The sight and listening to the body

Stefania Romagnoli is the daughter of a photographer and an optometrist and met the Feldenkrais Method when she was intent on transforming myopia that was getting worse and giving her discomfort.

From that first contact with the discipline an adventure began that today sees her as a teacher of the Feldenkrais Method, now for 15 years; her eyes are efficient and her continuous research on the subject of the visual field linked to the emotional led her to create the Children Perfect View project .

In dialoguing with her, one immediately perceives that the training path coincides with a personal search well married to a desire to offer something valid, useful to others.

We asked her some questions to explore the connection between eye movement and body management .

What does it mean to live in your body in a pleasant way, enjoy your living spaces?

It means first of all refining listening and self-observation to become witnesses of how the body lives according to the movement of our attention and our intention.

The act of listening to oneself is not intended here as an exercise in verification and judgment, it is more like a journey where nothing is taken for granted and where movement is the means that leads us to discover a wonderful instrument that transforms itself according to our intentions.

The Feldenkrais method highlights how the evolutionary movement, from which we develop all our abilities, can continue to play a role of activator of learning processes at any time in our lives .

Learn new skills, discover that you are able to carry out activities you thought lost, learn to play an instrument in mature age, improve your memory, feel happy in your body and communicate it through actions that are dancing or talking or playing or to walk; in short, living one's own body, better than "in" one's body, in a pleasant way means being in touch with one's own needs and allowing oneself to listen to them .

To enjoy one's own space is also to perceive a single harmony, that of the only moment that has life, the moment you are living in this moment.

How do traumas affect our proprioception? An emotional trauma can act on the quality of sight. What does the recovery depend on and how can it be supported?

The subject of trauma is very complex to argue and there are different opinions on the subject. In my experience as a visual educator I have often found that even minor traumas can impoverish the quality of sight, such as a sudden fear, an unexpected and ominous outcome for a university exam, a withheld emotion and many other examples.

Sometimes there is a slight lowering of the eyes, not always found in objective terms, or the person complains of burning, sensitivity to light, fogging and other unpleasant sensations.

The first step is to assess your condition without alarmism, go to your doctor if necessary, but above all start to relax the visual system. Such as? The practices of the Bates method are useful tools for directing the person towards unity in recognizing that the visual system is not separate from the body.

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What is perfect sight children and how was it born?

Bambini Vista Perfetta is born from more than a decade of work experience on children's sight and from the desire to create a path for parents and children to be managed in complete autonomy.

Children respond beautifully to the Bates method and this allows them to intervene in a timely and effective manner on their sight.

Parents on the other hand must know the principles of the method well and experience it directly, especially if they have visual defects, to be able to follow their children in the process.

In recent years I have noticed how decisive and concrete the participatory contribution of the parental figure was in the approach to visual disturbance. The idea of involving the family came to me through a series of circumstances, not least to give us usable and captivating tools to stimulate daily practice, including the case of a child who solved an initial myopia in three months (at the eye examination turned out to be emmetrope, that is perfect sight) and of his mother who understood the value of work becoming her visual educator.

Other cases followed so that the desire to think of an articulated path that would have gone in the direction of the autonomy of treatment at home was strengthened in me .

The lessons are designed specifically for them and in a second phase they are accompanied towards an autonomy in visual practices with the delivery of a kit and a manual. The method is characterized by the presence of artistic / creative matrix contaminations (dance, music, theater, manual creations) within the path.

Recommend pinhole or rasterbrille glasses?

They are certainly very useful, I recommend direct experience even in the context of a visual education course. They do not replace a path of visual awareness.

Can a pain in a joint depend on a problem of ocular divergence?

The way we move has a lot to do with visual behavior; it is therefore possible in this case that the osteoarticular system is organized in a framework of functional adaptation to the visual request .

The constant of the body is the movement and therefore a muscular change, a tension or a stress, even on a visual level can lead to imbalances in other areas of the body.

Anger is said to blind people. Power hunger is said to make one lose sight. And there are many other metaphors related to the sense of sight and emotions in the various modulations. What emotion really feeds your eyes in depth?

There is a special sparkle in the eyes of children that is also seen in adults who are in a state of joy and well-being . In simple terms, the view improves when the mind is quiet.

Tell us 3 small daily actions that would make a big difference in terms of visual well-being.

The first is to remember to breathe, it seems trivial but it has been shown that, if our body does not oxygenate enough, this also has a deleterious effect on vision.

The diaphragm of people with visual defects has a reduced movement, so what I suggest is to check what happens to your sight when you breathe in abundance. Then, even singing is a small healthy daily action, to be combined with a free movement or a dance.

The second is being in the sun, in the sense of exposing your face with your eyes closed to the rays of the sun . The action is once again simple and difficult as it is about enjoying the main nourishment for the eyes and not doing anything else for a few minutes.

The third action is to close the eyes, remove the control for a few seconds, turn off the light of the world. Oxygen, sun and darkness nourish our cells, stimulating and relaxing the visual organ and bringing incalculable benefits to our body. Try to ... see.