Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) protocol is a technique in which you visualize yourself as a young child, say between the ages of 1-5 years old, interacting with “ideal parent figures”. Ideal parent figures are imagined people, or entities, who are your ideal parents. (Note: they are not your real parents, and the imaginal creation of these ideal parents need not imply anything about your real parents.) That is to say, they’re utterly perfect, relative to your needs. They respond to you exactly how you need to be responded to. In the imaginal world of your visualization, they regulate you; you feel a sense of safety, curiosity, joy, wonder, and they delight in this. Around them you feel implicitly innocent. IPF is practiced as a visualization meditation. I do it 1-2x per week. It can be used to gradually adjust one’s attachment conditioning by forming a set of new memories which change your orientation in the world. There’s a heavy-duty technical book about it which situates Ideal Parent Figure within a broader psychotherapeutic strategy for working on attachment conditioning. (I haven’t read the book.) In general, I measure the effectiveness of a psychological intervention in terms of a) noticeable changes in my experience, b) noticeable changes in my behavior, and c) frequency/duration/durability of these changes. For me, boxes (a), (b), and (c) are all checked by IPF. Recently I did a session that was peculiar because due to its subject and its effects. I’ve had an eye problem since I was a small child where my eyes bounce back and forth involuntarily. It’s called nystagmus. It mostly hasn’t been a big deal, aside from making it hard to read the whiteboard in school and preventing me from driving (my vision is technically good enough and I passed a driver’s test when I was 18, but for now I’ve decided not to drive). Yet recently I’ve been wondering if maybe the eye shaking has had more of a consequence than I’ve hitherto appreciated. Eye movement is connected to cognitive processes; it’s common wisdom in open-eye meditation tradition that a) still eyes beget a still mind, and b) the angle of the eyes matters (for example, pointing the eyes downwards is helpful for concentration meditation). My internal experience bounces around; I’m always hopping between thoughts, feelings, sensations, sensory information, etc. Maybe not more than the average person, but I suspect so. Stilling the bounce is a proximate goal of my meditative journey. I’ve been wondering if perhaps the eye shaking is related to this cognitive/affective dynamic. There’s another phenomenon of my internal experience I’ve noticed, which is that I do this thing where I go fuzzy. My inner experience “blurs out”, and when this happens my visual field blurs, too. This shows up when I’m walking down the street, when I’m talking to people, when I'm working out – in most settings. It feels subtly tense. I’d been thinking about both these things, and developed an intuitive hunch that I should explore this eye-shaking in IPF in relationship to the fuzziness. (I’ve had intuitive hunches about IPF subjects several other times, each to notable effect compared to the average IPF session.) So, I gave it a try. To begin, I closed my eyes and visualized that I was three or four years old, standing in the family room of my childhood home. My ideal father figure was there. I had the feeling that there was some physical danger, that something was wrong. My ideal father figure scooped me up and, kneeling on the ground, held me to his chest with one hand over my eyes. Slowly the feeling of physical danger receded. We then went outside to the deck and I sat with him in a chair, still held to his chest. The rest… I can’t remember very well. That’s typical for these kinds of visualizations. [Footnote: Though I often wonder whether the ability to subsequently remember one of these sessions correlates with the effect of the session on the mind/body. I wonder whether recording the session (when it’s spoken out loud with an IPF guide) and listening back later would fortify the efficacy of the visualization. Practically, much of the experience isn’t spoken out loud, but I think what is spoken out loud may be sufficient to re-invoke the visualization, and/or the felt experience. I will experiment.] At another point in the session, I relaxed out of the fear/aversion to the way my visual field shakes when my eyes bounce – and connected this fear/aversion to the fuzzing out I mentioned above. Separately, as this child self, I encountered anger at being made to feel like there was some inadequacy with me because of my eyes. And, I felt anger that my anger wasn’t seen/understood. Having worked through a) the resistance to attending to my visual field, and b) some of the emotion around my eyes, after the session I started exploring what would happen if I relaxed when I noticed myself fuzzing out. It basically went like this: notice fuzz-out, release whatever tension seems like it’s maintaining the fuzz-out, see what happens. Concretely, noticing the fuzz-out might entail, for example, having my eyes pointed at a particular part of my computer screen and realizing I’m not actually focusing my eyes at the right focal plane, nor am I paying attention to the contents of the screen. What happens when I do release is fascinating! There’s a sense of unadulterated presence with the thing I’m looking at. The feeling of “soaking it in”, “being there”, and – pulling in another thing I’d been exploring the last couple weeks – “being open to it”, which feels like a releasing sensation in my chest and sometimes abdomen, sort of like what you might feel if you’re foam-rolling your legs and get a good stretch of the torso in, and suddenly you feel this “releasing” feeling in your torso. If I try to do this intentionally, which doesn’t always succeed, there’s generally an order of operations. First, I try to “open my heart”, i.e. relax tension in my chest in such a way that, subjectively, it feels as though I’m more “open” to whatever I’m paying attention to, more willing to be impacted by it. Then I notice that my eyes are somewhat unfocused relative to what’s that’s directly in their line of sight. I then “let go” of the non-focus and allow my eyes to focus on whatever object is directly in their line. When this happens, there’s a releasing sensation in the middle of the forehead. The prominent feature is that there’s a “knowingness” or “presence” that suddenly emerges about the object I’m looking at. In other words, I suddenly feel like I’m really seeing the object. I’ve been playing with this while walking down the street, among other situations. It’s sort of like… having a beam of focus to point at objects, for example hopping from person to person to person as they walk by. When eyes rest, they go to “infinity focus” – the muscles that usually contract them relax, and they don’t converge to a single point (which they ordinarily would if they were focused on an object at a particular distance). What’s interesting is that during this phenomenon I encountered, it actually feels like there’s a release when the eyes focus on what’s in front of them – counterintuitive, because you would think that focusing takes more effort. Yet upon transitioning from fuzz-out to focus, I feel a noticeable sense of release in the muscles of my eyes, forehead, nose, face and neck. I also have a release feeling in my belly and my chest as well. Given that the expected result would be more muscular tension rather than less, I have a pet theory that there are two competing psychomotor processes, one “natural” one in which my eyes “want” to see what’s in front of them and in which my mind “wants” to process that visual information; and a second competing process which doesn’t “want” me to be present, doesn't “want” me to process that stimulus, and so inhibits the first process, “locking” the eyes and sensory processing into infinity focus. Perhaps the feeling of muscular release is what results from the abatement of this second inhibitory process.