Martial Arts

 

 
I have trained for about five years now on the vision focus sphere that appears when working both mind and eye focus. This was kind of an affect rather than an effect as truly my intent and focus was to avoid the pain pulsing through my body ; a healthy means to ease the pain through attempting symmetry by a focus on eye level even with a hypothetical horizon line while seated or standing on a horizontal surface.

It was also during this time that I attempted to train my rather adventurous monkey mind with a prescribed practice, and sometimes a ritual; a focus to ease the endless distraction leading me to worry, fear and anxiety. For those who know me most, my husband and family friends, this was witnessed as Jill enacting some sort of strange, esoteric, slow motion ridiculousness. But, thank heavens, my family and friends are highly creative, and no one “batted an eye” or “missed a beat”.

Now, these days, I can say with certainty these seemingly absurd yoga like routines most certainly redirected my hurt, damaged body towards wellness by stimulating the muscles that had atrophied, strengthening their neural pathways, and releasing the tensions on my pinched nerves, damaged cartilage, and bone on bone pain.

An effect of this practice was what I call, the sphere of visual creativity. I did not start out seeking to understand the sphere of illusionary creativity and to this day actively disengaged my ability to create illusions within my mind during this practice. I simply focus and accept when this sphere appears and sometimes experiment with projecting the sphere onto the horizon line, or, on the visual backdrop of my surroundings. Recently, I have been practicing a “Tai Chi” sphere just about where my Muay Thai Guru and my current Martial Arts Professor would recommend keeping focus.

And, having studied the traditional visual meditation practices of ancient heritages, I cannot help but believe there is not only scientific truth to this phenomenon but there is therapeutic means available for people who can understand the theory and train their own eyes to balance and define focal ranges as if a camera’s F-stop. I believe this practice actually somehow calms and restores the central nervous system because I feel directly a calming release of painful tension when I go through this practice. If I become stressed and my body begins to pulse in pain, if I can, I stop, balance, center my weight through gravity and use eye focus with my eye-line (horizon) and meditate on the senses.

This visually defined sphere is not real, nor is it imagined or an illusion; it is a visual phenomenon that occurs when the eyes are balanced in focus and the mind is able to recognize the state and define the range of visual focus. Anyone will or would be able to enact this phenomenon with intent, focus and practice. I do recommend caution as I do believe this is also the mind space that enables illusions or individual interpretation of our common visual reality. As a visual artist this is as commonplace as when looking at clouds and creating images from both the sight of clouds and the creativity of mind.