Introduction

As with so many of these exercises, these seem simple and not exciting. That is not correct. Except for the breathing, you will get more personal benefit from freeing the forehead and eyes then from any other exercises. Don't wait until the breathing work is mastered before beginning these exercises. The forehead and eye exercises may and should be done at any time before the breathing work is finished.

It is really amazing how much is held in the forehead and the eyes. Think about it this way. Suppose you were to draw a circle around your head at a level slightly below the eyes. Your circle would include your forehead, your eyes and your ears. That takes in two of our three distance senses. The only thing not included would be the nose and I will take care of that part separately later. It is with our eyes and our ears that we most take in the world. If there is tension in these senses — if we have withdrawn from the world into ourselves — the life cost is immense.

In both parts of this book I have, in general, not told you what to expect because I don't want to give your subconscious the data with which to fake a response. And believe me, it will. Your subconscious is built to resist change. The more information it has, the more it has the means to resist the effects of this work. But here, the effects are so dramatic when they happen and are in general so difficult to fake, that I will break the rule here and tell you what will happen when you fully clear up any chronic tensions in the forehead and the eyes.

It is rare that there is not some, and often a lot of, held tension in the forehead and/or the eyes. Thus while it is true that not everyone will experience these changes, it is so common that I am safe in saying that you will experience this change.

One change occurs in vision. If you have tension in your eye area, you don't realize it but you don't see depth and colors the same way someone without the tension sees them. The best way I can describe the difference is that a person with eye tension sees the world as though it were a color photograph. That is, the sense of depth is, as it were, flat and the colors are not as vibrant as they are in reality. Someone with held tension in the eyes can not know they have the tension, for that person the world simply looks the way the world has always looked. It is only when the chronic tension is broken and you see the world with a full sense of depth and vibrant colors that you realize that you have not been looking at the world that way before. The difference is dramatic, but it comes only when the tension in the eyes has been broken.

The other change is in hearing. The change here is less dramatic, but no less real. Your taste in music will change as will the loudness at which you play music. The change is from the loud and hard rhythms of rock type music to softer and more melodic music. I can't say for each of you what the change will be, whether it will be to crooning or classical or country; but it will change to a softer sound played with a lower volume.

Just to cover the person whose subconscious sees this discussion of music as a way to escape these exercises, let me add that the person who already listens mostly to classical or opera or crooning music is not thereby free of this tension. You may have less of the tension, it may not have deadened your hearing, but it is only when you can fully do the eye exercises that you can be sure that this held tension has been dissolved.

Another common change is with people who are absent-minded, tend to lose things, have more than their share of auto accidents. This tendency to be unfocused is mainly contained in forehead tension. As you clear the forehead and then the eyes your degree of focus and concentration will increase. As always, you will not be aware of this as if there were some switch thrown. Instead it will be a gradual, organic, change and you will likely only be aware of the change in looking back on yourself and the way you used to be.

Forehead

Tonic Eyes Open

variant 1

On the inhale (Figure 71 on page 184) open your eyes and wrinkle the forehead as much as you can. On the exhale let your eyes close. You should be able to do this exercise for ten minutes without stopping or losing your sequence of open and close.

Footnote 25. If you have had Botox (tm) injections into your forehead muscles, then continue with the other eye exercises until the medication wears off. Then do the forehead exercises until you have freed the muscles. You can then go back to your Botox use.

Figure71

variant 2

On both the inhale and exhale open your eyes and wrinkle the forehead. In variant 1 you relaxed after each inhale, here you keep the forehead constantly wrinkled. Again 10 minutes is a good time goal.

There are two things to notice in Figure 71. First note how much better the wrinkling is for the lower picture than in the upper picture. Both have good wrinkling, it is just better for the second model. Now this difference can be because the upper model has residual tension in his forehead muscle (the frontalis) but it can also be because he has a shorter forehead and thus his muscle is shorter. In your work shoot for the amount of wrinkling of model two, but keep in mi nd the issue of anatomical differences.

The other thing to note is that top model in Figure 71 has to open his eyes wide in order to get wrinkling of the forehead while model two has relaxed eyelids while still getting maximum forehead wrinkling. Model two is doing it correctly. It is not a critical issue that the two be separated, but still that is the goal. The muscle that wrinkles the forehead is completely different from the muscle that raises the eyelids.

My Reichian therapist referred to this connection of two different muscles such that both had to be used to accomplish a movement as the muscles being "fused." It is not a bad term to use. Our goal is to unfuse muscle groups. We will see this phenomena again when I talk about the jaw. We have already seen a variant of this fusing when I discussed the breathing and how some people need to use the accessory muscles of respiration to fully inhale.

For some it can take many months of repetitions of this exercise to separate these two actions, but that is the proper goal.