Day 5 - Pressure

A month-long writing challenge exploring the theme of "Being Myself"

This is the latest instalment of the 21 day writing challenge I’m doing with Megan Macedo, writing every week day in February. One of the directives is to avoid perfectionism and publish your pieces to your audience, so here we are. I hope the series provides food for thought. Thank you for being here.

I remember a time when I was in a playgroup with my daughter, who was still little and having a quiet moment, standing off to the side and staring into space. Another parent nearby said loudly to her “oh, someone’s looking sad!” and I responded, as someone learning to defend their children against the misinterpretations of strangers, that no, she was concentrating. I knew because I make the same face, furrowing my brow, creating a line that doesn’t go away when I stop thinking. A story that’s firmly etched in now.

Thinking hard or deeply about things must have brought me lots of good things in my life, but it’s easier to think of the times when I overthink, when I spiral into what ifs or try and try and solve a problem by staring directly at it in the face. You know those problems that are best resolved by going for a walk or taking a shower, by glimpsing the thing from a different angle? Those kinds of issues aren’t fixed by me creasing up my forehead. 

I was so relieved when I found a yoga class where I could feel with my body and not think with my head. The feeling lasted the duration of the class and a little afterwards too, as if the sensing had dropped down into other parts of my body and lost its insistence. It taught, and continues to teach me, to release the pressure at the front of my head and pay attention to a landscape elsewhere.

I have these strange bodily experiences in therapy sessions when I’m talking, and I’m trying hard to analyse or explain something, to get to the end of a thought and my forehead starts to ache. It feels like the verbal equivalent of looking at something too hard. I want the answer now, but it isn’t there yet, or at least I won’t get there by talking/thinking my way into, or out of it. 

What I want to do in these moments is stop talking, close my eyes and rest my head on my arms. I wonder if an answer might be found more quickly or peacefully through sitting silently for a while. My therapist is always encouraging me to do what my body wants in these sessions, but I haven’t loosened up enough to let that happen very often.

The Somatic Experiencing practitioner Kimberley Ann Johnson teaches a technique where first you stare very hard at something in front of you, letting your eyes feel like they’re gripping onto something. Your gaze is narrow and focused. Then you try and look softly at something, relaxing the eyes and being aware of things in your peripheral vision. A gaze like the horizon.

I know the third eye, a way of perceiving beyond ordinary sight, is supposed be in between the brows, the same place where I get the thinking-too-hard sensation. Over-activating this area feels less, not more, insightful for me. But maybe there’s another way of accessing this kind of perceptive vision and it’s along the lines of this softer, more horizontal sight, tuning in without urgency, sensing related phenomena by looking beyond our immediate environment. An invitation to feel, not just frontal-lobe my way through it, to see with more parts of my brain and more parts of my body.