Field of Vision and Depth (Patreon)

• If you’re new to LMA, start with our table of contents

Note: All LMA activities are designed to reconnect you with the environment and center you within it.

Gaze and perception are the skills that enable wayfinding. They're the priorities in every training session, even over problem-solving. You can only problem-solve if you can recognize the problem. Most physical activities tell you to make visual reads without ever developing your reads.

Solutions exist outside of you in the world. It's your solution space. Inside you are anxiety and noise. By commanding our senses, we regulate our perception—how we take in the world. When we control how we take in the world, we ease tension. When we lack control, we tense up and resist. Likewise, when we tense up and resist, we lose control. When we are at ease, we can take more in.

Tension tunnels our vision and blocks everything out. Relaxation opens our field of vision and allows us to take more in. Rather than quieting the world, quiet the mind and take in the world. That's how you learn to engage and move.

Learning means dwelling in your environment (e.g., excellent cooking requires dwelling in a kitchen). For us to dwell, we need clear eyes. To consolidate and retain dwelling experience, we need ease.

Tension and anxiety block learning. You might be able to perform on occasion, but that's fight-or-flight, not learning. Doing something does not mean learning something. A video game character can do things, but that doesn't mean it learns.

The Liberation Martial Arts approach allows the environment and its conditions to be the teacher rather than the orders of an instructor. Perceiving your conditions fosters knowledge. Coupling your actions with perception fosters wisdom.

Movement is about engaging with space rather than taking orders. It's an interactive experience rather than a subjugated experience that lacks personhood. You're not a video game character to be programmed by an instructor. Interacting means actively sensing and responding rather than memorizing and taking orders.

As an LMAist, you are an active participant in your experience rather than a passive recipient where experience is happening to you. How often does coloniality offer solutions to their diseases where experience is happening to you rather than the other way around? Coloniality affects you; it does not want you to affect it.

Our primary source of feedback should be our senses. We must simultaneously develop ourselves and trust in ourselves. Within a community of care like Liberation Martial Arts, the second source of feedback is your partners. The training organizer comes last (other than about safety and rules).

For people with unimpaired sight, 80% of environmental information comes through vision. It accounts for two-thirds of the electrical activity of the brain. In "Perception Awareness," there was an exercise where we focused our gaze on a fixed reference point while broadening our peripheral vision. Despite thinking we're looking at the target, studies reveal that most of us aren't actually looking. We assume we're locked onto a target, yet we tend to lose focus, shift our gaze, visually search, or stray our attention elsewhere. While we believe we were consistently locked on the target, in reality, sustaining gaze demands practice, and so does growing peripheral vision.

When I lead new LMA practitioners in stretching their field of vision, at the beginning, they aren't actually broadening their vision. They give themselves the illusion of breadth by constantly moving their eyes all over the Learning Lab. They take it all in by directly looking at everything. However, after a few sessions, they quiet their eye movement and maintain their gaze. Trusting your body develops skills, and developing skills fosters trust.

In LMA, we don't prioritize visual search because people come to us already with that ability. Looking directly at the thing is not skillful. Looking without looking is skillful. A close-up camera shot has to move fast to track a subject. A long shot that captures the entire scene can follow the subject no matter how fast they move. A broad field of vision makes your subject seem slow. Visual searching makes your subject seem fast.

By centering our gaze, we center ourselves—physically and emotionally. Our sense of vision greatly influences our sense of (emotional) balance and groundedness. A sense is equal parts physical perception and regulatory feeling. Expanding our gaze physically centers us and bolsters our equilibrium. Having a better sense of our surroundings and ourselves in space centers our emotions and regulates them.

Perception is critical to physical and emotional safety, and self-regulation is crucial in sparring games. When emotions go unchecked, our perception slows, and our sight can tunnel. When we lose our gaze, it's hard to self-regulate.

Like our breath, the eyes have a bidirectional relationship with our feelings. Our eyes work involuntarily, but we also have control over them. Commanding our gaze and breath influences our involuntary functions.

Practitioners start every session with self-regulation. Centering ourselves doesn't mean making it about ourselves; it means balancing and regulating ourselves to make it about our partners and environment.

Just as we warmed up, stretched, and regulated our breath with box breathing, we need to do the same for our eyes. We want clear eyes and steady breathing.

Field of vision

Fill your eyes with the landscape. Find a distant fixed reference point. Then, zoom out and absorb as much as you can without shifting your gaze. Stretch your field of vision. Put the entire periphery into focus.

Maintain natural breathing, whether two-sided or four-sided. By natural, I mean whatever feels natural to you. Maintain that tempo.

Box breathing initiated the release of tension, enabling us to break out of our tunnel vision. The more we break free from this narrow focus, the greater our sense of ease. The more we see, the less likely things can come at us from left field. We're less startled and more secure in our environment, becoming more aware of ourselves in space and attuned to our presence. You're no longer lost because there you are.

Touch and sound

Taking in your space means also taking in its sounds. Listen not only to your breath but also to the sound of your surroundings. Hearing your breath is essential for a sense of pace and time.

Feel the ground with your feet. Feeling that connection with the ground encourages rootedness. It activates another sense.

Being rooted prevents your gaze from overriding your movement behavior. Looking directly at a thing pulls you to that thing. This is target fixation. We must look without fixation and stay rooted to avoid the pull. (This is also an important understanding for preventing neck and back pain and improving balance.)

Our perception is skillful and intelligent. It fills in the gaps, like water, with prior coverage (spatial mapping). The more you take in, the more you will be aware of your surroundings without looking. Your perception understands object permanence. I don't need to constantly look at the environment to have a mental model of the environment. If I look at everything before me for a while and turn around, everything I just saw is still a part of my perception. I can play sparring games in a room full of exercise equipment without running into anything because I have a mental model of the room. Your field of vision—your expanded long shot—constantly updates your mental model. However, filling in the gaps is also what makes you fall for deception.

Depth perception

Once our field of vision is stretched and warm, we'll do the same for our depth perception.

Hold an object or your index finger near your eyes. Focus on it. Then, shift your focus back to that distant reference point. Go back and forth between the close object and the distant. Make sure to breathe, listen, and stay grounded.

This rhythmic gaze (and breathing) movement soothes the parasympathetic nervous system. This exercise is also helpful during big emotions or anxiety and panic attacks.

Our eyes are windows to our bodily and emotional processes. The retina is an extension of our brain, comprising over 60 distinct neuron types and over 200 million working components. Additionally, over half of our brain is dedicated to visual processing, making our eyes the only part of our brain exposed to light. Our eyes nurture us.

Just as our emotional and mental states influence our eye movements, our eye movements influence our mental and emotional states. Your interior life impacts perception, and in turn, your perception impacts your interior life. How you do one thing is how you do all things.

Warming up means preparing to respond to your dynamic environment. Words don't make sense to the body; only experience and perception make sense. Stretching and warming our visual field and depth perception connects us to our first-person point of view and experience. Connecting to our feet connects us to the feeling of first-person movement. By connecting to our point of view and first-person experience, we avoid the point of view error where we connect our movements to a third-person or an observer's perspective and experience.

In a dynamic environment, things move, and so do you. Seeing moving things in three-dimensional space and moving in three-dimensional space means depth. The thing can get closer or further from you, you can get closer or further from the thing, and you both can get closer or further from each other. Visual field and depth perception, alongside touch and sound, construct three-dimensional models and dynamic three-dimensional perception. It's your experience of the world. It's not experienced passively and statically but personally and dynamically.

We can't move as if we're watching or experiencing someone else do it, nor can we think of movements from a third-person or observer's perspective. Coloniality has trained us to experience life as an audience member watching a movie. We're disembodied, disassociated, alienated, and denied. Liberation means confirming our personhood. You can sense, feel, and experience.

Rather than deny experience, let's improve it.

– Sam