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66 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k m a y / j u n e 2 0 1 7 66 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k m a y / j u n e 2 0 1 7 Do you take breaks? Real breaks? Many of us take coffee breaks or food breaks, but what about a real body-mind break? Here are some more self-preservation techniques you can try. When it's time for your next break, go outside, get a few minutes of sunshine, exercise your eyes by looking into the distance, and breathe clean air. Consider taking a short walk. Walking backward and sideways can help loosen muscles we don't regularly use. Move your arms up and around in a rotating motion, stretching backward. That's a real break for your body, mind, and spirit. If all we have in front of us are the same four walls or a massage table all day, it is no wonder that the eyes begin to stiffen and the body quickly follows. Here are two specific exercises to help rejuvenate your body and mind: The Sunning Exercise At my school, we love to take people outdoors and do an exercise called "sunning." We use the sun to relax our eyes and bodies and, thereby, prevent strain and injury in our backs, shoulders, and necks. To do the sunning exercise, we close our eyes, face the sun with our noses pointed directly toward it, and slowly move our heads all the way from side to side, shoulder to shoulder. It is important not to tense or lift the shoulders. When the head moves all the way to the left and away from direct sunlight, the pupils expand. When the head moves to the middle, facing the sun, the pupils contract. And when the head moves all the way to the right, they expand again. When my students practice this, we create a kind of loop—while people are moving their heads from side to side, they massage each others' shoulders. As we sun, we allow our partner to relax our shoulders by doing a deep and relaxing shoulder massage and we reciprocate to the next person. That sounds easy enough—there's nothing challenging intellectually about moving the head from side to side while massaging someone's shoulders, but 90 percent of the people have a difficult time doing it. Most of us tense our shoulders while moving our hands, because we never learned to separate and relax the shoulders or the neck from our hand movements. Sunning, done in partnership this way, not only relaxes the eyes, but also helps increase awareness of muscle isolation and reinforces that concept. Give Your Eyes a Break, Too As a result of nearly 45 years as a bodyworker and teacher of my Natural Vision Improvement method, I am keenly aware of the connection between our eyes and the rest of our body. One of the first places strain makes itself known is in our eyes, but most people don't make the connection. For example, we don't notice how much effort it takes for our eyes to look at close objects or how relaxing it is to look far away. We also don't notice how we strain to pay attention to our central vision and neglect our peripheral vision. These imbalances lead to stress throughout our bodies. The simplest way to overcome these imbalances is to take breaks and look into the distance at least once or twice an hour. It's best if you can go outside and look at distant treetops, over the ocean, or at the sky. If that isn't possible, look out a window at whatever there is to see. Don't try to focus on anything. Just let your eyes gently scan. Wave your hands at the side of your face to wake up your peripheral vision while you use your central vision to look long distance, which allows the lens of the eye to assume its relaxed position. This gives the tiny muscles of the eye a chance to rest, while improving Time for a Break