As you’re reading this, start to notice your breathing. Don’t try to change anything, just let your body breathe naturally. Now, continue to observe your breathing but make one change: for a minute or two, stop focusing on the individual words. Instead, relax your gaze and take in the whole screen and everything around it, right up to the edges of your vision.
When you were focusing on reading, you might have noticed that your breathing was shallower, mostly happening in your chest, and relatively fast. In contrast, when you took in the whole scene, your breathing probably became deeper, involved your abdomen more, and slowed down. You likely felt more relaxed, calmer, and happier.
When we focus our gaze narrowly, the sympathetic nervous system—the part of our autonomic nervous system responsible for the fight-or-flight response—becomes active. This system looks for threats and prepares us to respond to them. Unfortunately, we often have our sympathetic systems active too much, flooding our bodies with stress hormones and keeping us in a chronic state of overstimulation. We quickly jump from one focus to another, getting stuck in a cycle of hyper-vigilance and anxiety.
Relaxing our gaze, however, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the branch that brings us back to calm, rest, and balance. This simple exercise can help trigger a parasympathetic response, breaking the cycle of constant vigilance and allowing us to relax.
The change this exercise brings about is quick and not hard to achieve. It just involves altering how we use our eyes—relaxing our gaze and making our eyes less tightly focused. While you can’t read or surf the internet this way, you can take breaks, have conversations, attend meetings, walk down the street, or drive.
Another activity you can do with a relaxed gaze is meditation. I often encourage people to use this technique to make their meditation practice more effective. Interestingly, how we focus our eyes affects how we focus our minds. When our eyes are in sympathetic mode (narrowly focused), our minds also tend to focus narrowly. For example, when we’re mindful of our breathing, we may only focus on one small part of the experience, which often isn’t enough to keep the mind engaged. This leads to a form of sensory deprivation, and the mind creates thoughts to fill the gap.
Our narrow focus, like a flashlight, tends to switch to noticing thoughts, which are usually more emotionally compelling than the physical sensations of breathing. We then enter the cycle of focusing on our breathing, getting distracted by thoughts, and having to bring our attention back repeatedly.
When our eyes are more relaxed in meditation, we can take in the whole experience of our breathing. This richer experience allows us to see connections between various sensations, like how sensations in the abdomen relate to those in the nostrils and the back. Our experience becomes dynamic, interconnected, and even sensual.
Thoughts will still arise, but with a less narrow focus—more like an oil lamp casting light in all directions—we can be aware of our breathing and thoughts simultaneously. This allows us to let thoughts pass through without getting caught up in them, making meditation much easier.
This simple change can significantly transform our experiences in both meditation and daily life.