setpoint 1

like she said in a porno from the good old days (they had lines back then, plots sometimes): if i don't get (in my case) a setpoint every day i just don't feel right.

i find my"self" getting up out of bed where i was in some position for many minutes, i'm going to pass most of my awake in one position more or less because work is pretty much doing the same thing over and over again. i have found that i want a few minutes in the morning to move all the parts. So: not a routine except in some larger sense, but something. this is what i want to do:

1. the mind - put it through some paces
2. the attention - move it around, put it places
3. the eyes - because we humans care more about what we see than any other sense we like lead with our eyes, we think we can "see" farther than any of the other senses, maybe that's true, anyway, fix the eyes the others will start to emerge. i decided that i had been "using" the eyes all wrong for my entire life. change is hard until it gets done, then it was easy.
4. the muscles - starting with the neck, then everything else, each system (leg, neck, etc.) move in every direction, find the weak and sore spots, work em a bit.
5. some freeform movement, maybe something new turns up for consideration. Like just now, going down stairs backwards at speed, no hands, how to. no i didn't figure out like "how," i considerded some aspects of the situation, how the knees might bend, favorable angles of approach, etc. like, um, in a castle tower in the dark, fighting blind with swords. use of senses in different way haha.

to for the day set the attitude, a sensory base line, a physical base line of feeling relatively better, so 2 hours later i can remember and then at break maybe i can do a 2 minute set to refresh the body so the mind can sing.

i present a journal of a training sequence:

the eye exercises
to the yoga eye move exercises i added: keep the eyes still and move just the mind
i went looking for what there really is to see
i saw myself looking at what i thought was interesting
there is stuff all around but i only went for what i thought was interesting
the other stuff wasn’t interesting but how would i know, i didn’t notice, I only
looked at what was interesting to the “me”:
boobs, lizards, noodles

i found that the bottom edge of the circle of attention i was drawing around the edge of my visual field
went flat in line with my lower lid. as if the attention did not want to bother with the arc of reddish black at the bottom,
had to “make” the attention do what “I” wanted it to do.
Hard.

The where to put the focus seems to turn out to be infinity
If I want to get the fullest picture all the way to the edges. The beautiful or dangerous object
Is up close and directly in front of me and I am not looking at it, I am focused on infinity to get the best
Look at everything.
Ha ha rd

There was another habit. Looking “off into space” turned out to mean focused on a spot about 5 feet in front and down if I was standing up and up to the left if I was sitting down. I used to run with that head position and gaze set, major contributor to falls.

So, then to the regular yoga eye movement exercise. Standing it is a balance thing, to take the eyes to a limit and to keep the balance, bent knees, pelvis-spine-neck aligned, center of gravity, weight evenly distributed between feet and between toes and heels. Past the limit black spots appear, not dangerous for short periods I imagine. Also to not recruit (neck muscles for example) at the end points. Also not to move the head. Also where is the focus: close, far. Also is the movement smooth?

I used to do this exercise and my attention would go away from the visual and into the movement, the focus would go to one of my standard gazes while my attention would concentrate on the actual movement of the part. I might as well have been eyes closed. I wasn’t looking at anything. Or the opposite, I was looking at the beautiful female human or the shiny pebble. If I keep my focus on infinity than my eye movement smoothes out and becomes more linear, even the complex diagonal motions. Vision like a sword cut.
Keeping the focus wherever I might want it to be. Seeking a more comprehensive vantage point. Out at infinity things move slower, relatively. More ”time” perhaps for the training to pay off.
On to the head movements. Balance in movement. Avoiding recruiting the shoulders, keep them level. Eyes I’ve been keeping level and forward at infinity. That demonstrates to me that when I rotate my head “all the way” it is only about 45 degrees and if I then continue with my eyes “all the way” until I reach on one side the bridge of my nose I only gain about another couple of degrees or so of field in one direction and lose it in the other (and I can go on to do the “attention” exercise while my head and eyes are in that position with interesting results). So I’ve been practicing keeping my eyes ahead and focused on infinity while doing the head movement exercise and its been interesting and hard.

tbc