Somatic support for therapists who suffer from body discomfort

“L’oeil comme un ballon se dirige vers l’infini.”

“The eye, like a balloon, drifts towards infinity.”

• Odile Redon, 1882

The practice in today’s video will demonstrate how profoundly the optic nerve (cranial nerve 2) is related to posture, balance, and quality of movement.

There is also a little involvement of cranial nerves 3, 4, and 6. You can’t really separate them, because the 12 muscles of the eyes (6 for each eye) always work in coordination with one another.

For example, if you look down, the muscle underneath your eye will engage – but for your eye to move, the ones above it has to release.

And, just closing and opening your eyelid involves the facial nerve, cranial nerve 7, which involves expression and emotion. Nonetheless, we can center the optic nerve in our conscious mind, amongst all its friends.

What’s different about an Alexander Technique exploration

Many therapeutic techniques activate the cranial nerves related to vision. Sometimes practitioners mention the nerves involved, like the vagus (cranial nerve 10) or the trochlear nerve, cranial nerve 6, for looking to the side.

None of them take into account the power of habit, which also profoundly affects ease of motion and states of being! My cranial nerve sequencing process addresses this practical issue and invites us to work with each nerve, not preferencing the famous ones, to reset the whole system.

Therapeutic techniques often center on one or two specific nerves, partly because they are trying to understand from a scientific perspective why these techniques work.

I’m more concerned with giving each separate nerve its own time and space, and then re-integrating them as a whole, functioning system through movement. Today’s practice is just one nerve in the whole 12 nerve process.

Don’t take my word for it – try the practice! Here it is in written form, or you can just follow along with the video.

• Start by standing with your feet comfortably underneath you, and looking out on the horizon. The horizon line is what you perceive as being level. Not down, and not up, but in the middle.

• With your gaze on the horizon, depending on how much space you have, take a short walk around your space. See what you see. What parts of your room are in your visual field?

• Pause your walking, stand, and put your feet gently underneath your head. Step in place, picking your feet up and placing them down a few times, so you’re not trying to position them in any particular way. Trust your feet to find the right place underneath you without you having to look down.

• Close your eyes. This motion is actually innervated by the 7^th cranial nerve, the facial nerve. The muscles that do this are small and delicate.

• Can you release any of the other muscles around your eyes, so that they rest on the horizon line easily behind your closed eyelids? You don’t have to focus right now, so you don’t need the 12 eye muscles to do anything.

• You’ll start to notice, as your eyes ease, that you are still perceiving light and color. You can locate sources of light in your room just by turning in place. Your eye is resting in its home and being bathed in color and light. 

• Stop turning, balancing easily over your feet, and imagine where the horizon line is. Let your closed eyes rest there.

• Slowly open your eyes… and don’t change anything. If your gaze is in a different place right now, just let it be in that different place. It might be really different than where you were at the beginning.

• See if you can allow your gaze to stay on the new horizon line as you walk around your space. Is what you are seeing different? Check in with the rest of your body and see if your balance and breathing have changed.

We all have visual habits. It’s really fun to explore them, because the balance of our head has such a big influence on how we support and move our body.

Visual habits can get our head locked into a certain position that isn’t quite as easy as it could be.

This kind of exploration is an example of what I do in cranial nerve sequencing. You learn about and directly experience each nerve.

Part of the exploration is always about habit. You start to notice that you are using other nerves and muscles when you don’t need to!

Just by noticing, you find a little bit of freedom from habitual relationships to sensory or motor functions of each particular nerve. Things start to work more smoothly.

More about how this is different than therapeutic techniques

Therapeutic processes like polyvagal trauma therapy, somatic experiencing, and EMDR, use cranial nerve activity. There are even a few renegades out there exploring all the cranial nerves in sequence!

These processes all, however, have a particular healing goal in mind, a particular result they wish for. They don’t explicitly explore habit, with no other agenda.

Some of them have more scientific proof, some of them have less. The important thing is that so many smart people have noticed that mindful movement of your eyes has kind of cascading effects through the rest of your body.

That’s partly because there are 4 cranial nerves involved, and your visual cortex is so important and large, taking up lots of “brain space.”

I think it is empowering for therapists, somatic practitioners, and their clients to be familiar with their own perceptual habits.

Each of your 12 cranial nerves may have something to teach you. Our intelligence, our system, works as a whole. Through learning about all of the nerves, and exploring your own habitual relationship to them, you can find new potential in yourself that makes your use of therepeutic techniques more effective!

We respect habit, but don’t want to be imprisoned by it.

This is the Alexander Technique process. It investigates the power of habit to free people from previously unconscious restrictions. We bow to the power of habit, accept its presence and the necessity of habit for our survival.

We just don’t want to be imprisoned by it.

So, that’s today’s Wisdom of the Somanauts post! If you’d like to understand all 12 cranial nerves better so you can move more freely, be a more effective practitioner, and develop a deeper state of calm and coordination, consider attending the upcoming day long retreat on March 28, hosted by the Alexander Technique Teachers of Greater Philadelphia.