Quote from Moshe: “Note the important role the eyes play in coordinating the musculature of the body...It is sufficient to recall climbing up or down stairs when the eyes did not see the floor at the end of the stairs to realize how great a part the eyes play in directing the muscles of the body.” Awareness Through Movement, p. 148-9
I am a frequent cataloguer. I can’t resist putting things into little categories, organizing them for quick and easy discovery, rearranging them. You’d think my office would be clean as a result, but that’s another story.
I think it’s very human to categorize. It’s one aspect of our intellectual organization that we use to empower ourselves as a species. For better or worse, it’s made complex finance possible, as well as high-level manufacturing, large-scale education, and any activity that requres us to work within a heirarchy. There’s nothing inherently wrong with our tendency to categorize, but it can get in the way.
When we look at the body, at how we function, at our walking, our seeing, our eating, is it wise to imagine these activities as though they are completely discreet from one another? I can give you one example where it is most definitely not to your advantage to put an activity into a box.
What is the act of “seeing?” When you walk down the street, as you look around at the trees or the houses or the buildings or the cars or the drug-dealers, how are you looking? With your eyes? Did I hear someone say that? Okay, so, we look with our eyes. Anything else? No?
Let me ask you this: You’re eating. You use your thumbs while you are eating, right? Most definitely. Otherwise the fork or the chopsticks would fall on the table. But if I asked you “how do you eat,” would you reply, “with my thumbs?” I don’t think so. Obviously, you use your thumbs to eat, but you also use your teeth, your jaw, your tongue, your eyes...
Whoa...your eyes? Well, you could eat with your eyes closed, but I bet you don’t. I suspect you use your eyes to find the food and also to guide the fork or the chopsticks or your hand to your mouth. So you eat with your eyes.
If you eat with your eyes, do you see with your mouth? It sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? That’s the problem with categorizing an activity: Anything outside the acceptible definition must be discarded.
But you do see with your mouth. Next time you’re walking down the street, open your mouth as wide as you can, until you feel your jaw popping. Keep it open and look around. Is it harder or easier to see in this way? I’d be willing to bet that although your eyes are unaffected, you cannot swivel your head as easily, nor can you think about what you are seeing as clearly.
“Hold on,” you’re probably saying. “When I walk, my jaw is closed. If my jaw is closed, I’m not using it.”
Have you ever stopped to notice the extent to which you tense your jaw during the day? How far apart do you keep your top teeth from your bottom ones? The jaw is never really at rest. When you are looking at something, craning your neck to follow it, refocusing your eyes to see far away, there is a coresponding movement, an adjustment, however small, in your jaw. Next time you’re looking at something, keep your jaw in the back of your mind.
This is a game of words, really. If you change the definition of “use,” you can claim that you “use” anything to “do” anything else. But what I’m really getting at is that the act of seeing requires more than your eyes. The eyes in and of themselves will not see. There are a number of people who have fully functional eyes that, at some time or other, cannot tell what they are looking at.
You see with your mind. In order to really see, you must recognize and respond to the images that appear on your retinas. This response will occur in your entire body, because it isn’t the individual, categorized parts of you that is connecting with the thing seen, but rather your whole self. The better we integrate the whole of ourselves in perceiving, the better our perception will be.
What does “better seeing” mean? Categorically we understand “better seeing” as being able to percieve objects in clearer focus. All other aspects of seeing are relegated to a lower category. Not until we lose our color-sense do we recognize that appreciating the different colors is a valuable and improvable aspect of sight. What about the ability to keep track of complicated movement? Some sports fans have mastered the art of following a football game by seeing the larger picture of the movement on the field instead of having to look at any one detail. They take these skills for granted, but not all of us have mastered them.
How about depth perception? It may seem as if all of us with two eyes have been granted this miraculous gift, but there are those who, while having the physiological ability to percieve depth, do not truly register it. Their lack of true understanding of depth will not only cause them difficulty in driving or catching, but will play itself out in their understanding of how they move their bodies.
Without the true experience of depth, a child will have a much greater difficulty gaining the lessons of sophisticated three-dimensional movement such as twisting, rolling and dancing. Instead, one thinks of movement along a flat surface. One can move left and right, up and down, with forward and back being merely a limited avenue for advancing or retreating. The lack of the mind’s ability to see will play itself out in the way a person moves, and eventually in their interactions with their fellow human beings.
Recognizing that we see with our whole bodies, we discover the following to be true: If you want to improve seeing, you must improve more than just the eyes. You must improve your mind’s ability to perceive.
To judge how well we are percieving we can examine ourselves as we look at things. How are we using ourselves when we see? To what extent does our body changes as we alter what we are looking at? Do we “gaze” with our selves the same way we “scan”, or the way we “examine”? Perhaps if we have more difficulty observing tiny details with our eyes, we may discover a difficulty in discerning tiny movements such as minute turnings of the head. Or maybe our difficulty in observing details stems from an inability to create a sturdy base beneath us whereby we can steady our vision enough to make them out. An overuse of the muscles of the neck, brought about by poor balancing upon the skeleton, can require us to constantly be moving our head around to avoid fatigue, wreaking havoc on our ability to pay attention to anything else.
It can be said that all activities rely to some extent on our whole self. There is nothing that we do that relies on a single part of us exclusively. Seeing is an activity that has been exclusively categorized as an activity of the eyes, but it, and so many other types of sensory input, rely on an integrated use of the whole self. Any way we can improve our use of ourselves will thereby improve our sensory input. Try it and you’ll see.
Adam
© 2003 Adam Cole