The Spiritual Meaning of Eye Issues

The Spiritual Meaning of Eye Issues

By Julie Peters

Posted on February 13, 2025

When issues arise with the eyes and our vision, we may want to consider how we are “seeing” things and ourselves.

Vision changes are common enough, especially as we age or during major hormonal changes, like with pregnancy. We can also get styes, dry eyes, cysts, and all kinds of other issues in and around our eyes. Of course, it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor, ophthalmologist, or other healthcare practitioner to address any eye issues directly, but let’s also think about the spiritual meaning of issues surrounding the eyes.

Clear Seeing

The eyes are the organs through which we see and perceive the world. When issues come up with the eyes, we may want to consider how we are “seeing” things.

• Is something happening in your life or in the world that has confused the sense you make of the world around you, the way you “see” things?

• Has your perception changed or been changing about yourself, the people around you, or the world?

• Is there something you are not seeing that you want to see?

• Is there something you’ve seen that you wish you hadn’t?

• What do you spend most of your time looking at?

• What is your relationship like with whatever it is you spend most of your time looking at?

The Sixth Chakra

In the Hindu chakra system, the eyes are connected to the sixth chakra, ajna, which is located between and just above the eyes, in the location of the metaphorical third eye. This is the energy center related to seeing, both inwardly and outwardly. It represents our intuition—our ability to know and understand the world literally as well as intuitively. One of the best ways to support the sixth chakra is to sit in meditation, allowing your mind to quiet enough that you can see, hear, and feel inwardly.

• Do you feel connected to your intuition, your inner knowing that comes from a non-rational place?

• Have you been ignoring your intuition about something?

• Does your intuition feel confused by fear, trauma, or unhelpful inner narratives?

• Did something happen that completely confused your intuition?

• Do you ever get quiet enough to be able to listen to your intuition, or are you too busy to pay attention?

Overvaluing Logic

Seeing is related to a very masculine, rational, logical way of knowing. We trust what we see with our own eyes, sometimes to the detriment of other forms of knowing. Knowing with touch, smell, taste, and other subtler forms of perception are often more related to the feminine—the unseen powers of the universe. When we over-focus on seeing at the cost of knowing, we may be privileging logic over intuition and, by extension, masculine energy over feminine energy.

• What happens when you close your eyes?

• How connected are you to what you are feeling—both to emotion and your other senses?

• If you were to close your eyes to the world for a little while, what might you feel, sense, or know differently?

• Do you tend to overthink problems without pausing to feel into them?

• Do you move ahead with something because it “makes sense” even if it doesn’t feel right to you?

• Do you honor your other forms of knowing beyond thinking, logic, and analysis?

• Do you have internalized gender bias, especially around things like rationality, logic, and intuition?

Seeing Out Versus Seeing In

We see out of the eyes, but the eyes are also a prominent part of our faces, which is what others see. Especially if there is a stye, cyst, lump, or some other visual change to your eye, you may want to think about how you are perceived as well as how you are perceiving.

• How do you feel about yourself at this moment?

• Do you feel that you are worthy of love, care, and attention, just as you are?

• Do you fear that there is something about your inner or outer self that makes you less worthy of attention?

• Do you feel your outer appearance matches who you are and how you feel on the inside?

• Is there something you would like to communicate to the outside world about yourself? Something you feel others don’t see or understand about you?

The Eyes as a Method of Connection

One of the simplest, quickest ways we make connections with other people is through eye contact. So much information can be expressed through the micro-expressions of the eyes. When we look into each other’s eyes and take the time to listen and hear, we can feel “seen” and connected with each other in important ways.

• Do you feel seen, understood, and connected with?

• Is there someone you’d like to feel more connected with?

• Are you lonely?

• Do you look others in the eye, willing and able to see their truth as you reveal your own? Or do you shy away from seeing and being seen completely?

• Does intimacy instigate fear or anxiety?

The Need for Tears

Especially if your eyes are dry or if you have blockages like styes or cysts, your eyes might have a buildup of tears.

• Is there something you haven’t been grieving completely?

• Is there an unresolved sadness in your life, even if it’s from a long time ago?

• Is there something happening in your life that is hard to accept or understand?

• Have you been crying enough? Or too much?

Notice how these questions resonate for you and use them to ask your body what wisdom it is holding through the symptoms it is showing. Remember that your body is always on your side, always trying to bring you back to balance (even if it doesn’t feel that way!). Consider helping your body rebalance by attending to spiritual and emotional concerns. Along with any medical advice you might need to follow, your eyes might just start to feel better.

Julie Peters

• https://www.spiritualityhealth.com/spiritual-meaning-eye-issues

What If the Meaning of Life Is in the Body?

What If the Meaning of Life Is in the Body?

By Julie Peters

Posted on January 6, 2025

How would your day-to-day life change if you knew your sole purpose in this life was to be in your body well?

The meaning of life is a big concept, of course, and no one has ever been able to satisfactorily answer what, exactly, it is. And yet many of us still wonder what it is we’re doing here, what our purpose is, and what we must accomplish during the short time we have on Earth.

Some believe we should pray, connect with God, and join with divinity. Others believe we must follow the rules of a religion to have a good life. Some of us believe there is no meaning; we’re just here following our animal instincts. From other perspectives, our higher self has some plan for us—but we don’t ever get to find out what the plan is.

What if the meaning of life was a little simpler than all that? What if the meaning of life is being in a body well?

Discovering Your “Spark” Through Lived Experience

The Pixar movie Soul addresses this very question through an exploration of death, the afterlife, and the before-life, when we are souls getting ready to come down to Earth and begin our lives. In the movie, Joe Gardner is a musician who finds himself suddenly dead on the very day he’s supposed to play jazz with his hero. He connects with a soul named 22 in the before-life who has no interest at all in becoming alive, and the two scheme to get Joe back into his body and allow 22 to avoid having to go through the bother of living a life.

The two work to help 22 find her “spark,” which is the inspiration with which she will live her life on Earth (so that she can give it to Joe). The two spend a lot of time trying to figure out what a “spark” actually is. Joe is sure his is jazz music, while 22 has never felt interested in any of the mundane tasks of human life. Through a series of hijinks, the two end up on Earth, with 22 inhabiting Joe’s body and Joe stuck for a little while in the body of a cat. While in Joe’s body, 22 experiences things she couldn’t in the before-life that introduce her to concepts like music, art, performance, and so on. She gets to eat pizza. She walks and feels the breeze from a subway vent. She collects a maple seed pirouetting from a tree. She listens to music, feeling the rhythm with a body she’d never had before. And, sure enough, she finds her spark.

The movie carefully avoids defining the meaning of life, but there is a moment in the movie when the beings of the before-life explain that our purpose is not about having a particular “thing” to accomplish. It’s more about the desire to experience life on Earth, in a body.

The Meaning of Life as Experiencing Your Body

Some people are so sure they know the purpose of life that they devote their entire existence to worship through abstinence. They don’t drink, barely eat, and never have sex. Most of their time is spent in deep contemplation and meditation. What if one of these people made it to the afterlife expecting a great reward, only to discover they’d gotten it completely wrong and needed to go back and try again? What if the meaning of life is about experiencing rather than denying your body?

There are plenty of theories about what happens before and after life, but the one thing we know for sure is that we have some limited amount of time to exist in a body. Even if our consciousness continues in some heaven-like place, it’s without a body that can feel pleasure or suffering. If we are reborn into endless new lives, we only get this body, this life, once.

Emotions are physical, after all. Big emotions like sadness, joy, and rage are fundamentally physical. We may have thoughts about them, but they are called feelings because we feel them. Whatever we can think or judge or imagine about our before-lives and afterlives, we likely can’t feel them.

There is a funny moment in Soul when Joe and 22 are experimenting with the different theoretical experiences that could help 22 find her spark. They come across a piece of theoretical pizza. They try to eat it, but they can’t smell or taste it, and when they put it in their mouths, the piece of pizza pops, fully formed, right back out of their behinds. They can experience almost any theoretical reality in the before-life, but they can’t smell, taste, or touch anything. These are the gifts we can only have during the short time when we exist within a body.

So, what if our work here is not so much about changing the world or leaving some type of mark, but simply experiencing the world? Having empathy, connection, loss, grief, joy, and pain? How would your day-to-day life change if you knew your sole purpose in this life was to be in your body well?

Julie Peters

• https://www.spiritualityhealth.com/meaning-of-life-the-body

Why You Should Stop Trying to Make the “Right” Decision

Why You Should Stop Trying to Make the “Right” Decision

By Julie Peters

posred on June 18, 2024

For many of us who tend to overthink, decision anxiety can be exhausting. Challenge yourself with a new perspective on right versus wrong.

In an old Taoist parable (recently retold beautifully by the children’s show Bluey in an episode called “The Sign”), a farmer goes through a series of experiences that at first seem to be good or bad but lead to an unexpected outcome. First, his horse runs away, and the neighbors call it bad luck. “Maybe,” the farmer says. The horse returns with several wild horses. The neighbors call it good luck. “Maybe,” the farmer says. His son tries to ride one of the wild horses and breaks his leg—bad luck, the neighbors say. But then soldiers arrive to conscript young men for the war and don’t take the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. “What good luck,” the neighbors say. The farmer simply replies, “Maybe.”

Taoism is an ancient Chinese philosophy that can be roughly summarized by the concept of going with the flow. Rather than assigning a binary of good or bad to different experiences, Taoism teaches us to just roll with the experiences, taking each change with equanimity.

The Concept of Karma

Here in the West, in a culture that is heavily influenced by Christian ideas of heaven and hell, we often think things—and people—are either good or bad. We like the idea of “karma,” which is a concept from India that we think means essentially the same thing—good actions lead to good results, and bad actions lead to bad results.

But that’s actually a Western inversion of the concept of karma. The word “karma” simply means “action” and implies that our decisions have consequences. We don’t know what those consequences will be, however, or when they will come to pass, and there’s no way of controlling that. Hindu and Tantric philosophies teach that we can only control our intentions, not the result of our actions.

Dispelling Decision Anxiety

I used to struggle mightily with decision anxiety. I always wanted to do the “right” thing, to think it through so thoroughly that I’m absolutely sure I’m doing good and that nothing bad will happen as a result of my actions. But I’ve learned since then that there’s no such thing as a right or wrong decision, only actions that have consequences, some of which are predictable and some of which are not. It was a great relief to me when I finally realized this. It took a lot of pressure off.

Outcome pressure can also really prevent us from making a decision at all. When we delay making a choice because we fear what will happen next, we rob ourselves of the chance to experience something. From the Tantric perspective specifically, all experiences have value, even the really difficult ones. Even when we have a bad time, we can learn something, grow in some way, or simply experience the power of difficult emotions, all of which are different manifestations of the Tantric understanding of the Goddess. In this worldview, goddess energy is not out there somewhere on another plane separate from Earth. It’s all around us, it is us, and if we never experience the darker side of life, we’re rejecting a valuable aspect of spirituality.

How to Make the “Best” Choices

In order to make choices, we have to trust ourselves enough to be able to handle a difficult or unpleasant outcome. We have to know that we can tolerate difficult emotions, learn lessons, and be able to pivot. We have to trust that things always change, and any single decision we make does not have the power to control our entire lives forever. There’s simply too much we don’t know and too much we can’t control.

We live in a culture that is very concerned about the binaries of good versus bad. We want to believe that a certain decision could be the right or the wrong one and that if we make the wrong choice, we’ll regret it forever.

The truth is, though, no decision—especially a major life decision—is wholly good or bad. They usually have some element of both. Maybe it wasn’t a very pleasant experience, but we learned a lot from it. Maybe some parts of it were good and some parts of it were hard. Humans also happen to be quite good at adapting to whatever is happening in our lives. Regret isn’t as common as you’d think. Even if something really big happens to change our life path forever—choosing to quit your job and go back to school, have children, not have children, move to a new city—there will inevitably be good and bad. Whichever way we go, we will tend to get used to whatever it was that happened and make the most of that.

So, no, we can’t always make the “right” decision because there simply isn’t such a thing. All we can do is make choices in alignment with our integrity and our values. If we’re clear on what’s important to us and the kind of person we want to be, all we have to do is let our ethics guide our choices. Then we can know we did our best and remember that the outcomes are simply not up to us. So, when you notice yourself labeling a particular something as “good” or “bad,” maybe pause and tell yourself, just like the farmer in the story, it’s actually a “maybe.”

Julie Peters

https://www.spiritualityhealth.com/the-right-decision