Idea | Seeing Is Feeling – Reclaiming Our I-Sight
On video calls with groups of highly sensitive, introverted, intuitive people, I often notice how many of us wear glasses. I’m not surprised—and I have theories about why.
Years ago, when I was in my early thirties and living in Seattle, I met a man who helped people heal their eyesight to the point of no longer needing to wear corrective lenses, a possibility I hadn’t known existed. He taught from his own experience and in-depth studies of previous practitioners, and his successes eventually prompted a group of conventional-medicine eye doctors to bring a court case against him to prevent him from practicing his healing methods in Washington State. To me, that was a sign the conventional medical community feared demonstrable truths about the healing of eyesight because that threatened their livelihoods.
One of the ideas taught by that eyesight healer was that we learn to hold tension in our eyes, which changes the shapes of our eyes over time and thus distorts our vision. Healing involved, in part, learning how to let go of habitual stresses settled in the area around the eyes.
In Louise Hay’s book You Can Heal Your Life, she writes, “When there are problems with the eyes, it usually means there is something we do not want to see, either about ourselves or about life: past, present, or future.”
When I approach eyesight from this perspective, the Seer archetype comes to mind. I consider highly sensitive, intuitive people to be seers, due to our abilities to know what’s going on behind surface appearances, to sense and feel subtle energies, and to know without knowing how we know. Isn’t it interesting that we, as seers, often need the assistance of corrective lenses to see in the physical, material world?
What causes this disconnect of seeing intuitively while not seeing physically—of perceiving subtle layers and energies, while seeing the earth-plane unclearly?
Childhood provides clues. If you wear corrective lenses now, how old were you when you got your first pair of glasses? “Whenever I see small children wearing glasses, I know there is stuff going on in their household they do not want to look at. If they can’t change the experience, they will diffuse the sight so they don’t have to see it so clearly,” writes Louise Hay.
I was in grade four when I first started wearing glasses, as shown in this series of consecutive school photos of me in grades one through five.
What do I remember about that time in my life? What did my parents tell me later about that time? What was happening during those years? What might I have not wanted to see or know? What did I not want to feel? What feelings or situations did I not feel capable of handling at that age?
After second grade in Honolulu, Hawaii, I moved with my family to Luna, Arkansas—a few homes scattered across a vast reach of countryside in the southeast corner of the state. We moved so my mom, brother, and I could be near Mom’s family while Dad went off to Vietnam to serve as a chaplain in the war. That was a lot to feel overwhelmed about, for certain.
I suspect I didn’t want to hear the utter weariness and sadness in my father’s voice on the cassette tapes he regularly sent to us from across the world, which we listened to in the kitchen of our tiny house in our rural outpost across the street from the high rise of levee holding back the immense Mississippi River. I also suspect that without Dad at home to be a second parent, I felt more protective of and responsible for my tender-hearted little brother.
That Deep South community in general, and in particular one offensively racist family member, were other shocks to my sensitive young self. I remember family get-togethers where that family member spoke with contempt and disrespect about the Black people who worked for him. I looked around at the other adults in the room, people I knew were gentle and kind and loving, but not one of them corrected or reprimanded the man who’d spouted off. I even remember an impulse to say something myself, but I was only eight years old, and fragile, and he was enormous and loud, so I kept quiet, folded in, stopped wanting to see.
The unwelcome awareness of realms I felt way too tiny and unequipped to know about, much less to understand—like war, an absent parent, and the unfairness of racism—didn’t turn off my innate and natural seer abilities, but gradually shut down my awareness of them. If my inner knowing was a liability, if I couldn’t process the implications of the things around me I “knew without knowing,” and if no one in my life noticed or helped me grapple with those issues, it makes sense to me now that the resulting overwhelm could have cause me to want to “see” less.
What might you have been wanting to avoid knowing, feeling, or “seeing” in the year or two before you began wearing glasses? And what might happen if we were willing to really look now, as adults, at what was happening to us back then? What might happen if we bring our past selves, our small, hurting, confused, unequipped selves, forward into our current lives so as to embrace them and thus reclaim our full capacity as seers?
Gregg Levoy, in his book Vital Signs, writes that, “Much illness is the result of not paying attention to the prescriptions handed out by our own inner lives.”
I propose that seeing is feeling, that looking into the past at intuitive experiences previously avoided and feeling about them, acknowledging them with compassion, can resuscitate our literal eyesight. I propose, also, the reverse, feeling is seeing, in that when we cut off our feelings we limit our ability to see, in all meanings of the term. Can we, as adults now, make space to acknowledge what our younger selves confronted, and provide the understanding, comfort, and attention we missed back then? Can we make space to allow whatever we feel now about our past, our present, and our future?
We are infinitely resilient.
We are the stewards of our own safe interior spaces where we can invite previous versions of ourselves to come forward to rest and be gentled and heard. We can prompt and promote reintegration by doing things as simple as taking off our glasses when they’re not necessary—while brushing our teeth or walking outdoors or listening to music, and in so many more situations—to perhaps rediscover the feeling of seeing without correction. We can offer our vision the option to show us what we can see without corrective lenses, what we naturally see. In my experience with practicing this, I’ve come to realize that I can actually see much more with my “uncorrected” eyes than I previously assumed I could. This experiential expansion promotes intuitive seeing as well, by removing a barrier and making interactions with what-is less mediated.
We can give our physical eyes more care, more breaks, more awareness. Our inner and outer natural visions interconnect, comingling with the potential to flourish together again, to sync and strengthen and synergize. “I see.” “I am willing to see.” “I can see.” “I am aware.” “I feel.” “I am aware of what I feel.”
If seeing is feeling, what do you feel when your eyes are allowed to see without “correction”? If feeling is seeing, what do you “see” when you allow yourself to feel? How much can you accept what you feel and see, rather than resisting? What if resistance to feeling is a left-over habit from a time when you were too young to handle what you felt and saw, but you can handle it now, especially if you practice doing so?
My term for the above collection of ideas about intuitive knowing and eyesight is I-Sight, a concept that reminds me I have the adult skills now to unite my inner and outer realms of visionary sensitivities, to play around with and explore and recover these areas through patient self-care and healing.
What might happen if more of us practiced I-Sight—both seeing and feeling—more often, as often as possible, all the time? We might free up, open up, trust ourselves more, rise up, lead, and change the world around us for the better, just by being our natural, lovely, sensitive, visionary selves.
Wouldn’t that be amazing?
The Photo Above | Roles
About the photo at the top of this page…
One Halloween evening when I lived in Vancouver, BC, I walked the streets of my busy city neighborhood and came across this man holding the hand of a little boy in a superhero costume. As the young superhero ventured into a darkness rife with scary skeletons and monsters, he remained protected and cared for.
I can imagine myself as that boy, trying on my powers of observation and extrasensory perception with a strong protector at my side to encourage me as I learn to discern and wield my special powers. I can also imagine myself as the protector in charge of safeguarding a tender being.
We have the ability to be both sensitive and self-protective. I see in this photo the manifestation of our two roles. We embody both roles as one entity. We can call forth either role at any time.
We are already the sensitive hero and the shield. Our mission is to claim our wholeness.
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Photo by Grace Kerina
Grace Kerina is the author of Personal Boundaries for Highly Sensitive People and other resources for quiet people. She has more than twenty years of experience helping writers and other creators find their true voices. Get her free ebook 7 Liberating Life Hacks for Highly Sensitive People when you subscribe to her newsletter. She also writes novels as Alice Archer.