Thread: Eyeballs, those nefarious buggers

I realized that I had not seen a post about this specific topic, so here goes. It is something that I think critical to the relaxation process regardless of your preferred technique, but especially critical to WILDing.

Regardless of your relaxation technique, an aspect of relaxation that may get lost in the shuffle is the relaxation of the eyes. If you don't specifically choose to relax the eyes, as well as the rest of the body, your efforts will be in vain. Your eyes will choose to look around at every opportunity if they are not relaxed.

There's not much to it of course. Simply instruct your eyes to shift upward slightly, so they are out of their normal waking focal plane and into their natural position for sleep. This both allows them to rest and sends a signal to the rest of the body that you really are serious about this whole falling asleep thing, and you are not trying to pull a fast one and slip into the kitchen for a bite of late night ice cream. Ooops, a tad off point on that last.

As long as we, or rather I, am on the topic of eyes, learning to properly focus when they are closed is especially important as well. At least I have found it to be true for me. There are two ways to focus: physically and non-physically. If you focus physically, your eyes tend to strain or maybe wander about or take on a hard focus that defeats the purpose of trying to relax. You must make a point of focusing non-physically. Non-physical focus is a soft focus, for lack of a better term. With relaxed eyes, you quietly wait and observe. You don't look at. You don't peer around. You don't gaze with fascination. You observe. You are using your non-physical capabilities to see non-physical things. Perhaps the most important aspect of doing this is that it focuses your mind internally and distracts it from physical input. If you catch yourself looking with your physical eyes, you are asking for physical input. Again, bad. The purpose of relaxing the physical body is to allow your mind to turn inward and distance itself from distractions.

In a nutshell; take your soft focus and watch the visualizations as they appear, the non-physical input. Don't take the physical eyes and watch the back of your eye lids. You might think this a small distinction, but it has important ramifications regarding your success. thanks for reading this to the end.