Lie on your back, cover your eyes with a sleep mask or a folded cloth, and let a quiet voice ask you to notice what is happening behind your eyelids. That is where this twenty-four-minute recording begins, and it is the whole premise of the thing: nothing is asked of you except attention. Made by the teacher Erifily Nikola and posted in February 2021, "Relaxing the Eyes" is a lesson in Awareness Through Movement, one of the core practices of the Feldenkrais Method, packaged in the hushed, close-miked style of ASMR videos. It is a practical guide to using slow, small eye movements as a way of sensing where you hold tension, and it rewards the viewer who treats it as an exercise rather than background noise.
The description is refreshingly candid about the origin. Nikola writes that she had been enjoying ASMR videos to settle down and fall asleep so much that she decided to make one on her favourite subject. That subject, Awareness Through Movement, is a class format built on slow, attentive movement sequences, and it turns out to translate well to a whispered, lights-down setting. The ASMR register does something useful here: it removes the performance pressure of a studio class and leaves only the instructions and the sensations they produce.
That crossover matters for anyone who has tried to learn somatic work from a video. In a live class, a teacher watches your body and adjusts. On a recording, you are the only observer, and the lesson has to teach you how to watch yourself. Nikola's script is built almost entirely from questions, and the questions are the instruction.
The first minutes are about seeing what is already there. Nikola asks you to attend to the residual images behind your closed lids, the shapes and colours that drift in and out, and to wait until, in her words, "the optic nerve begins to rest and quiet down." Only then does the lesson ask you to look for the darkest areas of your visual field and "the places where the black is blackest" (around the 1:18 mark).
This is a subtle but deliberate choice. Before any movement, the lesson establishes a baseline of stillness and a visual field that is easy to read. Later, when the eyes move, you have a reference point for how much effort the movement is adding. Many people discover that their eyes are already busy before they have done anything at all.
The core of the lesson is a pair of movements. The first is a slide: the eyes glide from centre toward the left, then back. The second is a jump: the eyes skip from the centre straight to the far left, "as if you were trying to look at your left ear," and back again. The lesson asks you to compare them, to find the stretches of the slide that feel smooth and the moments where it becomes abrupt, and to notice whether the movement feels like a gentle roll or a series of small catches.
Nikola's prompts go further than mechanics. She asks which eye seems to lead and which follows, and she invites you to try the slide once imagining that you lead with the left eye, then again leading with the right. That experiment is a clean example of how Feldenkrais-style lessons use imagination to change the quality of an action without asking for a different result. The movement is the same; the sense of who is doing it is not.
"Could you make the movement only with your eyes so that the rest of yourself stays quiet."
— Erifily Nikola, early in the recording, as she asks the listener to isolate the eyes from the jaw, nose and brow
That instruction is the hinge of the whole practice. Most people, when asked to move their eyes, unconsciously recruit the jaw, the bridge of the nose, the eyebrows and the breath. The lesson's repeated question, "what is happening to your breath, and what is happening to the rest of your face?", is a way of making that hidden recruitment visible.
Later in the session the lesson shifts from mechanics to attention. Nikola asks you to think about where you are focusing and what you are imagining following: a dot, a line, a moving object. She guides you to imagine tracking a small boat far away on the horizon, then to bring the focus close and follow a flying insect right in front of your face. The question is what changes in your eyebrows, cheekbones and temples as the target moves.
The useful insight here is that the eyes respond to the distance of an imagined target. A far horizon invites a longer, smoother sweep. A close insect invites a quicker, more detailed adjustment. Nikola then asks you to find a point between the two and move your gaze there, which tends to produce the kind of middle-distance softness the lesson has been looking for. You are not forcing the eyes to relax. You are giving them a more coherent job, and relaxation follows.
Once the slides and jumps feel easier, the lesson invites speed. Nikola asks you to make the sideways jump faster, "but without hurrying," and to keep the quality of peace in your eyes while you do it. Then she adds diagonals: jump to the right and slightly upward toward the top of the right ear, then slightly downward, always returning to centre and always resting between sets.
This is the part of the practice that separates Feldenkrais-style work from a simple stretch. Speed is allowed, but only if the effort does not rise to meet it. The test is not how fast you can go, but whether the face stays soft and the breath stays quiet as you go. If they do not, the lesson asks you to slow down and find the place where ease returns.
The final active section is the most playful. Around the seventeen-minute mark, Nikola reminds the listener that "in our imagination we can do anything," and asks you to let the gaze travel past the ear, toward the floor, and then somewhere behind the head. She asks which side slides more easily, and whether the movement can stay the same soft, easy motion when the imagined target is far beyond the physical range of the eyes.
The lesson then moves toward looking "right in the back of your skull" and, eventually, toward a very quiet close. The point of these exaggerations is not to push the eyes further. It is to show that the eyes' capacity for smooth movement is shaped by what you believe you are doing. A small change in imagined direction can change the whole feeling of the movement, and that is the kind of lever Feldenkrais teachers rely on.
Done properly, the session is less about any single movement and more about an ongoing habit of checking. Ask yourself whether your jaw is involved. Notice whether one eye is doing more of the work. Compare the sliding and the jumping. Let the darkness widen, then return to looking. Each question is a small act of attention, and attention is the thing the video is trying to build.
It also helps to be honest about what the recording is. It is a guided practice, not a clinical treatment, and nothing in the material makes claims about vision or medical outcomes. What it offers is a structured invitation to feel your eyes as part of a whole body, rather than as tools for looking at screens. For many viewers, that alone is worth the twenty-four minutes, whether the goal is falling asleep or simply noticing how much effort they bring to a glance.
If this lesson made you curious, the most useful next step is to repeat it slowly and keep a short note of what changed. Try the slide once with a clenched jaw and once with a soft one, and see what the eyes report. Practise the boat-and-insect exercise on a walk outside, where the horizon is real. Then return to the recording when you want to sleep, and let the whispered questions do their work. Nikola's video is a modest, honest example of what Awareness Through Movement can look like on a screen: quiet, specific, and built on the idea that the body learns best when it is asked to notice rather than to perform.
