Gwyneth Paltrow has declared her love for yet another bizarre health-related activity.
The wellness guru, who has also previously dabbled in fads such as inserting jade eggs into women’s vaginas to improve the pelvic floor, invited health influencers and friends to the launch of her new app, Moments of Space.
During the event, which took place via Zoom, she announced her flirtation with a new wellness habit: eyes-open meditation.
Refraining from closing your eyes is said to help keep you awake and improve concentration and mental clarity, according to the meditation app Calm.
Buddhists have been practicing a form of eye-opening meditation called Zazen for more than 2000 years.
Gwyneth Paltrow has launched a new app that advocates open-eyed meditation
And in addition to declaring her love for the practice, the Goop founder invited others who attended the event on Zoom to join her for a session.
One man, journalist Charles Trepany, who took part, has described the experience as eye-opening, in a report for USA TODAY.
Paltrow began by explaining the benefits she has gained from eye-opening meditation. Mostly, she loves that you can practice this at any time of the day while you’re doing other things, Trepany wrote.
“When I’m able to let it go in a meditation, it gives me a lot of comfort and happiness, I think, because I feel so connected to something bigger than myself and my own thoughts and my own ego,” she said. .
The session began by focusing on the breath for a few moments – before the Shakespeare in Love actor asked participants to open their eyes and turn their attention to their environment.
Meditation is usually practiced with eyes closed, especially in Western societies, as a way to shut out the world.
She said: ‘As you become aware of this all-encompassing space that is everywhere and allow everything in your outer world to be, notice if you also become aware of a similar sense of space within you, the space that allowing everything in your inner world to be the space of your own consciousness.
‘Don’t try to grasp it. Just be there with it, in that moment of space.’
Trepany wrote that he felt ‘lost’ at this point, thinking instead of his next coffee and his empty stomach.
Still, at the end of the exercise, he said, he walked out feeling calmer, but not transcendent.
‘I can’t say I found unity, but I felt calmer. My pulse felt slower, my breathing deeper. I felt relaxed and energized at the same time,’ wrote Trepany.
Meditation in general has been shown to have a number of health benefits, from stress reduction to pain treatment.
Relatively few researchers have investigated the differences between meditating with eyes closed and eyes open.
But a 2020 study of British researchers found that people who meditated with their eyes closed ended up being more relaxed and experienced less stress than those with their eyes open.
Paltrow’s free app, Moments of Space, aims to teach people eye-opening meditations by offering guided meditations, healthy lifestyle recommendations for your day, and even walking-focused meditations.
Meditation has grown in popularity over the past decade, tripling in popularity from 2012 to 2017, according to US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.
Studies show that those who participate mainly do so with the goal of reducing stress and improving sleep, according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.