Exploring The Third Eye: Looking vs. Seeing

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When I wake up in the morning, I walk out onto my balcony and survey the scene around my home. It’s usually still quite dark out, but the little lamps that dot the bike path on Santa Monica and Venice Beach are still lit and to the left of my window there’s just a hint of dawn approaching in the east. You can hear the waves crashing off the shoreline to the right, and the occasional garbage truck or street sweeper getting to work. The smell is what I notice most. There’s a salty spray in the air that reminds me of my youth going down the shore with my family. Two weeks every year, that was summer for me, and ever since then I have loved the beach. I always knew that I would someday live right on the beach. And now, I do.

Welcome to this month’s overdue article and the third eye. Now please excuse my lateness. I could regale you with reasons as to why I didn’t get this done when I thought I might, but in my experience those always just come off as excuses. Suffice to say that I’m currently on my third attempt from scratch and the path that I had originally intended is no longer the one that I’m on. I have a feeling that by the end of this article I’ll wind up in the same spot, but who really knows these things?

The third eye is all about vision.

It’s located right between your eyebrows and is the seed of intuition. It’s a spot where you know before you really know. I guess in that sense, it’s similar to trusting your gut and in some ways that lines up well with the solar plexus being the third chakra and the third eye being the sixth. Things tend to repeat.

In the earliest depictions of meditation that I can remember, there was always reference to the third eye. The Buddha has a dot there. If a character from a cartoon had some sort of mind or psychic powers, the energy would always exit from the center of their forehead. Even Dragonball’s character, Tien had a literal third eye at the center of his forehead that he obtained through years of intense meditation. Admittedly that last one seems a bit on the nose (or in the eye?) but we’ll let it slide and keep moving. All this to say that the third eye is inherently linked to a mediation practice. So in order to discover mine, I had to rededicate some time to just that.

Back in January when we explored the root chakra, I had dedicated my morning ritual to a practice of zazen meditation and I have to admit to you that over the course of this year, it has fallen off from that absolute discipline that it used to be. Does that make me a bad yogi? I’m not sure. But I do know that it makes me pretty human. And my human experience of balancing the chakras has led me to believe that it is in fact a balancing act. A balancing act where you’re constantly correcting things little by little to make sure that the whole thing doesn’t fall over. So while certain chakras, like the sacral and solar plexus, may have led me to other practices outside of meditation, the third eye is bringing me back. 

So over the course of the month of June, I’ve returned to my meditation cushion in the mornings and sat with my lotus posture, with the intention of gaining some insight or foresight or hindsight or regular sight into…….. Something. And oddly enough, I thought that the best way to do that would be to close my eyes. So I shut down my sight and turned my eyes up towards the middle of my forehead and sat and breathed. And I did it again and again and again and nothing really seemed to be happening.

Well, what I wanted to happen wasn’t really happening. 

You see, I have this dragon that visits me sometimes. It first happened at a breathwork class. If you haven’t experienced breathwork, please explore the site further and check it out. At Beth’s EXPLORE Retreat, I bawled my eyes out during a breathwork session. I didn’t even know I needed it until it happened, and I can’t tell you how therapeutic it was. But years ago, I attend a men’s circle where we practiced holotropic breathwork. We laid on our backs closed our eyes and practiced a three-part breath of two separate inhales and a longer exhale. (There’s more to it than that but it will do for the sake of today.) We would practice this for seven minutes and then hold our breath for a minute and we did this for seven rounds.

Weird shit happens at breathwork. Your hands claw up. You body tingles. You bawl like a baby. It’s one of the more interesting experiences I’ve had. When you hold your breath at the end of a round, I have found that you can go for quite a long while before needing to breathe again, and in this first ever session I was pretty amazed by it. In the fourth or fifth round of breath-holding, I started getting visions behind my closed eyelids. I would equate these as being similar to closing your eyes and rubbing them where you can see what seem like tiny electrical signals bouncing around. Only here, my electrical signals were very much coming to me in the form of a dragon. He would come around during the breath-holding process and sort of sniff around me as if he were feeling me out. Then we would start breathing again and he would dart off, but whenever I held my breath and sat in a sustained stillness, he would return again and take measure of me. I took him to be a spirit guide that day, and since then he has shown up several times along my path.

So as I entered into this month of third eye energy focus, I was really expecting him to show up. Why wouldn’t he? I’m doing all the right things. I’m practicing balance and flowing my energy and committing my time. He should be here. He should be assuring me that I’m doing it right and I’ll be there soon. But no matter how hard I focused on my third eye, he would not show his face. It was quite a disappointment. 

Then I stopped closing my eyes. I opened them up to the morning’s view from my porch. I had been a bit worried about my growth as a person and professional, and I saw trees growing leaves without any effort. I’d been concerned that my current occupation and work wouldn’t allow Jenna and I to start the family that we might want, and across our walkway I saw a mom making breakfast for her kids in the early morning hours. I didn’t know if we could create the living situation that we talk about when we talk about the future, and I saw the beach. I saw the beach that I had always told myself I would live at. And now I do.

And then I relaxed a bit.

So often we are desperately looking for our path like we might miss it, when it's already laid beneath our feet. Seeing and looking are very different. When you’re looking for something, you’ll only come back with what you find, but when you’re seeing what is actually there before you, you cannot be fooled. It’s why all the great fortune tellers and psychics are never heroes of the story. They speak in riddles that often confound and frustrate the hero, but they themselves never even try to decipher what the riddle means. They just state what the tea leaves or tarot cards are saying. And I think it’s because before you can have foresight, you need to have true sight. You need to have that calm inner peace that assures you that the visions don’t really matter any way. They’re simply there as a guide, but oftentimes they’re more tricky that what’s actually in front of you.

June went from looking to seeing, and the whole process was an act of relaxation more than one of focus. Thanks for looking down the path with me. Next month, we’re on to liberation! 

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