so. (P.S. If you need a little help with resting your predictive brain, try this video too.)

This week’s offering is a small piece of what I’ll be sharing at the yearly meeting of the American Society for the Alexander Technique.

I’m paring my Cranial Nerve Sequencing course down to 90 minutes, with less information and more experiential practice. I’m editing a lot, simplifying, doing less. (If you want to find out more about the full 8 week course coming this fall, go HERE.)

This week’s video was good practice!

Learning usually goes like this. You are sitting there, already thinking about 10 things at once. The teacher adds 3 more bits of information or advice, so now you are juggling 13 spinning plates. The first 15 minutes you are like “wow, this is great! Amazing!” Then, the last hour and a half are a blur and you remember nothing.

This juggling has a profound effect on our bodies; there is a subconscious fear, kept alive by our predictive brain, the world will come to an end if we stop. Each plate adds a little bit more tension in your body. And usually, you are not allowed to move! You are just supposed to sit still and absorb it all.

There are, in fact, a limited number of “chunks” of information that we can hold in our mind at once.

There is lots of debate, with consensus being on 1 – 4 chunks at any one time. (Note: I do not truly comprehend this paper. But I instinctively understand chunks of it!).

Newer research seems to disagree, saying if you practice enough you can hold more and more chunks. However, that study was done using video gaming as the activity. I don’t think somatic practice and video gaming are comparable kinds of paying attention!

The fact is our brain saves energy by combining two focal points of attention into one “chunk.” This has a big influence on my teaching of late – starting with one focus, adding another, then letting them interact with each other.

I’ve included 4 main chunks of information in this video related to cranial nerve 6, the abducens.

It is purely a motor nerve, contracting and releasing the lateral rectus muscle of your eye. This rotates your eye out away from your nose.

Somatic elements covered in the video:

• Eye rotation
• Response of the neck, ribs, torso, hips, and legs to eye rotation
• Vestibular stimulation resulting from how rotation shifts weight
• Resulting ease that appears naturally after the resolution of rotation and weight shifting

When you add in an element, you will have plenty of time and space to let go of the one that preceded it. In somatic practice, each focal point leaves a trace or effect in our system. It’s not dropped or lost, but rather integrated back into the whole.

We can more profoundly integrate the whole by keeping our focal points simple.

I believe that we also affect the world as we travel through it when we know how to learn in this way. The world might not be going the way we want to, but it does keep going, for now, when we pause in our “doing.”

That pause makes way for integration, new combinations of sensation and thought, new ways of moving, seeing, and responding. This is simple food for the soul.

Interested in the next Cranial Nerve Sequencing course? There is an early bird special still available!