Chapter 1

Healing Myself of Blindness

I was born in the Stalinist Soviet Union under difficult circumstances. My father was involved in an illegal business, taking and printing photographs for churches. This work could have resulted in his being sent to Siberia for twenty years. Furthermore, both my parents were deaf.

My grandparents on my father’s side were opposed to another child coming into the family but could not stop my parents from bringing one. So some people say that I was a mistake. But my parents were very happy that I was born. At first, it was my paternal grandfather who noticed that something was wrong with my eyes. After an examination by doctors, it was revealed that I had been born with cataracts. Although many people develop cataracts later in life, very few are born with them. I was, for all practical purposes, born blind. One can ask why I was born with cataracts because my mother did not have rubella, which is known to be a cause. Only one out of twenty thousand infants are ever born with cataracts. I’ve heard the opinion that, because my father had an illegal laboratory—which he was hiding—and because I was a very weak infant, several times at the brink of death from undiagnosed illnesses, it could have been a chemical imbalance that caused my cataracts. Furthermore, cataracts are considered to be genetic. But I was the anomaly in my family. And, eventually, my kids inherited my gene. Or was it the psychological reason that there was great resistance to a new child being born in the family? Is it even possible for infants to carry the conflict within families and then be born with symptoms related to the conflict? When a cataract grows, it creates opacity, and unlike the cases of my own kids, my childhood surgeries were never successful. Were the difficulties in my family life therefore a contributing element to my condition?

In search of a better life for all of us, my family decided to flee the Soviet Union and relocate to the new country of Israel. During this time of transition for my family, five surgeries were performed on my eyes. The first, done in Poland on our way to Western Europe, was unsuccessful. The other four surgeries—all performed in Israel—scarred my lenses to the point that 99 percent of them was scar tissue, effectively preventing almost all light from getting through. As a result, I was issued a Blind Certificate by the state of Israel, and most people in my life had resigned themselves to the idea that I would never be able to see.

Figure 1.2. Blind Certificate: the state of Israel declaring me permanently blind.

I was raised reading Braille, although I attended a standard school with normal-sighted children. I experienced much loneliness and isolation because of this situation. What do you do when you are blind, surrounded by normal-sighted people, and your parents communicate mostly with sign language that you cannot see?

In Israel at that time, the concept of inclusion of legally blind kids in a normal school was novel; educators went to the United States and brought it back as a new idea. Until then, blind kids were schooled only at a special institution in Jerusalem, learning with other blind kids. I agreed with the idea of inclusion and was included by the fact that general study was from 8 a.m. to noon with most of the other kids, and mine was later on, from noon to 2 p.m., in a special place called the Braille Classroom. So instead of learning just with blind kids, I first integrated with other kids, and then I went to mentoring with the Braille teachers. Some of the Braille teachers were impatient and, to some extent, abusive. Nevertheless, it was a fantastic concept, especially in my case, because not only did I want to integrate, I also wanted to be one of the other kids. That was probably the beginning of my motivation to move forward and away from the limited vision I had. I kept working, and while the progress was slow, it felt like my world changed completely.

My father, who was very interested in current events, often wanted me to listen to the radio and to explain to him what was happening around the world. He would have me listen to the news and repeat it to him, which confused me at first. I didn’t understand why he always lifted my head up when I tried to tell him what I had heard. I later realized it was because he wanted to read my lips. But how would I know that reading lips was so important when I couldn’t even see lips moving? This tragic comedy more or less captures the early days of my life. I was surrounded by confusion, frustration, and struggle. But I was also learning that there are many ways to overcome the challenges people face due to the circumstances of their lives.

It was obvious to me that my parents loved me. Still, our life was marked by fear and insecurity, having escaped the repressions of the Soviet Union, only to move to the young state of Israel, which was ravaged with war. Because of their deafness, my parents could not study Hebrew, which was so different from the Russian they had spoken before. Additionally, my maternal grandparents lost all the money they had brought with them from the Soviet Union in bad investments in Israel. Yet through it all, my grandmother steadfastly believed in me and was able to find ways to help me. She stayed with me in hospital beds after surgeries, when I was traumatized and feeling insecure from hearing many other kids crying.

Other members of my family believed that I should depend on social services. Although I didn’t mind asking for money from my family, somehow I did not want to take it from the government. It was a deep instinct, the origin of which I understood later on as I matured. It is easy for a person who receives help from the government, as many with disabilities do, to develop a poor self-image as being needy or pitiful; it comes automatically, like it or not. But when you do not rely on that help, the image you have of yourself becomes stronger, and you are forced to become self-sufficient.

I was determined not to have the stigma of being a blind person. That basic resolve was the beginning of my transition and change, without which I would not have gotten to where I am today. As a response to the lack of security and uncertainty that filled my early life, I grew a sense of commitment. Kids often did not want to play with me. Girls would not dance with me at parties. I sometimes became lonely. But I understood the choice was with me to be depressed or to be happy.

So, I escaped into my Braille books. With my books, I was in a different world and would read for hours on end. Even when my mother said, “Time to sleep; lights out,” I would just hide the books under my bed. Due to my mother’s deafness, she could not hear me. Although our walls were thin, as soon as the lights were out and I knew that she couldn’t see me anymore, I pulled out my books again and kept reading. Most of the time, I was able to sneak in a couple of hours of reading without anyone noticing.

Figure 1.3. As of the seventh grade, I was the fastest Braille reader in Israel.

Whenever more of my Braille books arrived at the post office, I would hurry to pick them up. The books were huge. I was something to marvel at, a small kid carrying a very large school bag on my back, tied and strapped to my shoulders, with a Braille typewriter squeezed under one arm, while the other arm held a sack of Braille books. More than once, the typewriter fell and broke, and we had to pay to get it repaired. My father always resented the cost, and I felt guilty about having let the typewriter fall.

Slowly but surely, my muscles built up. Many a passerby felt I was engaged in too much lifting and carrying. But that lifting, in many ways, formed my character. I imagined that, one day, something would liberate me from my blindness, and I acted by it.

I went from doctor to doctor on my own. I struggled against the resentment of the other children in school who thought I was receiving too much special treatment. They resented the fact that they had to explain to me what was on the blackboard. And I agreed with them; I wanted to be able to see the blackboard with my own eyes. I wanted to work on my own. I even had teachers that were mean to me because they felt I was not behaving right. They believed a blind kid was supposed to be submissive and passive—something I never was and most likely never would be.

I desperately wanted to be liberated from my condition. But all the doctors told me there was nothing I could do, that legal blindness was going to be my life, and that my vision would never be more than 0.5 percent without glasses, nor more than 4 or 5 percent with glasses. They said to accept the sight I had, and that I should be happy with it. Those were nice words, but they did not work for me.

Discovering the Bates Method

My father was openly upset at the fact that his deafness prevented him from succeeding in life. My mother also felt like she was put down by the hearing world. I understood the prejudice they had experienced but, nonetheless, felt I had a bright future, though I did not know what it was.

Then one day, I met another young boy, named Jacob, who had dropped out of high school. He showed me eye exercises based on something called the Bates Method. I learned the eye exercises and started to work with them diligently.

To my amazement, as I practiced the Bates Method and experienced improvement, I received more complaints than ever from the authority figures in my life. You see, part of my practice was to look from detail to detail; the purpose of this exercise was to stop my brain from being lazy. But my geography teacher would get upset as I moved my eyes from one bell to the other, looking at the details during class. She went all the way to the vice principal. Thankfully, the vice principal heard my case and told her that the exercises may help me, and that they did not disturb my ability to listen to her lessons.

My Bible teacher was upset that, when my class sat in the yard reading biblical verses, I would close my eyes and face the sun, moving my head from side to side. When I faced the sun, my pupils would contract; when I moved my head to the side, my pupils would expand. My teacher said that it bothered him to see me moving my head from side to side, even though he recognized that I understood everything he was saying. He said that, even though I was the best student in the class, I should stop doing the sunning because it bothered him.

Figure 1.4. With these glasses, I was able to read the largest letter on the eye chart from a distance of five feet (20/800).

Despite these reactions, I persisted. My retina started to wake up to light, and that was my vehicle to removing the thick, heavy, dark glasses that had made the world dimmer for me. My mother was upset with the fact that I would run, ten times a day, up to the roof to do sunning. She said, “You’re taking time out from your homework.” Then she was upset that I would for sit three hours a day and do palming, an exercise to rest my eyes and stop them from moving involuntarily.

In short, I encountered so much resistance to what I did that I didn’t even know it was possible to attempt change without facing resistance. When everybody resists you, not only does difficulty come in doing the exercises, but it also comes in dealing with the fact that your family, friends, teachers, and even neighbors oppose your efforts. Still, I persisted.

Within three months, I was able to see print. And not with a correction of 38 diopters, which is a microscope lens, but with a correction of 20 diopters, which is simply a very thick lens. Headaches that had plagued me all my life disappeared within six months.

Seeing the Light

Within a year of practicing the Bates Method, I was able to see regular letters. I’ll never forget the day I was doing the sunning exercise on a roof, and looking at sharp black letters printed on white paper. I placed the paper at the tip of my nose. For the very first time in my life, at the age of seventeen and a half, I could see the printed word without magnification. This success took such a huge effort that I threw up. Again, I sunned and palmed and threw up until I saw another letter, then another. Soon, I heard loud voices in argument. It was the neighbors downstairs accusing each other of creating a mess on the windows. I hadn’t realized that each time I threw up it was over their windows. So I went downstairs and told them what had happened. Instead of being angry with me, they were amazed at my honesty. I could have ignored my deeds, but I didn’t. I was proud of the fact that I could finally see a letter. I honed my process and, within three months, could see multiple letters by putting the print right in front of my nose.

From then on, I continued to work. People were surprised that instead of just feeling my way down the road, I could literally see the road. Instead of not recognizing them, I started to know their faces. One neighbor was actually upset that I could recognize her. “What’s wrong?” she would ask. “You’re the blind person in the neighborhood. How can you see us? What have you done? What’s going on?” It was amazing. I had taken away from her the feeling of security that resulted from knowing what was going on in the neighborhood. It was almost as if she felt the world she knew had been taken away. Here is the blind kid looking at everyone and actually seeing them. I was used to resistance, but was pleasantly surprised by the first voices of admiration I received.

My diligence continued. I looked from detail to detail. People finally accepted that I could see and recognize them, so my status soon changed from being one who was nearly blind to one who was nearly sighted. I kept working despite the fact that my progress was slow.

A landmark came when Jacob, my instructor of vision improvement, told me I no longer had astigmatism. Don’t ask me how he knew, but when I went to the ophthalmologist in the public clinic, she was shocked. She said to me, “I don’t know how it happened, but you don’t have astigmatism. You don’t need the cylinders anymore.” I was not surprised to hear this.

It was at this time that I was taught the connection between the health of my eyes and that of the rest of my physical body through my work with Miriam, my grandmother’s librarian, who taught me a series of exercises to improve my body. I began to practice movement techniques and learned that movement is life. I knew Miriam through an exchange of books between her and my grandmother and because she had introduced me to Jacob in the first place. He was also the person who read two books on the Bates Method: Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing and Harold Peppard’s Sight Without Glasses, which were translated into Hebrew but went out of print rather quickly. Jacob improved his vision and overcame nearsightedness from 5.5 diopters to no glasses—and he was a high school dropout. My grandmother influenced me to meet him and was always behind me, even when she resisted because I devoted so much to work with my eyes, and later on to helping others work with theirs. Her love, as well as my mother’s, was the reason I was able to help myself, and it made a big difference in my motivation.

Whenever circumstances block possibilities of improvement, there are always other possibilities that can help you move forward. I learned from experience that the human body is capable of improving and healing itself. We forget that we have the potential to improve our vision. The world is so engaged in the myth that poor eyesight cannot improve, especially in a case like mine, that it is difficult to imagine a story like mine being true. I’ve proven the conventional wisdom wrong and have shown the power of healing exercises.

Figure 1.5. We forget that we have the potential to improve our vision.

I am grateful that Miriam and Jacob taught me eye exercises and body movement, and encouraged me to share these exercises with other people. I have met people who have improved their bodies even from major conditions such as paralysis from polio, motor neuron disease, muscular dystrophy, spinal injuries, arthritis, strokes, and many other ailments. I knew I had found my calling: to bring this consciousness to others. Most people have little faith in their own healing ability. My faith in their ability is great because of my faith in my own ability and my success.

There are two ways for me to describe to you how you can improve. One is to explain that the body has a greater functional potential than most people ever experience in life. The other is to demonstrate how to meet that potential through exercise. Whenever I work with people, I demonstrate to them that they can do more than they think. When they have pain, this means helping them not let the pain restrict them too much. When they have tension, it means first helping them recognize the tension to its fullest extent, then decreasing it.

My own process was not smooth. My eyes used to involuntarily move three hundred times per minute until I learned to palm: rubbing my hands, putting them around my eye orbits very gently, and visualizing darkness. This would calm and relax my eyes. In one strange way, it actually helped to have deaf parents in my teens. I could play loud rock and roll music and relax with it. In spite of our thin walls, my parents couldn’t hear it. Whenever I played this music, I would place my hands very gently around my eye orbits to relax my eyes. The movement of my eyes decreased to sixty movements per minute within three months. That’s when my vision started to clear. The exercise of sunning warmed my eyes and started to activate my irregular pupils.

Although I could not exactly see, I gradually learned to look, even though it was sometimes painful. I had been taught by my Braille teacher to “feel the Braille and not look at the page. For God’s sake, don’t look, because if you look, you’ll confuse your senses. You’ve got to feel and not look.” That order was so vigorous that I had learned to live a life without looking at anything. Looking was a new order to my brain. The result, even though I was starting to see more, was that my eyes hurt. Palming and lying down for a long time had helped me. Sometimes I just didn’t want to see anything; it was just too much. But I kept looking.

Figure 1.6. My eyes used to move involuntarily three hundred times per minute until I learned palming.

When I arrived in the United States, I met some people who were very interested in my work. They offered to help me train other people in my methods. It was new to me to have people embrace my experiences. I learned how to teach individuals—as Miriam always taught me only to work with individuals—and how to teach classes in a way that would enable each individual to learn how to work with himself or herself. From this I learned that the greatest difficulty most people have is that they don’t believe they can find the time to work on themselves. Most people think they are too busy. Others feel impatient and aren’t willing to invest the effort it takes to quiet and to relax their minds and bodies. I teach them how to incorporate these exercises into their existing routines. I teach them that looking at details is something they had stopped being motivated to do a long time ago, and to do so stimulates the macula and can prevent macular degeneration. I teach them that sitting with a loose neck is worth the investment of moving the head in a rotating motion before sitting in a chair. I teach people that, while they use their computers, they should look far away from time to time to rest their eyes. These are simple habits that are easily incorporated into day-to-day life.

My own two children were born with cataracts, which was traumatic for me and for their mother, as we knew from experience the struggle they would face. At the age of two weeks, they went through cataract surgeries that allowed the visual brain to develop normally. This was unknown in my generation. Because their surgeries were successful, they did not have to deal with the scarring that I dealt with when I was young. Using the techniques you will read about in this book, their vision has improved tremendously. Throughout their childhood and adolescence, my children have sat in my car, covering their strong eyes, and looking with their weak eyes at objects, in order to ease the strain of looking with the strong eyes all the time.

With an artist’s mind and an artist’s heart, my son, Gull, is often in his own world in many ways. While in his world, however, he looks at details with great interest. Because of his powerful capacity of observation and love of detail, he sees much that others don’t see. It is an amazing inside world that relates to both his artistic mind and his autism. While I feel that his surgery was very successful, it’s possible that the combination of treatments—some electric treatments, and also anesthesia—have, to some extent, affected his brain. Yet, his internal world is amazing. Unfortunately, many people don’t see it because he’s afflicted with a very mild form of autism. But anyone who does acknowledge that world sees an amazing person with a kind heart and deep perception. In fact, he has the ability to discern details that most people tend to ignore most of their lives.

Gull has developed the best vision of any kid who was ever born with cataracts. He now sees at 20/40 without glasses. This is 80 percent of 20/20 vision, without his natural lenses. Anyone else without the natural lens of the eye would be seeing 20/400 (5 percent of normal vision). He sees 20/15 with glasses. Most other kids who were born with cataracts and had successful surgeries see 20/80 or 20/100 using much thicker lenses; 20/40 is unheard-of vision for someone who has no natural lens of his own.

My daughter has also passed through many transitions. We used to play a lot of games in our living room, where she would cover her strong eye and play ball with me using her weaker eye. Seeing that ball as it rolled close and far made a huge difference for her, and her vision greatly improved. At the age of twelve, she developed elevated eye pressure. Immediately, the doctors wanted to give her eyedrops to reduce her pressure. We declined the doctors’ recommendation because we believed the drops could be damaging. I worked with her instead and, in spite of incredibly demanding middle school and high school schedules with many extracurricular activities, she found some time to work on her periphery, which reduced the eye pressure. She also found some time to work on her neck. She saw acupuncturists, took homeopathy diligently, took vitamin treatments, and got massage treatments to reduce the tension in her back and neck. I taught her how to relax her whole body in many different ways in order to bring more blood circulation to her head. Her pressure was reduced enormously. And to this day she has not taken eyedrops.

The process was long, hard, and cumbersome, and had its ups and downs, but it worked. With high pressure, some people have a tendency toward developing glaucoma, and glaucoma expresses itself by damaging the optic nerve and diminishing the field of vision. So our success with her is partial but good; her vision is 20/20. Though her tendency is for high pressure, her optic nerve is very healthy and her field of vision is excellent.

From these experiences of my own, with my children, and with thousands of patients and students with whom I’ve worked, I have come to truly believe that people can improve their vision and find the time to do so, whether they’re in school or in the workplace.

A wonderful computer engineer who once came to a class of mine was able to improve his vision from 20/200 to 20/80 during the class. He reduced his prescription by half within eight months, from 7 diopters to 3.5 diopters. For the first time in his adult life, and still in his forties, he felt comfortable driving in the daytime without glasses.

We all can take the time. We just have to decide that we are worth the time, and that the process is worth our while. We need to make an effort to combine eye exercises with our everyday lives. Then we can thrive. Then we can excel. Imagine never needing to have any major treatments from the eye doctor. Imagine your life without cataracts, macular degeneration, glaucoma, or retinal detachment. Imagine that you can improve your life simply by creating more life in your eyes.

So far, the oldest person I’ve worked with was 101 years old. This patient experienced great changes and was able to see better and to improve his brain and eye functions quite a bit, even after one session. Since he was one of only two patients over the age of 100 with whom I’ve worked, I can only give these examples. I did, however, have success with both of them. I have also worked with several patients in their eighties and nineties, and have witnessed tremendous positive changes in their visual systems through working with these exercises.

There is no doubt in my mind that, whether you are in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, or seventies, you can change the function of your eyes. There is enough elasticity in your brain to back it up. The problem isn’t age itself, but whether or not a person is practicing the correct exercises for his or her age. It may be easier for a five-year-old child to get used to the weaker eye’s workings by putting on a patch for four or eight hours a day as he or she plays. And truly, the brain has more plasticity when you’re five than when you’re seventy-five. But there are good age-appropriate exercises you can do at any time in your life that can change your visual system completely.