Heighten Your Senses – Close Your Eyes

When I started this blog post, I needed to have a good understanding of what balance actually is. I looked it up in the dictionary, and it made total sense.

Balance:

1a : physical equilibrium

trouble keeping your balance on a sailboat

lost his balance and fell

a boxer kept off balance for a whole round

b : the ability to retain one’s balance

Gymnasts must have a good sense of balance.

2a : stability produced by even distribution of weight on each side of the vertical axis

when the two sides of the scale are in balance

tipped the statue off balance

Planning to writing this blog post, closed my eyes and imagined what the outcome would be. Why did I close my eyes? Because I was in my living room, and I was sitting with all of the things in my environment surrounding me and vying for my attention. I needed to focus directly on the elements that would be part of this blog post. When there’s a lot of distracting things in my environment my eyes tend to pull my mind away from what I’m trying to do. When I am on the elliptical trainer or on weight bearing cardio like the Cybex machine, or even any weight bearing weight training activity, I need my balance.

I have been training my body like crazy and it seems like my muscles are growing and I am getting stronger every day, but my balance is still lacking. I don’t want to blame it on a mess, especially since I was weak before, I trained and then I was able to get stronger, why can’t I trade my balance, too?  What can I do to get better at being self-aware of both sides of my body in space. Especially when I’m walking everything just has a mind of its own it seems sometimes.

So I brought my balance in to the max in the reason to close my eyes to get rid of the distraction, but there’s another reason I need to close my eyes. And that’s to remove distraction so I can train my mind as well.

I’ve been reading a lot about hacking happiness and understanding the mind and how to control it more with hacking the mind. I’ve been getting better at it, with the books that I’ve been reading that fuels my brain, especially during cardio when I am fixed in one position and have to finish the task at hand. I have no choice but to move to someplace else and get involved in another activity or another exercise or something that shiny.

So yesterday, on the Cybex machine, I just closed my eyes. It was about 4:45 in the morning and I wanted to get my cardio out of the way for day two leg day. (I train my legs three days a week)

There was not much activity at the gym distracting me, except for those televisions that always talk about some local news where somebody was killed, or the planet fitness TV, which has some amazing scenes with athletes doing diving of cliffs, mountain biking in some crazy places, surfing, some pretty interesting stuff to sink my eyes into.

So I held on tightly to the handlebars on the machine, which had a heart rate monitor on it, and just close my eyes. What was the worst that could happen? If I felt off-balance I would open my eyes. I wasn’t going to fall and I could always stop moving. I didn’t think I was a danger to anybody else or myself.

It was the first time I close my eyes went in motion. But it was a safe position that I was in, because I would never walk with people around me closing my eyes.  Every step was evenly balanced. Or was it? When I closed my eyes I thought of which handle was getting more pressure from my hand to balance myself and I noticed that it was more on the left side, because of my right leg deficit. So I put more weight into my right leg and even the balance.

I also thought further up the leg and felt if both legs were pushing the same especially at my ankle, where I had my surgery on the right side, and I noticed that my right foot was planted without moving much, I tried to move it and lift my heel off the pad like my other one and I could do it. It’s just that those muscles are not used to doing it being in a brace for so long, or is it because of MS? I had to find out.

I tried to copy the left side, and sure enough I was able to. But it wasn’t until I close my eyes and really focused on my body rather than just the action of doing the motion on the machine, that I was able to.

When I get on the cardio equipment, on most days my SI (sacroiliac joint) is out of whack because of my weaker right leg. I’ve always had issues with my back and disc issues, and this was the culprit. It’s not until I got diagnosed at 36 that I realized it was MS, but I need to always watch it.

Since I have been on the cardio machines that keep my leg motion while in action in a fixed position repetitively, it’s like I have a chiropractic adjustment in addition to cardio every time I’m on it.

It’s one of the reasons that I have to do it before I do my lifting, especially when I go heavy with the weights, because adding weight to the leaning tower of Pisa probably is not the best idea.

I am able to go for one minute, keeping my eyes on my iPhone, and hope that I can get to a minute and a half today when I get in the gym. We’re getting close to 5:00 AM.

So the main reason that I wanted to close my eyes was to have the feeling of understanding where my weight was and how my body was feeling when I was in motion. I wanted a good balance, but there’s another reason.

In addition to training my body and strengthening my muscles, I need to strengthen my brain, and I’ve been learning a lot about hacking the mind, and understanding the inner workings and how your brain works. Everybody’s got a brain, I don’t think mine works any differently than someone else’s, I just may have some heightened senses of awareness that might allow me to do all little bit more. And a times a little bit less. So every brain is like a snowflake, right? But what we all have in common is a mind that can be controlled.  I don’t think yours is any different, it’s what was designed to keep you alive. It’s like your CPU.

When I close my eyes, I think inward, and how my bodies feeling? I’m also able to think outside my body and try to recall what is around me in every place of the room. It’s like meditation, an inward focus. It allows me to remove my vision, and take a major sense that I use for keeping myself from falling, and think. It’s not a way like you can think when your eyes are open. Try it.

I think of Stevie Wonder, Diane Schuur, José Feliciano.  Tremendous talents without vision. Would they be as tremendous in their talents if they have a vision? Quite possibly but most likely not.

You are a lot stronger than you think, and if you think you need your vision at all times of the day, think again. You would be amazed at how strong you are removing just one of your senses. I’ve heard of a float tank where you float in room temperature water in darkness and there is no weight around you pressing on your body giving your sense of touch any input, your vision is out of the picture, it’s completely quiet. It must be amazing I have to try it it’s on my list of things to do.

So the only fear I had was falling, but because I could hold on that was taken out of the mix. I wasn’t a danger to myself. I took a chance and closed my eyes on a machine I never thought I would. And it was one of the best things I did. It got me aware of my sense of balance, the strength I was applying during the activity, and made me very self-aware. And I got to train my mind.

If there’s a way that you can remove your sense of vision from an activity where you are not a danger to yourself, especially if you have a chronic illness that you think you are not in control of, train your mind. It will help you realize how much stronger you are than you thought, especially taking your vision out of the mix which you always rely on. I think I’m going to eat this apple now before I go into the gym. And I’m going to close my eyes to do it, heightening my sense of taste!