Expressing your Blue vision is one of the 7 keys to colorful communication. Your vision includes your background, accent, experience, opinions and beliefs. This year new challenges like living through lockdown or dealing with COVID-19 may have shattered your longstanding beliefs and helped emerge new ones. I know it has been the case for me. I thought I would not be comfortable teaching remotely. Yet, I have grown increasingly at ease with this in 2020. Have you recognized and welcomed the external factors that have changed your vision in 2020?

During the lockdown period in France, I noticed another external factor which was changing my vision and, funnily enough, my look and self-confidence. Today I wear glasses much more rarely than before. In fact, some days I can’t even remember where I put them. And I love it.

How did all this happen? By magic? No, by the discovery of Eye Yoga. And the ideas and pychology behind that practice.

The magic of Eye Yoga

I had never heard of Eye Yoga before Béatrice Pauly-Laubry brought her dream of doing a workshop in London in English to me in 2018. When I agreed to coach her, I had no idea that it would have repercussions on my life in 2020. Our first session was rather “eye-opening” to say the least.

In an act of “foresight”, we decided to work by Skype. As I had no idea what eye yoga was, and Beatrice wasn’t 100% sure of her English, we stumbled blindly until I suggested she guide me through the physical exercises. I found myself standing up in front of my laptop, swinging my arms and upper body from side to side, while Beatrice explained how to do the movements correctly .

The Yawn Factor

My body enjoyed the movement as I did the exercises. Yet, I noticed that I was yawning a lot. And I mean a lot! I felt bad as I yawned during these exercises (not a good sign for Beatrice’s future workshops, I thought!). However, she said this showed that I was absorbing the training as deep relaxation is one of the great benefits of eye yoga.

Once I knew that I embraced the exercises fully. Can I have more relaxation? Bring it on!

Our coaching sessions became fun and fluid. Each one brought more confidence to Beatrice and more yawning to me. Progressively she had fewer hesitations finding the right words to describe the exercises and debrief outcomes with me. We built up a base of the right words for training each technique and honed this by doing them together via our Skype sessions. I became the pupil (funny how this word comes from the eye!) whom she guided through all the learning that she eventually gave her workshop participants in London months later.

I know I did not do the exercises long enough to strengthen my eyesight. However, I opened up to one of the core concepts of eye yoga: accepting bluriness in vision. This was a surprise to me because as an artist, I tended to draw and paint in a realistic style which “required” sharpness of vision.

Embracing “bluriness”

My belief was that any bluriness was a sign of weakness. As a result, I kept my glasses on even when not absolutely necessary. I am near-sighted so my glasses are of little use to me working on a computer. During the lockdown, and working by Skype and Zoom for full days at a time, I remembered my training in eye yoga. It seemed silly to wear my glasses so I abandoned them. As a result, I began to accept blurrines when off my laptop.

I went out to the shops and did my one hour jog without glasses too. I appreciated the time outside and engaged with the colors of the trees, sky, the movements of things in a new way.

The lockdown period gave me the chance to experiment, to accept a new “look” without glasses, without sharpness of vision. In the end, I began to see more with my body and heart than simply through my “eyes”.

Revisioning my world

Due to COVID-19, our vision of what is life in 2020 has become blurry to say the least. And we can hardly “see” our way forward at times. My own personal life has been profoundly affected by things that I did not “see” coming. Yet, my attitude is to accept this “blurriness” as part of life now and let my heart feel the beauty in each situation.

My art has also changed as a result of my decision to abandon my glasses. My drawings and painting have adopted a looser style. They are less “realistic” and yet perfect in their own way. Another benefit of leaving my glasses off is that I don’t have a pair of glasses on my nose constantly fogging up because of my mask.

All this reminds me of the silly British comedy film “Mindhorn”. The main character has a bionic eye which enables him to see the truth. But he sees the relationships in his life all wrong. Thus the bionic eye is in fact the problem and not the solution. Only when he realizes that he is not seeing the full “truth” can he get a new vision of his own life.

This profound shift has been one of the benefits of the lockdown period. It changed my vision as both a speaker and a trainer. If you are exhausting yourself “refocusing” your core beliefs in a world that has become “blurry”, perhaps you should try eye yoga. It could relax your body and mind and lead to surprising changes in your “vision”.