Preface
The world may soon be faced with an epidemic of vision disorders, as hundreds of millions of humans who have been subjected to constant contact with computer screens, fluorescent lights, and excessively lit cities gradually enter old age. Tragically, although they seem adequately equipped to predict such a catastrophe, the existing medical establishment is not at all prepared to correctly address this epidemic. From my personal experience, I believe medical doctors often tend to suffer from their own form of myopia, a shortsighted attitude toward holistic approaches to body repair and maintenance.
In modern times, where culture has influenced our values for most of our lifetimes, we understand the importance in any successful endeavor of budgeting for repair and maintenance. If we intend to maintain the value and the beauty of any product or system throughout its lifespan, and to extend that lifespan for as long as possible, steps must be taken along the way to maintain the usefulness of all vital systems, and to correct any defects that develop along the way due to misuse, neglect, or accidental damage. Human beings need even more attention than machines in this respect; we need nurturing.
I am happy that people are beginning to wake up to this notion, and that a preventive, protective attitude has already begun working its way into the human psyche. Every day, more people pay closer attention to the food and beverages they consume, to the environment in which they live, and to establishing general healthy habits like physical exercise. But we still do not spend enough time addressing the health and well-being of our eyes. That is the purpose of Vision for Life: to help people maintain and repair their vision as a way to increase the length and quality of their lives.
It seems ironic to me that the scientific establishment might be to blame for the sorry condition in which we are finding ourselves. The success that optometry and ophthalmology professions have had in recent decades is largely to blame for our culture’s laissez-faire attitude toward the health of our eyes. This has happened by correcting vision problems through prescriptive lenses and surgical technology without offering any alternative.
People often take it for granted that if something goes wrong with their vision, medical science will come to their rescue. And while this may be true in many cases, I am a firm believer that it is always better to prevent a disease in the first place rather than to simply wait for the system to break down in hopes that science will offer a solution. First of all, preventative medicine is cheaper! Compare twenty minutes a day of aerobic exercise, such as running along the beach or bicycling through the park, to the extreme cost of a surgical procedure to correct clogged arteries. Even factoring in the price of an expensive luxury gym membership and regular massages, the preventative approach is still far less expensive.
We must commit right now to creating a health regimen for our eyes, because the whole body is affected by eyestrain. The human eye was made to hunt, to scan the horizon, to look at birds, to look into the distance. It was designed to be engaged in a variety of circumstances, looking at different things at different distances and in different light. If we stare only at a computer screen all day under the same lighting, we lose the variation as well as the acuity. We lose the passion for looking and seeing the diversity of life around us. What then does this do to our bodies and to our energy levels?
So many people report that they feel exhausted in the middle of the day, that they need stimulants to revive them. We must remember that whatever we do with the eyes affects the whole body.
The habits that you will develop if you follow the exercises in Vision for Life can be the lifeline you need. You will reinvent your passion for life while protecting the vision you have and correcting the degenerative condition from which you suffer. Best of all, as with any kind of personal exercise regimen, these habits will impact your life in ways that transcend the utilitarian benefits of disease prevention.
Like the poet said, the eyes are the windows to the soul. By connecting with our vision, we connect with light and darkness, with nature, with our physical environment, and with each other in fundamental, simple, and beautiful ways. Going for a jog doesn’t have to be just good physical exercise, it can also be a welcome relief for the mind. It is a way to reconnect with your neighborhood, to break out of your routine, and to expand your psychological comfort zone. And the same can be said of learning how to blink correctly, practicing the scrutiny of details, looking far into the distance, and nighttime walking.
Computers have certainly done much to advance the quality of life in our culture. Yet every year, as hundreds of millions more people worldwide incorporate computers into their routines, they expose their precious eyes to constant unnatural strain and poor lighting. By straining their central vision to stare blurry-eyed at the screen, people forget to utilize their peripheral vision. They forget to blink. They forget to breathe correctly. They scrunch their shoulders and tense their necks. They squint, trying to analyze digital data. And instead of using the natural human ability to scan for images, they simply sit and wait passively for the flood of constantly changing images to come to them. We must be proactive in taking care of our eyes in front of the computer in order to prevent vision problems and keep our eyes refreshed on a regular basis.
It is our joy and responsibility to personally make the effort to connect with nature and with our own human potential. We each must make the commitment to claim our heritage and our birthright, which is health, happiness, and a long-lasting, balanced, productive life. And it all starts with our eyes!
Our senses connect us intimately with each other, with our environment, and with ourselves, perhaps none so much as our sense of vision. When a person loses his or her vision, there is no end to what he or she will pay for a doctor to correct the situation. Sadly, however, many procedures performed on people’s eyes today, including LASIK surgery, do more harm than good.
Compounding the problem even further is that many people’s eyesight ratings are misdiagnosed at the optometrist’s office because of the stress and nervousness people feel while they are having their eyes tested for glasses. Often, people are understandably stressed, and strain their vision out of fear that it may have declined. Their visual capacity on an average, relaxed day differs greatly from that when they are fearful and stressed. But when have you ever heard of an optometrist confronting this reality? When has your optometrist massaged your shoulders and asked you to breathe deeply before measuring your eyes? When has your ophthalmologist asked you to pray or meditate prior to measuring your eye pressure?
Most optometrists make no effort to test their patients’ vision under normal, less stressful circumstances. And most people have no capacity to test their own vision when they are in a friendlier environment. Consequently, most people’s glasses prescriptions are incorrectly based on stressed vision. The result is that the eyes, having no choice, learn to accommodate the incorrect prescription by weakening, adjusting gradually in the wrong direction toward worse, not better, vision. In fact, most optometrists don’t even think stress relates to poor vision at all. The only way to adjust to a stronger prescription is to get the eyes weak enough that the prescription fits. And so the eyes slowly but surely get worse and worse. Stress does decrease the strength of you vision (acuity). Some people have a feeling of dizziness when they wear their new glasses because they are too strong for their eyes when they are not in a stressful setting, such as the optometrist’s office. My personal experience in working with dozens of thousands of students and patients contradicts what these doctors think they know. Stress and poor vision do indeed go hand in hand.
So I advise my patients and students to sometimes take their lenses off while practicing the techniques I teach them, and I advise readers of this book to do the same. When you are in a safe environment, do the exercises periodically and always with your glasses off. It is no different than learning to walk again after a leg injury. If you never let go of the crutches, your legs can never regain their strength and improve to their full potential. Therefore, work out your eyes in the same ways you work out the rest of your body at the gym, but remember to do it with great relaxation.
The exercises in this book are intended to help you to create a basic, fundamentally healthy routine that you can incorporate into your life immediately. If enough of us practice these exercises diligently and work on improving vision throughout our lives, we can avoid the coming epidemic of cataracts, macular degeneration, and other degenerative conditions of the eyes that scientists predict are speeding toward our culture like a freight train.
Ask yourself what is in the medical establishment’s best interest. Is it to help you to heal yourself with only an investment of time and self-healing work, or is it to find the quick fix that the average person is looking for in the form of a pill or surgery? I am not trying to be accusatory or conspiratorial. I am simply attempting to rephrase the wisdom of an old adage that says you should never ask a barber if you need a haircut. Never ask an optometrist if you need glasses, because in most instances if a person has his eyes examined and their vision is less than 20/20 the doctor will prescribe glasses to get you to see 20/20. It doesn’t matter if you see 98 percent of 20/20 or 50 percent of 20/20 they will prescribe you corrective lenses because they do not believe you can improve your vision. But, if that doctor sent you home with exercises to strengthen your vision and relax your over stressed eyes you would very likely return the next year to find that you have returned to having 20/20. The medical establishment is so dependent on technology and chemicals that it has little incentive to embrace a simpler, less expensive, personal, holistic approach to vision maintenance and repair.
This book is my response to this serious problem, and it is also my attempt to give human beings an alternative to becoming the playthings of profit-driven, narrow-minded scientists who do not explore the whole truth. You are your own patient first. Heal yourself using the techniques in this book and other books like it. Seek the aid of chemicals and surgery only as a last resort, or in the most serious of situations.
For those of you who have perfect vision, or even better than perfect vision, now is the time to incorporate simple habits into your life, ensuring that your extraordinary vision will be maintained for as much of your life as possible. To that end, I have attempted to give you a lifetime of acquired knowledge all in one volume. Make your vision a central priority by devoting as much time as possible to the application of this book’s principles. It is my dream that everyone will integrate my work into their own personal vision for life.
