Why do we work with the eyes in Esoteric Yoga?
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Why do we work with the eyes in Esoteric Yoga?
A part of the Esoteric Yoga template is dedicated to the eyes – from a supine position on the mat, participants move to a seated position with the legs out in front (or slightly bent to support ease of posture) and then bring their awareness to the eyes themselves, and the area around the eyes.
And there is much to be felt here – tension or relative ease; their differing positions in the eye sockets, as in one sitting more forward or higher; the eyeballs themselves feeling distended or hard; a relative numbness around that part of the face, of our anatomy.
And yet, our eyes work overtime. As humans, we mainly tend to piece our world view together from what we gather through our sense of sight, at the expense of the other physical senses and at the expense of whole-body presence.
We direct our eyes, albeit unconsciously, to grab what we have determined we need to have confirmed of what we think we already know or want to know. And in that sense, the adage “seeing is believing” reveals its treachery – we see everything but do not want to see everything and as such, believing what we see has us depend on a narrow window into the all that is available to us to be seen.
We see what we want to see – and we don’t see what we don’t want to see.
As an example, we see but then ‘turn a blind eye’ to the distress of a son/daughter or to the lovelessness of a partner – until it is too late, and we are left to pick up the pieces. At the time, it did not suit us to acknowledge the whole picture and we dismissed and explained away what was presented.
In truth, our physical eyes are there to confirm what we have already felt; the latter, our clairsentience, providing a much vaster and all-encompassing sense of what is really going on and has been going on. We can all relate to a situation when we walked into a room and clearly felt that we could ‘cut the air with a knife’, it was that thick.
“We are energetic beings. This means that we are energy well before we are the physical, dense or material matter we appear to be to the current form we make of the images our eyes receive. Let us not forget that we are assembling what we receive into an image that conforms to our ideals, beliefs and concepts and not that we ‘see’ and make real all that we actually receive to see and make real.”
Serge Benhayon Esoteric Teachings & Revelations Volume III, ed 1, p 18
In Esoteric Yoga, we gently open and close our eyes three times, re-imprinting an otherwise automatic if not robotic movement, executed thousands of times each day. It is said that we spend 10% of our waking time with our eyes closed – this is astounding, is it not? Especially when we are unaware of the fact. And as such, the detail that can be felt when we bring our awareness to such fine and tiny movements of the eyes by opening and closing them in the session allows us the opportunity to deepen our presence and therefore our awareness.
When we bring awareness to opening and closing the eyes, we keep the mind with the body and don’t let it escape into an otherwise presence, whether that be the past or the future. We put a stop to this split and the exhaustive mind-full practice of entertaining two planes of existence; one that is dominated by the mind and its meanderings if not aberrations, and one that the physical body moves in. In other words, we practise true yoga = union.
There is much to be gained from bringing that level of care and attention to our eyes and the movement of our eyelids across the eyeballs. We get to feel the warmth and protection that the lids provide (can you imagine for a moment what it would feel like and how painful it would be to not have eyelids?); we get to feel the spherical shape of the eyeballs (give or take variations for myopia, astigmatism, etc.); we learn to appreciate and love the delicateness of the movement and the harmony of the interconnectedness.
This part of the Esoteric Yoga template allows for greater appreciation and the expansion into a much vaster context, into our multi-dimensionality while being in a human body.
How truly sensitive and delicate can we allow ourselves to be?
Filed under
Yoga, Body awareness, Conscious presence, Clairsentience
