By Naomi Wynter-Vincent, PhD, Certified Advanced Rolfer™, Rolf Movement® Practitioner and Pierpaola Volpones, Basic Rolfing® and Rolf Movement Instructor
Naomi Wynter-Vincent: What, for you, is the significance of eyesight and ways of using the eyes in Rolfing Structural Integration (SI)?
Pierpaola Volpones: One of the keystones in Rolfing work is body-reading. And it’s one of the most difficult skills to teach! Why? I believe it is because we are good in talking about what we feel, yet less articulate in using words to explain what we see. There is another aspect that contributes to the struggle with body reading: so often it is seen as a test, so students, and teachers too, get tense because we are afraid to be ‘wrong’. So, it is very easy to ‘see’ one’s fears instead of the client him or herself. What I have found very helpful is to pay attention to the physical event of vision: the image of my client touches my retina; it leaves a print, a mark in my retina. From that sensation that brings me in contact with myself, I analyze what I see: I organize myself so that I have the cortical experience of vision after the sensorial one.
NWV: I understand that you’ve learned something about the Bates Method of Vision Education. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
PV: I came in contact with the Bates Method many years ago. I started to wear glasses in my adolescence due to myopia. My father was an eye doctor and he prescribed glasses to me with a correction that was less that what I needed to see ten diopters. He explained that my eyes would become lazy otherwise, that having a lower correction was intended to stimulate the eyes’ activity. This was all he said and I found it very interesting. Years later I heard about the Bates Method; I bought the book, read it, and started to do the exercises. I found it very boring! I was not disciplined enough to train my eye muscles regularly. Many years later, in fact only a few years ago, a colleague of mine, Giovannella Pattavina, organized a two-day workshop based on the Bates Method. I believe that over the decades I had changed my attitude toward self- exploration, but undoubtedly Giovannella also offered a different approach; her teachings started to make a lot of sense to me and I could practice some of the exercises and found them very helpful. The breakthrough idea, for me, was ‘to accept Mr. Blur’: to take off my glasses and accept that vision could be blurred, but that it was ok. What a relief to allow myself to do this!
Another surprise was to learn that eyes have to move; that, in fact, they move constantly to catch the image and align it with the fovea, in what is called the saccadic motion. Saccadic motion is the physiological activity that our eyes do in order to be able to ‘see’. Of course, we also see thanks to the retina, which is the membrane positioned inside the eye, full of receptors, cones and rods (the cones are able to see colors and shapes; the rods recognize movements), that catch the light stimuli and send them to the brain that then transforms those stimuli into images. From there, the neurons of the retina are continuous with the optic nerve that reaches the visual cortex located at the occipital lobe. On the retina, next to the optic nerve root, there is also a small area named the ‘fovea’. This tiny spot – 1.5mm in diameter – is full of cones, and almost no rods. The rods, meanwhile, are all over the retina and very numerous: we have about 120 million of them compared to the cones (6.4 million); the rods are activated even in poor light conditions. The rods detect variations in luminosity, and in a wider sense they perceive movement, so they tell us where something is; by contrast the fovea is the place where, thanks to the cones, we gather information in order to know what something is. Ultimately, in order to be able to understand what we are seeing, the image has to fall into the fovea: this motion is what is named the ‘saccadic motion’, and it is performed by the extraocular muscles of the eyes.
Wearing glasses, where the center of lenses are aligned with the pupils, prevents the eyes from moving freely; they have to stay aligned with the lenses instead of being free to search out the objects of sight. Not wearing glasses frees my eyes to do what they are supposed to do and allows me to see something else (the blur!). Another experience that amazed me was that any session of Bates Method exercises started with relaxation. ‘Palming’, ‘sunning’, resting the eyes in the orbits: it felt as if these practices allowed sympathetic activation to be reduced, and made the eyes more ready to accept changes in their usual visual habits.
Understanding the roles of cones and rods also illuminates the different kinds of vision that can be summarized as ‘peripheral’ and ‘focal’ vision, and these have postural consequences. Focal (or foveal) vision is helpful for seeing details and colors, the ‘what’ of visual content. Peripheral vision recognizes motion, tonality of light, but not details. These different visual types or preferences can be seen to correspond to a more focused posture of neck and head, in focal vision, and a freer motion of the neck and head, where peripheral vision is dominant. Despite being apparently less detailed, peripheral vision is what allows us to react very quickly when something crosses our field of vision, before we even know what is it. Foveal vision lands on the cortex; peripheral is subcortical. For example, if we are in a room where sunlight is entering the window and illuminates a wall, we can perceive the gradient of brightness with our peripheral vision; when we look at the shape drawn by the sun’s rays, we are using focal/foveal vision. Both visual processes are needed to be able to orient within the environment: in fact, peripheral vision is wider, as if we are using the wide angle in a camera; foveal vision has a more limited field, as if we are using a zoom.
Yet another type of vision is tunnel vision, which happens when we reduce the field of view, as if we are inside a tunnel. We keep the foveal vision but lose peripheral vision completely: tunnel vision undoubtedly has consequences in our postural tone and in the freedom of eye movement and, by corollary, in the way that we are able to perceive and receive the world. Understanding and embodying the distinction between peripheral, focal, and tunnel vision made a lot of sense for me: it helped to bring clarity about different visual styles and their resulting consequences for posture and tone.
It has helped me, my clients, and my students to understand, recognize, and change habits and patterns.
NWV: Have you integrated aspects of the Bates Method into the way you teach or your practice with clients?
PV: Yes, whenever it makes sense to introduce some elements. For example, before we even start to try to change anything in the way that people see, there is a sensation of the eyes that can be defined: we can observe the eyeballs
in the orbits, sense their movement, and free their capacity to move, to recover the physiological saccadic motion. The most surprising exercise I did in the workshop was to ‘allow the world to move’ as I walk, to perceive the motion of the world around us when we move. It is the best way to introduce peripheral vision that I have ever experienced. I teach these subjects in Rolf Movement classes or in classes on functional understanding of vision, in relation to topics such as perception, the triangle of orientation, and the Seventh- Hour orientation in space.
NWV: I have been looking into something called the Eyebody Method®, by Peter Grunwald, and I’m intrigued by the way that he connects our patterns of eye use to specific restrictions in the body, even personality types. He also believes
that it is possible for most people to correct how they use their eyes to the point where they no longer need to wear glasses. He also goes very deeply into ocular anatomy in a way that we certainly do not, as Rolfers. Do you think that we do enough, as Rolfers, around eyesight and visual preferences?
PV: Probably not. There is a lot to do, a lot we can learn from other methodologies. I learned from Tessy Brungardt to literally work the eyes: that is, to hold the eyeball and feel where it is free to move and where not; to perceive which of the eyes muscles is tighter, for example. It’s amazing what you and the client can feel!
NWV: Where and when are our patterns of eye use formed, do you think?
PV: The optic nerve is believed to complete its myelination during the third month of life of the newborn. As a sensory organ to explore the environment, it takes some time to be ready to function: the organs of smell, taste, and the auditory and vestibular systems are ready much earlier. They are available to us from the moment we are born. But eye use and vision are processes that require a cortical component. We see with our brain, as science teaches us, and the optical nerves can be considered an extension of the brain. From this point of view, the development of the nervous system and of vision go hand-in-hand. And we know that in this developmental process, as in others, there are also affective, social events, and factors that determine this development alongside the form that we inherit within our genes.
NWV: Does physical posture determine eye use or the other way round?
PV: It’s difficult to say which comes first. I tend to imagine posture being the stronger in shaping eye use: for example, when the neck is very far forward, the occipital area might be compressed to lift the plane of the gaze. We also know that posture is linked to one’s character and personality traits. A rigid posture might cause the neck to be too straight; the eyes always looking from ‘behind’. A shy person might demonstrate a certain posture and the tendency not to be able to look straight into the eyes of another. An arrogant person might gaze on people as if looking from a higher position. Somebody in love might have languid eyes . . . For sure, one’s emotional state can interfere with the mechanical habit of vision, our language idioms reflect this.
For example, not being able to see clearly while angry, being clouded by a bad mood, blinded by love, not being able to see beyond your own nose . . .
NWV: You are a glasses-wearer. Can you say something about your own experience of your eyesight, and how you feel it might relate to other patterns in your posture or personality?
PV: I went through different phases toward my need to wear glasses. There was a time when I felt handicapped, penalized, as if having less than ‘perfect’ vision was a lack in my being. I also hated wearing glasses because I would drop them or they would fall; I generally found them a nuisance. But without glasses, for example while swimming, I could not clearly see where I was or where others were. And I can get headaches if I strain my vision. At other moments in my life, glasses have become a fashion accessory, and I have played a lot and had fun with them. I also wore contact lenses for many years, until I was sick of having this piece of plastic in my eyes all the time. But the first time I had contact lenses, I felt so happy and free; I could see clearly at a distance without perceiving the limitation of the frame of my glasses. Now that I am getting older, I have to take my glasses off to be able to read: just the opposite of what other people do! It’s relieving, particularly after the work with Giovannella.
Pierpaola Volpones discovered Rolfing SI through bodywork and her research into well-being and somatic expression. She studied in Munich with Stacey Mills and Michael Salveson in her Basic Training, Michael Salveson, and Jeffrey Maitland in her Advanced Training. Her Rolf Movement Training took place in Italy with Janie French and Annie Duggan. She began her Rolfing and Rolf Movement teacher training almost twenty years ago, and has been teaching since 2006. She runs a practice in Rimini, Italy, and teaches for the European Rolfing Association®. Her website is at www.volpones.it.
Naomi Wynter-Vincent certified as a Rolfer in London in 2014, and as an Advanced Rolfer and Rolf Movement Practitioner in Munich in 2017 and 2019, respectively. She holds degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Sussex, and University College London, including a PhD in psychoanalytic theory and literature. Her website is at londonrolfing.com. Wynter-Vincent is also the Europe Editor of this Journal.
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