The Neurobiology of Mature Feminine Consciousness

I am a Taoist from the Bronx. This, I believe, is what makes me well suited to portray why and how the Crone does not dwell in despair, but rather exults in wisdom. I often come frighteningly close to falling off the despair cliff. Having experienced rape, incest, family betrayal, poverty, political torture, physical violence and terror, despair always seems within reach. Since October 7^th, despair has inched even closer, but it does not overtake me.

This is not to say that I am immune to despair. Right now, in November 2023, despair is everywhere, and I feel it. I allow it. Yet I never succumb to it. As a neuroscientist I am curious about the pathway of this resilience. Indeed, it is my indomitable curiosity that leads to creativity and that keeps me out of the gutter.

The Orienting Principle: The Eyes Have It

The theory and practice of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Repatterning) grew out of the understanding of how the eyes communicate information to the limbic brain and its memory systems. There is much more to be harvested from bringing forward the awareness and research about how the orientation of the eyes is relevant to resolving trauma and shock. I would like to speak to this from my Bronx Taoist Neuroscientist Embryologist’s perspective.

Eye orientation can be utilized as a somatic activity for differentiation from trauma. That is the theory behind EMDR, but if we flesh it out further, we can itemize self-care that allows us to promote eye orientation in an ongoing way to offset depression and despair.

Notice where your eyes fall. Be attentive to what you are taking in, what your vision is processing. When you glance at people, or when you glance away from them, do it consciously. Become interested in why you look where you look and why you may avert your gaze. Your eyes are operating behaviorally based on deeply subconscious motoric impulses. When we harness that motoric process, we can send new signals to our brains, particularly when they are stuck in destructive and self-destructive loops. When you are sad, when you are depressed, when you are enraged, notice your eyes. Where are they glancing? What are they doing? Listen to them. Befriend them. Then direct them to beauty.

The optic nerve and the entire human oculomotor system evolve within the first twelve weeks in utero. Patterns of seeing direct head and neck movements, and establish the rhythms with which we interact with our eyes, including with whom and how directly or indirectly, how often and with what emotions we express through our eyes. We can be trained very early in life to avert our eyes, to avoid, and to not reveal ourselves through our eyes. These patterns, like all coping mechanisms, need to be updated or we will revert to them unconsciously. We will hide from what we now have the resources to face. In that way, we diminish ourselves.

As a woman who had to survive sexual violation and physical assault, I can report to you that what brought me out of despair then was writing. When I brought my attention to writing, my neurobiology changed on a dime. It was virtually instantaneous. When what I saw were my own words, forming themselves before me, telling my story, my brain relaxed. My breath deepened. My stomach eased. My attention was focused. I stopped ruminating, and internally repeating, over and over, what had happened, as if reporting to myself. I stopped gazing at nothing, lost in the miasma of disembodiment.

The same is true today. When despair is about to drown me, I start to write. Or, I read something I know will uplift or enthrall me. My eyes focus on words that invigorate me or educate me beyond the moment of the impending darkness. I can be in the darkness and find it soothing, but the darkness of despair is not soothing. It is like a drug: heavy and without vitality. Shift your eyes. Gaze at something else, even for a moment. Everything will change. That is one of the things that EMDR teaches us.

Take in and hold steady to the beauty you perceive. Absorb it as good medicine. Let the beauty soak into your connective tissue. In Buddhist practice, we learn to merge with the images of Tara or Medicine Buddha. They consume us with their beauty and we become them. We can duplicate this practice with all beauty, particularly in a time of meta-crisis. It is a spiritual practice. Do it. This is Crone Wisdom.

Rest in the beauty that your eyes harvest. When you do this, you transmit the images and the state you are in that is conjunct with those images, to your brain. There you will store that which imparts equilibrium through vision. This then is recognized by your brain as a location of balance, a resting spot that is always inside you. It is programmed as HOME in your inner vision, in your amygdala’s memory storehouse, like a GPS. Whenever you are about to become lost in despair, you can find HOME.

The more beauty you collate in your limbic memory library, in your GPS of locations, the less room there is for the old images of horror and impossibility, entrapment and suffocation. Trauma takes up more neurological real estate then ecstasy, until you change the equation. One of the most potent ways to change the equation between memories of despair and resources of truth and beauty is through your eyes, through what you choose to see and how you choose to see it.

The practice of directing your eyes to what provides a restful, balanced state for you, and then allowing yourself to slow down, as you absorb that serene state, changes your nervous system. It imparts vagal tone. It influences how you breathe. Your brain needs more neurological spaces of comfort, ease and beauty in its library of hope and resources. Even in the midst of the end of the world, the eyes can perceive beauty. When we have trained ourselves to orient towards beauty, it is much easier to find it, even in rubble.

Surround yourself with beauty so that when your eyes land, they land on color and shapes that please and satisfy you. Let your eyes rest in the natural world. Give your eyes the feast of holiness. Create an environment that returns you to the truth of who you are, your Original Brilliance which is pure beauty. See what nourishes you. This is my antidepressant prescription, signed by Dr. Stephanie Mines.