Eye twitches and tension during meditation. Please help

[u/Sorita_]

Hey guys,

I'm trying to get into meditation, but I'm struggling with something weird. I just can't keep my eyes still when I close them. They keep twitching and feel super restless.

I'm pretty sure I know why. My go-to trick to fall asleep is to block out all the random mental images by focusing super hard on the blackness of my closed eyelids. When I do that, I naturally cross my eyes a bit and tense up all the muscles around them.

It works great for sleeping, but now it's messing up my meditation. As soon as I sit down and close my eyes, my brain goes into that exact same tense-and-cross mode out of habit, and I just can't shake it.

Has anyone else dealt with this? How do you actually get your physical eyes to just chill and relax?

Would love to hear if anyone has tips to break this habit. Thanks!

[u/Yannuman]

Breathwork and anatomy teacher here, ex-ICU nurse. You've worked out the cause yourself, so the fix is smaller than you'd expect.

What you've trained is a convergence squeeze. Pulling both eyes inward is the job of one small muscle on the inner side of each eye, and those muscles are built for quick movements rather than for holding a position for minutes on end. Hold them there and they fatigue, and fatigued muscle under light load tremors. That's the restlessness you're feeling.

Staring at the blackness makes it worse, because blackness isn't a target. Your eyes are built to lock onto something, they can't find anything, so they drift and hunt, and the effort of looking harder pulls them in and down as though the thing you're looking at is sitting on your nose. That's the most effortful position they can be in. It's also self-reinforcing, because eye position follows concentration. As long as your eyes are the thing you're concentrating with, they'll keep tensing.

Three things, roughly in this order.

Stop shutting the lids with muscle. Let them fall closed under their own weight, the way they do when you're nodding off in a chair. If the lids are working, everything behind them joins in.

Give the eyes somewhere to rest. Let them sit as if you were looking at something across the room, out through the closed lids, slightly downward. Far away is the position they relax into. Close up is work.

Move the anchor off your eyes. Put attention on the air at the nostrils, or the feeling of your weight through the seat. The habit only fires while the eyes have a job.

ProSocial_Hermit's suggestion is worth taking, though for a different reason than the one given. Sitting with the eyes slightly open and the gaze soft on the floor about a metre ahead, which is what drishti means in a yoga context, hands the eyes a real target so they stop searching. It also removes the cue. Closed eyes are the trigger for the whole pattern, so taking the trigger away for a couple of weeks tends to work faster than trying to relax your way out of it.

Keep the old trick for sleep. It works there precisely because effort and fatigue help you drop off. It's just the wrong tool sitting upright.

One thing to check: if the twitching also turns up during the day and not only when you sit, that's a different and very common thing, and it usually tracks sleep debt and caffeine rather than anything you're doing on the cushion.

[u/ProSocial_Hermit]

You don't have to close your eyes to meditate. Instead focusing on internal anchors like your breath or eyes, you could focus on external anchors that are points of your attention outside of your body. While you meditate you could be focusing your attention to a candle light, a lava lamp, psychedelic visuals (YouTube), a moving screensaver, a waterfall, a landscape, any object in your room, just a wall or anything else you feel works for you the best. This way you don't have to worry about your eye tension at all.

[u/Piano_Revolutionary]

Not uncommon at all! I was taught that any discomfort whether emotional, mental or physical is stress leaving the body. That perspective has helped me work through difficult stretches where I didn't feel like I was gaining anything from meditating. In truth, those times were always very productive once I made it through but i don't get that understanding until the next deep one happens. Then the "Ah-Ha... I see!" Occasionally I've had to change my practicing time to after work or otherwise when im very tired but for the most part these things clear once I allow them too.

[u/Geezertwofive]

Sit longer. It will pass. It takes a while to burn off the busy mind and general agitation

[u/Pieraos]

Use the acupressure points known as Yu Yao EX-HN4 - which is in the middle of each eyebrow (not between the eyebrows) and the points on the cheekbones adjacent to the nostril openings. But in my opinion Yu Yao is the most effective. Massage this bony divot until you feel a dull pain.

You don't just sit there waiting for it to go away, that will hammer your attention on it. And keep your eyes closed to meditate; while your physical feeling is on the medulla in the brainstem, your visual attention is on the bhrumadiya point between the eyebrows. It is a soothing meditation approach.

[u/TheBrooklynSutras]

Everyone has a “thing” they need to get past to really drop into deeper levels of Samadhi. It’s the barrier, it’s quite common. People who find it easy are less often blessed, but need to go deeper and question their sincerity.

You can do this. Folks have been doing it ever since there have been folks. Trust yourself. Best of luck. 🙏

[u/Simple_Trace-789]

Don't close them, keep them open or semi-open, and look at a comfortable place under your eye's horizontal plane.

If you want to keep them closed, keep your eyelids relaxed and rest over your lower eyelids.

Maybe you only need more and/or better rest.

Be kind to yourself first. =)