Just moved house and just got re-connected to the internets!
Here is an eye-open practice that I can do with baby in the room. It is inspired by including this approach into sitting and attempting to hone the art of paying attention.
One can play with interrupting the usual habitual tendency of the mind to lunge and give form/shape to objects in the same movement by allowing the periphery to be known. This lunging and giving shape happens usually in/into/on/onto a 'centre' of the field of experience (i.e. where the eyes and mind narrowly focus on). This practice is to expand the visual field, widening it to as far as the visual field can be taken in, paying particular attention to the visual field's periphery.
This practice tends to soften the usual habitual centring of focus onto a co-arising form/shape/object and allows for momentary interruptions to this habit. When the mind lunges and narrows focus due to this deeply engrained habit, just simply remember the periphery. Allow the centre focus to soften and the periphery to come forward. The centre is not ignored, it is simply stripped of its narrow focus and softened by a wider attention. The centre is taken in with the periphery informing it.
Meanwhile, baby is allowed to do his thing in the room. Making sure that nothing sharp or bad for indigestion is in hand's grasp, he is allowed to explore and plunder to his whim. His actions and movements become part of the periphery. And because there is a stronger urge/volition to pay attention to what baby is doing, if he presents in the periphery, this acts as an anchor/support to this peripheral practice.
When the visual field becomes easier to pay attention to peripherally, the other sense doors can be experimented with peripherally as well, until the entire field of experience is peripherally informed.
