We tend to close our eyes as if they are flat – closing our eyelids as if we are pulling down the blinds in our house – sometimes to shut ourselves off from the outside world.
But our eyes are not flat...and we are not separate from the world around us.
Our eyes are spheres – lovely warm round spheres, filled with clear fluid, and bathed in light – the light they receive from the world, and the light that they emanate out, from the light that lives within.
In a world where we are forever seeking stimulation, we use our eyes to seek outside of ourselves for satisfaction in visual pleasures, but that is not what they are designed for – they are designed simply to receive light.
A lovely way to connect to this receptive quality of our eyes is also a gentle meditation.
The eyelid meditation
If we open and close our eyelids slowly and gently enough, we will begin to feel this warm, round, spherical quality of our eyes, feeling our lids as they close, curving gently around the warm round eye, which brings a feeling of coming home to ourselves, to all the love that we are, rather than shutting the world out in hurt and protection.
And if we close our eyes like this, over and over again, until we can feel the warmth and the roundness of them, we focus the mind on what the body is doing, bringing the two together, as one.
This is also the greatest aid to sleep I have ever found! Done with dedication, it is guaranteed to send you to sleep, or at the very least, into a deep rest for your body and your mind.
The eyelid meditation is a great prescription for health – for true medicine is the way we live, including the way we close our eyes.