Peter is writing in the Eyebody book that for the mixed type (one side contracted, the other overextended) the problem is confusion, because the mind doesn't quite know, what to choose. However, in my experience it is not just confusion, but there is fear, there is insecurity, there is loss of direction.
When I struggled with my new eye patters on Monday, I noticed a tendency that I know I sometimes have. When I walk and there are a lot of people around me, sometimes I get very annoyed. This time I noticed what happens. I walk forward and I see with my peripheral vision that someone is walking at an angle to my trajectory. However, I am not quite sure what exactly is their direction, nor whether they are going to cross in front or behind me. I am not sure if I have to accelerate or slow down. In this case one of my tendencies is to tense and to move my eye to the side and to try really hard to see, what is going on there. Another tendency is to look away and to walk at some average pace, which will often cause this other person to stop and wait until I pass. Sometimes I would literally want to run into them not only to make them suffer for everything that I am experiencing, but probably also to finally figure out, where both of us are located in space. There is usually a lot of anxiety and insecurity in such moments, and a desire to be left alone. This is particularly annoying when I am crossing the street (and it is my light), yet there is a car turning at the same time. I often found myself unable to understand, what exactly is going on, if I should keep walking, if it is better to wait, or whatever, unless I directly look at this car. Of course, when I am crossing a street I do not want to stare at a particular car, so I would sometimes try to wait until all the cars complete their turns, which takes forever, and then perhaps end up crossing on the red light.
Another problem is postural imbalances. I have quite a few of those, and because of that, my dancing and related skills have suffered quite a lot. One of the problems, as I now see, is relying on my vision too much. Unless and until we learn to do otherwise, it is natural to rely on one's vision to check one's alignment, in the mirror or directly. The problem with that is, what one eye suppresses the other, what is straight does not seem straight. One can try to take it into account and to reinterpret the visual input to still use it to check the alignment, but in my case sometimes it was the left eye that was suppressed, and at other times the right eye.
The importance of the squint for postural imbalances should be fairly easy to check if we ask someone with a marked postural imbalance to do some movement with the eyes closed.
However, it seems, a deeper problem lies in the eye-body connections. Thus, the eyes are integrated if and only if the sides of the body are integrated. Disintegrated eyes should be constantly disintegrating the two sides of the body via the eye-body connections in the brain.
On Tuesday morning as I was going to work I noticed a person in the street. This man seemed quite aligned, that is, the left and right sides of his body seemed to be well integrated. I tried to pick it up into my body and to use this feeling to integrate my eyes and the two sides of my body, and it worked, to a degree. However, then I tried it with lots of other people, and failed miserably, since most people in the street turned out to be twisted and crooked in various ways. Interestingly, those who had a purse or a bag on one side always had this side higher than the other. This is easy to explain, but still unexpected. It is particularly common to see a woman walking out of the building, taking quick, long steps, and leaning away from a purse she is carrying on her arm. It was also interesting to notice how some people stop before crossing the road, shifting weight to the left leg and turning the upper body about 30 degrees to the right, and this turns out to be exactly what I had expected from their walk.
Is it possible that everyone has a little bit of squint? If both sides of the visual cortex are, say, contracted, one should be contracted a little bit more than other. Nobody is perfectly symmetric. Perhaps, nobody's eyes are perfectly together, and there is a general connection between anxiety or sense of lost direction and the lack of integration of the left with the right.
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