Those eyes that would not close

She was thirty-eight, and the life she had known until then could no longer hold her.

She was coming out of a long and painful relationship. She had given up the wish to become a mother. Even her work, which for years had given her motivation and direction, had lost its meaning.

"Everything that had sustained me in my previous life, the firm points of reference, was gone."

Olga speaks of a feeling of "general collapse". And yet, at a deeper level, she sensed she had reached a turning point: life might be offering her the chance to reconsider her way of being in the world. She was thirsty for change, and she wanted life to surprise her at last.

It was this search that led her, through someone very close to her, towards a school and a path of inner knowledge. One autumn morning she walked, for the second or third time, into the living room of a man who at that moment represented for her "the wind of change".

He was about sixty and slight of build. His penetrating gaze, his deep, warm voice, his presence at once severe and welcoming touched her as few things ever had.

The man suggested a short meditation and showed her some cushions to sit on. Olga took the first one, almost to cut the moment short and escape a gaze she felt capable of laying her bare. She was wearing tight jeans, hardly suited to sitting cross-legged. She did not really know what it meant to relax. Inside her, trust, curiosity, impatience, embarrassment and a thin unease all lived together.

They sat facing each other.

The man invited her to close her eyes. Then he closed his own.

Olga tried to follow the instruction.

Her eyelids reopened at once.

She tried again.

They reopened.

And again.

"What on earth is happening to me? Why can't I close them? Am I afraid? It doesn't feel that way. I don't understand."

The room was quiet. The person in front of her inspired trust and was not watching her. Her mind recognised no danger. And yet her eyes seemed to have made a decision in her place.

Olga tried to reassure herself, to convince herself, to carry out that apparently simple gesture. All her attention was concentrated on the eyelids that kept reopening.

She did not interrupt the practice. She did not say that she could not do it. She went on resisting that movement.

That first meditation was a silent battle.

One part gave the order.

Another did not carry it out.

Another still watched, astonished.

When the practice was over, she told the man what had happened.

"You could have left them open."

He said it without giving the episode the weight it had taken on for her.

The sentence left her stunned.

It was the second great surprise of that morning.

All that time, closing her eyes had become the problem to be solved. It had not occurred to her to say that she could not do it. She had not imagined that the meditation could continue in another form.

The man's words did not explain why her eyes kept reopening. They did something different. They moved her attention: from the problem to be solved to the possibility of another way.

That possibility did not, however, clarify what had happened.

An unknown language

Olga cannot say with certainty why her eyes kept reopening.

Looking back, she has thought of the fear of exposing herself, of a form of nakedness: staying with her eyes closed in front of a person of such significance, inside an encounter she wanted and which, at the same time, intimidated her. But it remains only one possible reading.

"It was as if someone were speaking to me in Turkish. I knew they were telling me something, but I couldn't understand what."

In that moment, though, the dissonance became impossible to ignore: the mind gave an order and the eyes did not follow it. In the reading she gives of it today, an emotional component was interfering in that dynamic, one she was only partly aware of at the time.

For the first time, Olga was able to observe clearly the dissonance between different signals which, although they appeared together, she could not bring into relation.

Which body are we talking about?

When, in the course of the conversation, we propose the title "The things the body already knows", Olga stops.

"Which body are we talking about?"

The phrase already contains a separation: on one side the body that perceives, on the other a mind that would understand belatedly. Olga calls it into question. The mind, too, belongs to the body.

Olga today describes that experience as becoming aware of the existence of different levels — physical, emotional and mental — each with a language of its own. What was missing, in that moment, was a centre capable of receiving those signals and bringing them into relation. How, then, does the researcher observe a scene like this?

Olga answers with a single word:

"By ascertaining."

To ascertain, for her, means discerning what the experience makes evident from what remains interpretation. The rigour does not diminish the reach of the episode: it prevents it from being forced into an explanation more certain than the facts allow.

With today's eyes, Olga calls that passage "a moment of truth". Not because she finally clarified why her eyes kept reopening, but because that experience opened her eyes to three things: the absence of relation between those levels; how easily her attention could "lose its bearings", turning a detail into the central problem; and, through the man's words, the "taste of another possibility".

That possibility did not erase her automatisms and did not hand her a method for interpreting every signal. It did show her, though, that another possibility was not to be found beyond the problem, but inside what the problem was bringing to light.

That episode fed her thirst for change and strengthened her decision to continue on that path. Not because she had finally understood herself, but because she had discovered how much she still did not know.

If she could return to that living room, Olga would not offer the thirty-eight-year-old woman a definitive explanation.

She would return to thank the conditions that made that experience possible: the man who, with one sentence, brought her attention back to what was essential and gave her back a direction; the young woman who, while her points of reference were collapsing, kept searching; and finally them, precisely:

"Those eyes that would not close."

To the woman she was then she would say only:

"Well done. Keep going."

Because what she was looking for in that living room was not an explanation. She was looking for life to surprise her.

And that morning the surprise arrived in an apparently small form: two eyelids that kept reopening, and a few words suggesting another way.