RELAXATION THROUGH EYE PRESSURE

Welcome to the very first Lauren yoga video blog. I wanted to start to share in this format for a couple of reasons. One to make learning more accessible. I'm personally always trying to find ways to stop staring at tiny words on my screen to help protect my eyesight. I hope these little snippets of video blog offer you helpful information and give you a different way to to lear.

I'm getting ready to teach my last day of an online yoga retreat which I do twice a year. One of the exercises I'm going to share with the group is a way to stimulate the vagus nerve by relieving eye tension. Our eyes are controlled by 12 extraocular muscles and the way that all of it is integrated through the neck is such that we can move the eyes to stimulate the vagus nerve, but we can also put pressure on the eyes, very gentle pressure to trigger what's called the OCR reflex or the ocular cardiac reflex. And because of the ways vagus nerve interacts with the eye muscles, putting gentle pressure on the eyes triggering that reflex induces a parasympathetic response. You can think of parasympathetic as turning on the off switch, putting the brakes on a little bit on stress hormones. I also teach this exercise to law enforcement because it's really accessible and it's pretty quick.

So to begin, bring your hands together and create a little heat and a little friction between the hands, and then you're going to take the heel of your hand place it directly over each eye socket and apply gentle pressure. I invite you to take a few deep breaths as you hold this for just about 15-20 seconds or so.

You'll know that you are a complete when you experience perhaps a wave of well being, or you start to feel a little better overall, or maybe the eyes begin to relax. Maybe you take a deeper breath.

Then, you can slowly remove your hands from your eyes. I like to keep my eyes closed for just a second and then open them slowly, looking down at first and then bringing in a little bit more light. I hope that offered you a little quick tool for stress relief. Try it out anytime. One thing I think that's very interesting is when you are stressed and you put your head in your hands, we somehow know to do this anyway. Right? Our body is so wise without us oftentimes even realizing it. So, thanks for listening and thanks for reading.