Chapter 6
Pathological Conditions
Explanations of, and exercises to combat, cataracts, diabetes, glaucoma, optic neuritis, detached retinas, vitreous detachment, macular degeneration, and retinitis pigmentosa
Correcting Cataracts
A cataract, put simply, is a cloudy spot on the lens of one’s eye. One theory is that cataracts are the result of a crowding of proteins within the lens, which prevents light from passing through. This, in turn, causes an obstruction that eventually makes vision blur or can make a person completely blind. Another theory is that the water pump, which pumps fluid out of the cells, becomes defective and there is swelling, and therefore crowding of the cells in the lens.
There are two main functions of the lens: to transfer light to the retina and to accommodate light properly. You can see why a cloudy spot on the lens would make seeing difficult. Most people experience fuzziness of vision when they reach their mid-sixties to mid-seventies. Upon visits to their eye doctors, they discover that they have cataracts or opacity of the lens.
There are quite a few reasons for cataracts, including poor nutrition and poor metabolism in the body. It is important, therefore, to eat a balanced, healthy diet and to devote time to regular exercise, especially as we get older.
Many other reasons for cataracts are unknown and, in fact, most people don’t really care what the cause of their cataract is, because the medical solution seems to work fine for most people, which is simply to remove the lens. Cataracts occur so regularly that we think it is natural, and there is no way to stop it or to save the lens. If the lens has been removed surgically and an intraocular lens is inserted artificially, most people regain the vast majority of their vision. After all, you do not see with your lens—you see with your retina and your brain.
In fact, that tends to be the treatment we like these days. We like to remove parts that are not essential to our daily functions, and either replace them or live without them; then we hail conventional medicine for being able to do it. While I’m happy that cataract surgeries exist, especially because some people cannot manage their cataracts, and the lens needs to be removed anyway, I would like to propose that in 80 percent of cases, when cataracts begin they can be stalled and even stopped for dozens of years, if not eliminated altogether. Moreover, cataracts can be prevented. In modern life the lens does not have the chance to function fully. It becomes thick and opaque because it doesn’t move the way it was designed by nature to move.
With the exception of operating on kids, if their lens is opaque in infancy, and where medicine has proven great relief to many children, we need to fight for every lens when cataracts begin. My feeling is that, if we did this, most of the people destined for cataract surgery these days would never actually have it. Often, surgery makes the eyes even worse because it causes scar tissue to build up on the lens capsule. Other times, we have glaucoma attacks that could blind the eye, or there is bleeding in the retina as a result of cataract surgery. There is also the possibility of retinal detachment, especially if somebody has very severe nearsightedness at first, which is called high myopia. It takes only a few weeks to heal the eye but every surgery, to some extent, weakens the body and in this case can weaken the eye, unless you completely heal from it. And that’s one of the things that eye exercises may help you do, because, over time, your eye health can get worse as a result of removing your lens, in spite of the miracle that when your lens is removed and an intraocular lens is put in, your vision appears to be extremely clear, as if you gained back years of clarity. Nevertheless, it is at the expense of a vital part of your eye.
One of my patients, Brett, had diabetes. His left eye was operated on successfully and was at 20/20 vision. When his right eye was operated on, he expected to have 20/20 but became blind. I had partial success with Brett’s right eye using light therapy, but his doctor negated the results and Brett lost the small progress he had made with me. Doctors’ suggestions can be very powerful. For that reason, I failed in my therapy with Brett, and it was heartbreaking because I liked this wonderful person, and I wanted very much to succeed with him.
On the other hand, one of my best friends and clients, Hannan, had one eye that was sighted and the other nearly blind. We worked for ten years and were able to get the blind eye to see somewhat, and the sighted eye to see better than he had seen since childhood. Then Hannan went to Bascom Palmer, one of the best eye hospitals in the United States, and had cataract surgery. There were complications in the surgery itself. But, after a four-and-a-half-hour surgery, which should have lasted for only forty minutes, his vision became 20/25, which is 95 percent of 20/20, to the amazement of all attending physicians.
We never know what’s going to be the result of a medical procedure. Sometimes it’s worse than we imagine it would be, like Brett, who had expected to see 20/20 in his right eye. Brett’s doctors didn’t notice that his calf had to be amputated from the knee down due to diabetes-related gangrene, and that his circulation couldn’t possibly be the same when they operated on his right eye. Therefore, his response was not nearly as positive as it was the first time around. But in the case of Hannan, where the physicians were sure there would not be any positive results from the surgery, it was Hannan’s insistence that caused them to do the surgery after the cataract was in place for a great many years. He ended up seeing 20/25. What an amazing dichotomy: when they expect to succeed, they fail; when they expect to fail, they succeed.
When one eye overworks and the other eye underworks because of a cataract, the brain works very hard to suppress the information that the underworking eye brings to it. The strain is immeasurable. The eye that overworks becomes fatigued; the eye that underworks becomes weak.
When looking into the distance with cataracts, it’s important that you wave your hands quickly to the side and massage around your eye to make it easier. And if the light is hard on you, do sunning for at least five minutes before you look into the distance, and then see if it becomes easier for you. If the light bothers you, put the obstruction glasses over your strong eye, look into the distance with your weaker eye, count twelve different points in the distance, then look at some that are closer, maybe about a quarter of the distance. Next, come visually closer still, another quarter of the distance. Then take the glasses off and again look with both eyes, wave your hands quickly to the side, and massage gently around your eyebrows and cheekbones. Now determine if your sensitivity to light has decreased. When it does, it means that your brain is looking around the obstruction of the cataract and starting to make the lens much more flexible. In that way, you can postpone cataract surgery, and stall the cataract from spreading and expanding.
I’ll never forget the patient who came to me with the beginning of a cataract. Nine years later, her doctor said to her, “keep doing what you’re doing, your cataract has not changed a bit.” That is most likely what will happen to you. If you have the beginning of a cataract, and you are diligent about the ten steps, plus these exercises, it will not change and your vision will remain with a little bit of sensitivity. This should make you feel very satisfied.
So, if your cataract is only beginning to form, this is a good time to work on it. Our statistics are better with cataracts that are just beginning. It may not even mature for many years. You might have an intensive amount of exercises where you can spend up to forty minutes a day on distance viewing.
Sometimes we have to give up on our lens, but often, if we can maintain the lens and not allow it to be opaque, we will affect both our physical and mental sense of being in a positive way. We will feel powerful. We’ll break all boundaries of what’s possible, because everyone believes you need to have cataract surgery. But with this work, with the intensity of looking into the distance, with palming, with all the ten steps that we have talked about, you will find that you may be able to control your cataracts.
If you experience a cataract, my advice is simply to work on yourself, first with the exercises recommended in this chapter. Remember to refer back to chapter 4 for specific instructions for each exercise. The goal is to get both eyes to work together, and to get the weaker eye to pull its fair share and not get dominated by the stronger eye. Only if your self-care fails to achieve the desired results should you seek help from surgeons.
Exercise Program for Cataracts
Look into the Distance: 30 minutes daily, three intervals of 10 minutes, or 20 minutes once and 10 minutes once.
Look at Details: 10 minutes daily.
Palming: 60 minutes daily.
Bounce and Catch: 10 minutes daily.
A note about cataract surgery: If you are considering cataract surgery, the purpose of doing these exercises is to see whether you can postpone or even cancel the surgery. When you do this program, you should ask yourself if you are improving. If you are, postpone the surgery.
Many people have improved or have stopped the progression of the cataract, so they didn’t need the surgery. Some, however, have not improved. If you are one of those who have not improved, and your vision is still poor, a surgery may be indicated. A few weeks after the surgery is done, you can resume eye exercises, and it will benefit your eyes and your vision. I found that some people only want to heal themselves holistically, even if they see extremely poorly and it compromises their life. My recommendation always is a balanced approach. If you cannot heal your vision holistically, then fix it allopathically to help you live fully.
But even for those who did not improve, the fact that they did the exercises was helpful anyway. So don’t stop the exercises even if you did not succeed in stopping the cataract. These exercises are good for the overall health of the eye. That is your goal: not to avoid surgery, but rather the health of the eye. If you can prevent surgery, great, and that happens to more than half of the people who follow this program.
We work very hard from infancy to early childhood to create balanced use of the two eyes. Pediatric ophthalmologists understand how important it is to create bilateral vision. What puzzles me, however, is that most ophthalmologists will correct one eye to see near with cataract surgery and one eye to see far. This correction is an error and it goes completely against nature’s will for the eyes to work together. It strains the eye and creates tension all over the body.
The best solution to request from your surgeon is for both eyes to be corrected to see well from far away, and with glasses to see well from close-up. With time and exercise, maybe you won’t need the glasses.
Note: Remember to work these exercises into the entirety of your day. Don’t do an hour and a half all at once. Pace out the exercises so that you are working on your vision all the time, as a matter of habit. Habits determine your destiny.
Extra Exercise for Cataracts: Bounce and Catch
For this exercise you will need the opaque piece of paper to tape to the bridge of your nose, a ball and, if possible, a trampoline. If you are not able to find a trampoline, or if your physical condition prevents you from using one, you can simply try running in place instead of bouncing. The point of bouncing is to distract your mind and body while you practice the exercise, and to engage your peripheral and central vision in a dynamic and different way.
Figure 6.1. The point of bouncing is to distract your mind and body while you practice the exercise.
Simply put the paper on the bridge of your nose so it blocks the central vision of the strong eye, and play catch with someone while you bounce. Wave one hand to the side, above, and also below the eye that is obstructed. Make sure that you can see your hand only peripherally. Bounce and catch for five minutes, then take a break and sun for one minute. Then bounce and catch for another five minutes. Now take the piece of paper off and see how different the world looks. Notice a bigger periphery expanding around you. Notice the intensity of color and shape. It is also helpful to try this exercise with the paper taped to the bridge of your nose from your forehead down to your chin, like in the Melissa Exercise.
Correcting Diabetes
Diabetes is a condition caused when the body cannot produce insulin, or does not utilize insulin in the right way. Insulin is actually a hormone. Insulin’s basic function is to transfer glucose, a form of sugar, into the body’s cells. There is also a tendency for patients with diabetes to experience poor blood flow.
Poor blood flow can lead to major difficulties in the body, and in extreme cases, heart problems and loss of limbs. Today, we are very aware of how important proper blood flow is to the visual system. Because of poor blood flow to the eyes, some diabetic patients get cataracts, retinopathy, and neovascularization, which are very similar to conditions related to high blood pressure. They lead to continuous bleeding in the retina, which could lead to blindness.
Poor blood flow leads to a response in the retina where new vesicles are formed. This response is very useful in every other part of the body. For example, if you lie down for a month, unable to walk because of a serious illness, and then stand up, at first you’d have pain, partly because you don’t have enough blood flow to your legs. Very quickly, the body would form capillaries to bring you circulation, sometimes called “collateral circulation.” If your main arteries are clogged or not functional in any way, when the main arteries open up, those vesicles (the capillaries) will degenerate, and the main blood vessels will take over. So, the second or third time that you stand, your legs won’t hurt.
Because of diabetes, high blood pressure, or other systemic problems, you do not get enough blood flow to the retina, and the body will form capillaries to nourish the retina. Many times those capillaries are defective; they leak and destroy the sensitive and small photoreceptive cells.
To prevent diabetic attacks, always carry fruits or seeds wherever you go so you can have healthy snacks if there is a rise in your sugar level. More importantly, learn to exercise in a way that brings more blood flow to your whole body and prevents lack of blood flow to your head and retinas.
A twenty-two-year-old woman named Marla, with type 1 diabetes, came to my office. She had already lost a tremendous amount of vision in her left eye due to diabetes and was about to lose a lot in her right eye. She was scheduled for a vitrectomy, a surgical procedure where the vitreous body is removed from the eye in order to protect the retina and to prevent tearing of the retina. While some vitrectomies are very successful in saving eyesight, at times it’s the reason for blindness. Therefore, whether or not you know anything about this surgery, you can come to your own conclusion about its success rate. In Marla’s case, I thought it best that she not proceed with the surgery and emphatically suggested so.
Because I was so scared of her condition I got her to sign a very long disclaimer—which she was afraid of—since I did not want to take responsibility for the outcome. Regardless, she decided to have the surgery a few days after we met, and it caused her almost absolute blindness in her right eye. Vision in her left eye remained, but a quarter of the left eye simply was not able to see. Consequently, she underwent many laser treatments.
Marla then took my whole training course, which was very helpful to her. I did a lot of tapotement massage with her, where I would tap on every bony part of her body, especially her vertebrae. As a result, more and more blood started to be formed because there had been poor blood formation in her bones. We lose red blood cells but we also form red blood cells. The cycle of life and death is within our bodies; it’s a beautiful activity. And so Marla started having better coloration.
Unfortunately, even though she did many exercises, she still had terrible vision in her left eye and hardly any in her right eye. So we did an amazing exercise. I gave her a strong flashlight—a pen light—which she held with her right hand and waved very close to her right eye—between her nose and her eye—while reading the eye chart with her left eye. Gradually, she began to read better and better. We did it individually, and we did it in the training course, and her vision improved from 20/400 (5 percent, uncorrectable—where she thought she would have to use special instruments for people who are very visually challenged to see screens) to 20/40. Ultimately, she became a bookkeeper for the small company her husband ran, finished both undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology, and even had the ability to drive. It was amazing to see. After two years of treatment, at the age of twenty-four, Marla told me that it was the first time since the age of seven that she was able to get a clean bill of health from her physician. And against everyone’s advice, she eventually brought children into the world.
I have another story with a happy ending. This one is about a seventy-seven-year-old man called Arthur who used to have a massage school. He had lost a lot of his periphery and thought he had very limited central vision because of repeated diabetic attacks. While Marla’s diabetes was type 1, Arthur’s was type 2, and he was also insulin-dependent. When he tried to read the eye chart, he couldn’t. I understood immediately that, because of major loss of his periphery, he did not know where he was looking with his central vision. So I got him to wave his hands to the side quickly, and after doing sunning and palming, he was able to track letters in front of him. Then, noticing his periphery, it was possible for him to find where he was looking. The periphery is that important, because the central periphery can help the central vision to find areas. If you look through a telescope at the stars and you try troubleshooting to find the location of a specific star, you would troubleshoot all night before finding that star; however, if you have another eye open, that eye can help you pinpoint the star you wanted to see. That’s exactly what happened with Arthur. By doing peripheral exercises, and just by getting him to wave his hand, we were able to help him use the periphery he was not able to fully use. As a result, he was able to read the chart; in fact, his vision became 20/30, which is 90 percent of 20/20. By stimulating the periphery, he found the letters he wanted to see. With his improved vision, he was able to see details, and his vision kept improving until he had an accident. He was a passenger in a car that had a head-on collision and he went into a coma. When he opened his eyes, he realized his vision was fuzzy and he could not see as well as he used to, so he went back into the coma and died. Arthur had really wanted to see, and for a moment he had a glimpse of light. But when that glimpse disappeared, it seemed he decided his life was not as worthwhile as it should be.
Personally, I believe in the sanctity of life: The more we have it, the better but we can understand that diabetes puts you in a vulnerable state and that you should make a commitment to strengthen yourself. Whether you are twenty-two or seventy-seven, have type 1 or type 2, we should cherish the abilities we have. Be happy with whatever exists for us and move forward. That’s my fight for life with many of my patients, and it should be yours as well.
Exercise Program for Diabetes: Up to 2½ Hours Daily (Varies on an Individual Basis)
Massage: at least 20 minutes daily.
Shifting—Looking at Details: at least 10 minutes daily.
Extra Exercise for Diabetes: at least 10 minutes daily.
Many people with diabetes do not develop eye problems. Doing these specific exercises may help the health of the eye. Concentrating on neck and shoulder exercises may prevent eye problems from occurring, because what we need is more blood flow.
The most important thing is to find every way to bring more blood flow to your body because poor blood flow is the secondary problem related to diabetes and is what causes you to lose vision, limbs, and internal organs like kidneys. So the most important thing is blood flow. When you sit and you hold your legs, your knees should be apart and your feet together. The soles of your feet are together and you rub your feet one against the other until they are warm. It is good to do it with socks because they’re smoother than bare skin. Over time, you can do it with your bare feet, especially if they don’t sweat much. Rub them one against the other while holding your calves, and that warms them up.
Incorporate these exercises into every part of your day. Don’t just practice for one hour in the morning, or one hour at night. Find five minutes here and five minutes there, all day, every day. Your diabetes is with you every minute of the day. So you must work constantly to overcome the disadvantages of your diabetes.
Figure 6.2. Bringing more blood flow to the head and retinas.
For your extra daily exercise, you may choose from any of the following. On some days you might want to practice them all.
Extra Exercises for Diabetes
Tapping
What I found throughout the years is that tapping on all the bones of the body makes a difference with diabetes. After massaging your face, head, eyes, neck, and shoulders, tap rapidly with your fingertips on every bone of your body. You can also stand under the shower and have the shower massager tap on every single bone of your body.
Tapping helps to stimulate blood production.
It’s also good to sit down, hold your legs, and rub your feet one against the other. That can help you to create more circulation. The extremities, like feet and hands, are far from the heart. So is the face and, of course, the eyes, and they have a complex vascular system as well. What we want is to bring better blood flow to everywhere in the body. Blood flow is what nurtures the body. The better the blood flow, the more vital, vibrant, and happy we become.
Whenever you massage your body, you have to massage toward the heart. Start by massaging your feet, then your calves, then your thighs in a rotating motion. Then massage your buttocks with your palms; use your fingertips to massage your inguinal area to loosen up the tension in the hips. Then massage your abdominal area firmly, but with some gentleness, and in a rotating motion toward the heart. Massage your chest and tap on the bones in your chest. Next, massage your forehead and then your entire head. This massage therapy can make a very big difference in terms of the blood flow in your body.
Waving
What often happens with diabetes is that you have a major blind spot in your retina. If this is happening to you, hang an eye chart on the wall at eye level, and wave your hand quickly in the area of the blind spot while looking with the healthy areas at the eye chart.
For this exercise, the point is to go back and do all the other eye chart exercises while waving your hand in the area of the blind spot. Review all the exercises in the rest of the book and do them with the stronger eye while you wave your hand quickly in the blind spot.
Patch the Strong Eye
If you have a small damaged portion in one of your retinas, wear a patch on your strong eye and, in front of your weaker eye, place a piece of paper with a small opening in the area of blindness. Then go for a walk around your yard or somewhere else safe. This will force the weakest part of your eye to do all the work.
If you cannot see anything this way, go into a dark room with your strong eye patched, and put blinking lights in front of the weak eye until you begin to experience some sensation of light in the blind spot. Refer to the section on glaucoma below for suggestions on using blinking lights.
Physical Exercises for Diabetes
If your retina did not detach and if you have the body capacity to do so, stand and lift your heels from the ground, while your toes are on the ground, and move your legs as quickly as possible. So you bend and straighten your knees while one foot is up and one foot is down.
Then, quickly lift your toes up while keeping your heels on the ground, dozens of times, and then lift your legs up and stamp on the floor dozens of times. You can start with a soft carpet and then move to a hard floor. The idea is to rattle and shake the bones. This is also a good exercise for osteoporosis, but it’s primarily for diabetes. And that is in addition to massage. Also, anyone who has diabetes must walk every day. In the morning, a brisk walk, never less than half an hour, is suggested; in the evening, take a slow walk. This is very important because it gets your blood to flow. Any physician will tell you to do exactly that unless your body cannot handle it.
Figure 6.3. Lift your heels up, alternating as quickly as possible, then lift your toes. The idea is to rattle and shake the bones.
A Note about Laser Treatments
I would like to discourage you from having too many laser treatments. Many concerned physicians do preventive laser treatments where they basically scar a big portion of the retina to prevent rubeosis, or bleeding in the retina. But if you improve your blood flow, there will be no rubeosis.
Too many laser treatments can weaken the retina and can blind too many parts of it. So while I respect and accept the use of laser treatments to stop continuous bleeding once it occurs, I would like you to aggressively embrace exercises, movement, and dietary change, and to work on damaged areas, in order to help the parts that are not damaged.
These days, doctors use injections to stop bleeding. While injections of Lucentis and other future medications may be effective and less damaging than laser treatments, they still have some damaging effect. My recommendation is to do the injections only when there is bleeding, and not to do it otherwise. Exercise to increase the blood flow, and you will decrease the bleeding.
Cataracts and Diabetes
If you do have cataract surgery, pay attention to your general blood flow, and demand to be checked by the doctor every two hours after the surgery. Doctors hate to be patronized by patients, but don’t worry about it. Your health comes first. Make sure that you are being tested every two hours and, if you are, let them test you for bleeding and for any compromise of your retina or optic nerve.
Keratoconus
Keratoconus is a disease that affects the structure of the cornea, the clear tissue covering the front of the eye, which thins and changes to a more conical shape than the more normal gradual curve. The bulge can cause substantial distortion of vision in either eye, and can even affect the patient’s ability to drive a car or read normal print when it afflicts both eyes. Estimates of the prevalence for keratoconus range from 1 in 500 to 1 in 2,000 people.
When the cornea becomes irregular, it creates a lot of astigmatism, and with time it changes shape to the extent that we can no longer see well. In the past, doctors used to think that a corneal transplant from a donor was all that was needed to solve the problem. The theory, however, proved unsuccessful because they discovered that rejections of the cornea can be pretty massive and lead to blindness in many cases. Furthermore, using immunosuppressants to suppress the immune system, which would fight a new cornea, can lead to many diseases. Consequently, doctors are a little bit more conservative in replacing corneas these days. Remember, most of the diopters we get come from light breaking on the cornea. The cornea itself does not have as much aptitude as the lens (it is not as powerful as the lens of the eye) but has more diopters within the eye because light breaks first in the cornea. We’d do better to use the old treatment of medicine from the 1980s: hard contact lenses. In the meantime, we need a lot of self-massage around the eyes every day. Start by first massaging from the bridge of your nose to your temples (over your eyebrows), then from your nose to your ears (over you cheekbones). Next, find the grooves in your cheekbones and eyebrows; massage them and they will loosen up. Wear the hard contact lenses only three to four hours a day, leaving a day or two off per week, in order to rest the eyes; otherwise, they will eventually prove bad for the eyes. If you follow these procedures, you may postpone or prevent corneal replacement for many years.
Today, what bothers me more than anything else is that some people get keratoconus due to unsuccessful LASIK surgery, which I oppose because it damages the eyes so much that, even with glasses, their vision is beyond repair. All ten steps of the eye exercises are good for keratoconus, but the emphasis should be on massage. In fact, I had the pleasure of working with several people who were able to prevent corneal transplants as a result of several months of massage in dark rooms.
Charles was a man in his forties who came to me with keratoconus in the 1980s, and he tried to use a contact lens that would change the shape of his eye. But the contact lens caused him a tremendous amount of pain, so both his optometrist and ophthalmologist strongly recommended a corneal replacement. He came to me because his wife was a student in one of my training courses and was very impressed with my work on her back. So I massaged him and we practiced all ten steps of the eye exercises, especially the reading and shifting work that we do in this book. The massage around his eyes relaxed him enough that his contact lenses fit him just fine. In fact, his cornea even changed shape. Eight months later, both his optometrist and ophthalmologist told him that surgery would not be necessary. He still had keratoconus but to a much lesser extent, making surgery a drastic, unnecessary step.
Interestingly, when Charles asked if he could share with them how he had improved his eyes, neither of them cared to hear about it. It is the fate of my work that this keeps recurring. When people improve to an extent that science would have been interested to discover, even doctors who recognize that improvement have a hard time admitting that something other than what most people who serve medical science think could make a difference. Medicine cannot prevent keratoconus from advancing. All doctors can do is change the cornea and fit you with very strong glasses to deal with the situation. So I feel so good about Charles because he’s doing well till this very day. I wish that more people would join him and get massaged around the eyes, in the dark, and do all ten steps with diligence. Eventually, you will end up improving your vision.
Correcting Glaucoma
Glaucoma is a disease of the optic nerve, often caused by irregular pressure in the eyes, which results in loss of the visual field and, eventually, blindness. Glaucoma can be a scary disease for many people because of this, and also since its symptoms may not be obvious until the disease is quite advanced.
The loss of vision that occurs with glaucoma has a few factors. One is pressure, and another is weakness of the optic nerve and disk. So if you have a very strong optic nerve and disk, even high pressure will not necessarily lead to a loss of vision. But if you have a weak optic nerve and disk, even low pressure could lead to a loss of vision.
For this reason, everyone must be evaluated to determine whether they have a weak or a strong optic nerve and optic disk, before the effects of pressure can be understood and predicted accurately.
The complication here comes from LASIK surgery because it alters the thickness of the cornea, which will alter the perception of pressure, thus making it harder to measure. To date, after LASIK surgery, it is hard to determine what the pressure truly is.
We would like to assume that normal pressure in the eye is above 10 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) and below 20. Anything less than 10 could be too little pressure on the eye. We need pressure in the eye just like a tire needs pressure to maintain its integrity. But, when the pressure mounts, it can destroy weak areas in our eyes. The main area that it destroys is the optic disk, which is rather weak in all of us, but with people who have glaucoma, the weakness of their disk is more pronounced. Reducing pressure would take away the risk of blindness or, at least, of partial blindness.
Statistically, it is true to say that those who have pressure above 30 will most likely lose more vision, but only statistically. In any particular case, it could be that even a pressure higher than 30 does not lead to vision loss. You could also say that some people at a pressure of only 24 or 25 may lose a lot of vision.
The other problem that could easily occur is low-tension glaucoma. With low-tension glaucoma, even having pressure under that which is considered to be desirable for most of us, the optic disk degenerates and is destroyed. The optic disk is the area where the optic nerve connects to the eye; this is a weak and a vulnerable area. When that area has pressure it cannot withstand, the optic disk can be compromised. In some people with completely normal pressure (the 16 mmHg that most of us want to have), the optic disk is still destroyed. This is the prevailing viewpoint. While I agree with it to a point, I believe that it is only a part of what happens. Therefore, the treatment is sometimes ineffective, and can even be dangerous because it only works on the eye pressure without considering other factors.
A few years ago I had the pleasure of working with a bright woman named Lucia, who came all the way from Brazil to San Francisco for two weeks of intensive sessions with me. She came to me with much fear because she had lost 95 percent of her nerve functionality due to glaucoma. The surprising thing about her case was that, after doing the eye exercises and before she even met with me, she gained back the peripheral vision she had lost; her field of vision was almost completely normal—with only one small spot of vision loss—and her acuity was 20/20. I am not the only one who is surprised with such magnificent vision after such significant loss of nerve tissue.
Lucia also told me that several of her family members were afflicted with cardiovascular disease. Knowing that she had this family history, my conclusion from her case was that doing the exercises had increased her blood flow to the remaining nerve tissue, and had improved the situation tremendously. Doctors had offered her a very risky surgery to reduce the pressure, but it would have also posed a big risk to her vision, and she could have lost it completely. Eventually Lucia did the surgery and found it to be useful. So she combined it with doing eye exercises, and it worked well for her.
My ideas of what can help people with glaucoma are:
1. Reduction of pressure (in this I agree with doctors).
2. A balanced use of the two eyes and within each eye.
3. Having sufficient circulation that nourishes the optic nerve.
In Lucia’s case, the bodywork we did was just as important as the vision work, and the part of the nerve that is working assumed the work of the nerves that had been destroyed.
The frustrating part of it all is that even when you reduce the pressure to 10 or 11, as many doctors want you to reduce it to, the optic disk may be preserved in some cases, but with others it may continue to erode to the point of destruction, causing damage to the optic nerve. And the feeling shared by medical doctors is that the optic nerve can never regenerate.
In order to reduce pressure in glaucoma, we discovered that if you use one hand to touch an eye that does not have pressure, and the other hand to touch an eye that has pressure, it will decrease the level of pressure in the eye with high pressure. Let me be clear that you don’t simply touch your own eyes; either you touch someone else’s eye that is soft while your eye is hard, or the other person with a soft eye without high pressure touches his or her eye and your eye. For example, if a family member has high pressure, you first put the fingertips of one of your hands on the closed lid of their afflicted eyeball and the fingertips of your other hand on the lid of the unafflicted eye of another person in your family so you can feel the difference. Then put those same fingertips on your eye. You may be able sense the pressure, because often there is hardness and firmness when there is pressure. Then once again, put your fingertips on the family member’s afflicted eye, breathe one hundred deep breaths as you do so, and then touch your eye again and see if, compared with your eye, the afflicted eye you’re touching becomes softer. Your best gauge to feel their eye pressure is by feeling the pressure of your own eye. This is a subtle ability. If you reach that ability, you may find that you are able to considerably reduce the pressure of their afflicted eye.
If a family member or a friend went to the ophthalmologist, and they’re just about to get pressure-reducing drops but you want to postpone it for a couple of weeks, spend as much as twenty-five minutes to half an hour every day touching both eyes: Touch their afflicted eye and your own unafflicted eye for twelve and a half minutes to fifteen minutes each time. And always remember that the touch has to be very, very gentle. Then determine if the hardness gradually goes down. In a short period of time, the pressure should start to be even between the one who touches and the one who is being touched. The process allows the person being touched to slowly learn, within the mechanism of their own body, how to reduce the pressure in their eyes. It might surprise you that the slightly risen pressure of the eye in the unafflicted person will go back to normal because there’s no anatomical reason for that pressure to remain high. This will happen within a very short period of time. On the other hand, the person whose has high pressure may have it return to being high, but it might not be quite as high and may even go down through enough repetition and work with the rest of the exercises for glaucoma.
You need to understand that cell communication can be transferred through your fingers. You’re actually educating the eye cells how to change through touch, and they will start to feel how to accomplish better drainage of inner ocular fluid (aqueous fluid) so that the eye can remain soft. Though this concept might seem bizarre, more and more scientists are finding that cell communication does exist. And this method is a good way to create cell communication between hands and eyes.
Another way to reduce pressure is through physical exercises like the ones in this chapter, specifically the exercises for neck release. It is significant that sports and low-impact aerobics can often reduce eye pressure. Even when the pressure of low-tension glaucoma is down to 11 or 12, which is desirable among most doctors, those patients may still lose their vision. In summary, balance the use of the eyes and balance the use within each eye, also touching the eye for person-to-person cell communication, and exercises for neck release.
Unlike cataract surgery, about which physicians are very optimistic, physicians continuously see that they cannot fully control glaucoma: not with drops, not with surgery. There is no way to clarify to anyone that reduction of pressure equals reduction of destruction of the optic nerve. And it is clear that most people like to have a simple technical solution to complex problems. Since there seems to be no magic bullet for glaucoma, people live in fear. And that fear is one of the main destructive dangers to our eyes.
The eyes feel this fear. The tissues feel the fear as well, then become much worse. With some of my patients who had temporary improvement in therapy, I sometimes felt that this cloud of fear caused them to deteriorate anyway. With other patients, where the situation seemed to be grave compared to everyone else, their trust in the therapy dramatically improved their vision through the correct exercises and the right knowledge. Positive affirmation can be very useful. You can close your eyes and visualize that the strength of your eyes outpowers any phenomenon that can destroy them. Positive affirmation is 50 percent of your healing process.
When it comes to high pressure in the eyes, all factors must be considered: lack of balanced use of the eyes; stiffness of the neck (which is a result of stiffness of the body); a sense of emotional loss—not just stress, but loss.
A good example is the desire for peace and harmony in a relationship, but never finding it because of resolutions that never come. Similarly, kids of divorced parents feel this when they want to see their parents getting along but never see that happen. There are many different situations that can cause glaucoma, so apply this book in a way that works for your specific situation.
Some people had lost a lot of vision before the practice of these exercises and will do anything they can to keep the vision they already have, and to sharpen it to a great extent. Other people have hardly lost any vision and, therefore, do the eye exercises to prevent any potential vision loss and to sharpen their vision. Some people have only a mild vision loss. Pay attention to the area where your vision is mildly lost, and use the area that is fuzzy or almost blind; this will help you to defend the rest of your visual system. So, apply the book individually to your needs. Take time and pay attention to yourself in a way that works for you.
I will never forget one of my dearest patients, Murray, who had glaucoma. He did well in his therapy with me for a period of seven years. But he took a turn for the worse when his wife died. Issues between him and his wife were never resolved, and that’s one of the worst things that happens when a person you love perishes. If a person who was very dear to you did not get along with you, and the problem you had with that person was never resolved, with their death comes a sense of loss without closure. Part of this loss is not processing your inner feelings around the unresolved issues you had with the deceased. Murray had a problem with his wife’s senility and the Alzheimer’s disease she had developed toward the end of her life. He discovered much anger that she had against some people that she had never brought out during their marital life. It revealed much of her anguish that he had never noticed during her youth. He was struck by the amount of anger and frustration that came out of her when she forgot the present and only remembered the past. And here was a woman who was a world educator and a writer.
When she died, his glaucoma became much worse because his emotional state lacked the stability that he had during most of the marriage. He was also exhausted from trying to keep his wife in as good a shape as he could during the last years of her life. Often, when there is a sense of loss and death, it can lead to loss of vision. A sense of loss or death could result from the absence of anything that you really loved and adored, like relationships, stability, or a home you had liked but from which you had to move. Anything that deep inside leads to an emotional connection and, when it leaves your life without a positive resolution, it could lead to tremendous subconscious tension. That tension reveals itself as a great muscular contraction in your neck. And that neck contraction hampers and disturbs the blood flow to your brain and to your eyes. When it disturbs the blood flow to your brain, you’re running a risk of strokes and hemorrhages of the brain cells. When it disturbs the blood flow to your eyes, you run the risk of losing retinal areas and vision, and you run a greater risk of having high pressure in your eyes. Sometimes you have good blood flow to the head, but in the head the blood vessels could be a bit narrow, and the skull could be tight. So letting go of skull tension is very, very important for sufficient blood flow to the optic nerve.
Pearl, who came to me fifteen years ago with good vision in her right eye and challenged vision in her left, was able to preserve her eyesight with my help. But when she started having surgeries, there were side effects, like cataracts that had to be removed, and a retina that became detached after the cataract was removed. Then layers of scar tissue had to be removed after the retinal reattachment surgery, which resulted in the loss of much of the vision in her left eye, but the vision in her right eye was preserved and is still 20/30.
We like to say that working with glaucoma is a work in progress. There are many genes that lead to losses related to glaucoma. These are genes that make the optic nerve weak. So even under normal pressure, you can lose vision. Also, emotions can make your optic nerve weak and your circulation poor. When the circulation to the optic nerve is poor, it could cause you to lose vision as well.
Some people have simple problems with the optic nerve. The blood vessels that bring blood to it become thin, maybe sluggish, and they don’t allow for good blood flow, thus leading to destruction of the optic nerve. I’ve had three patients with destruction of the optic nerve without it being glaucoma, and I was only able to help the third one, who was diligent in doing my exercises. He was able to preserve his vision and even became able to drive.
So it’s important for us to know that, while sometimes loss is irreversible, it’s usually an issue of blood flow. It calls for opening vessels in the body for better blood flow as well as opening the small vesicles near the optic nerve, which would allow the blood to flow and to nourish it. Good circulation in the body and loosening of the neck to allow good circulation to and within the head makes a very big difference in keeping the optic nerve alive. At the same time, we need to have good use of the retinas.
In the early 1980s I was introduced to a young man, about sixteen years of age, who had a defective heart. His heart was racing at a speed of 104 beats per minute, so he came to my office. I was young then, and my heart—just like in all the textbooks of the time—was 72 beats per minute. With one hand, I touched his heart, and with the other hand, I touched my heart. My assistant, Ellen, was a good nurse with very sharp eyes; I described her previously in the palming section in chapter 2. She measured our pulses within five minutes of my feeling his heartbeat above the seventh rib, and both had become 84 beats per minute. When I took my hands off our chests, our heartbeats changed again. Mine returned to 72, but his only climbed to 94. That was one of the first times I actually experienced how my touch could affect somebody else’s bodily function, even though I had believed in it before.
A similar thing happened to me with an infant of two and a half years of age, who had an eye pressure of 27 mmHg, one blind eye due to total retinal detachment after cataract surgery, and one legally blind eye with a pressure of 27. I did many exercises with her, but the pressure remained the same. When I touched her eye and mine, her pressure was reduced to 11. Therefore, touch is amazing in its capacity to help you reduce pressure. It’s not a panacea, and you cannot count on it, but it’s worth doing. It’s important to know that the true panacea is increased blood flow and activity of the eyes.
In many cases, we lose vision to glaucoma. I say “we” because I really identify with my clients and patients. The way we lose more and more is if we don’t properly use the vision we have, and quite often we succumb to having less vision without best using what we have. For example, if you see well from both the left and right sides of your eye, but you lost a lot of vision in the center, you may not be using the places that you have. I’ve seen a woman guided by her husband in spite of having moderately good vision in the two sides of her eyes, and so I taught her to simply move her head gently from side to side in order to see her environment. It often happens that we lose part of our visual field and become so discouraged that we don’t use the rest. Then, the part we are left with degenerates from lack of use. If we are encouraged to use what we have, and we use these exercises, we stand a very good chance of gaining back some of the parts of our visual field that still exist. Consequently, your life becomes much better, and you will feel much more in control of it.
When we talk about fear, when people have fear of loss of vision, it leads to paralysis and lesser use of the remaining vision after some loss has occurred. That is, by the way, also true about the rest of the body. In the case of a woman who had multiple sclerosis and was walking with a cane, I found that only one of her toes was really paralyzed and that the rest of her leg was merely stiff. When the stiffness was loosened, she was able to walk much better. And so, discouragement comes to both clients and medical professionals, when some previously functioning body parts have been lost, that that the rest cannot be used either, which eventually leads to further loss. One thing I can say is that more and more therapists in the visual education field are trying to help people engage with the parts of their eyes that still exist and that could work better.
While glaucoma is an organic illness that leads to destruction, to a great extent we have a situation that reflects lack of peace within one’s life. I just recently had a client who came from far away to San Francisco, and she went through many difficulties in her life, some of them physical. She had fallen and broken her ankle, and suffered from what’s called low-tension glaucoma. So we mainly worked on balanced use of the eyes, along with a request for her to walk long distances. We did all the exercises with the red and green glasses and with the beads and long-distance walk. She brought with her a machine similar to the one used by physicians to measure pressure, and learned that those are the best exercises for her. It’s always nice to find out what works best for you. While her work at this point is still in progress, after working with her for a few weeks, her pressure dropped from 19 to 13. Although the pressure of 19 mmHg is excellent for most people, in her case it was a surgery-saver. Her physician wanted to put a structure in her eye that would drain the fluid, but when he saw that her pressure had dropped and her vision was stable, he decided to cancel the surgery. Anytime surgery is avoidable by working on our eyes, we extend visual life. Because surgery is never the final point, you should still pursue this work. Bringing more blood flow to the optic nerve brings more life to the eyes, and that becomes most important.
Special instructions for palming with glaucoma: You should only palm for up to ten minutes at a time. Then wait at least five minutes in between ten-minute sessions. You can do this many times a day. But if you palm too long all in one session, you can experience an increase in pressure. If, for example, you have closed-angle glaucoma and you palm for half an hour all at once, you can have an increase in pressure of 4 mmHg.
Exercise Program for Glaucoma
Peripheral Exercise: 20 minutes daily.
Palming: 6 minutes at a time, three times daily, with at least 5 minutes between sessions.
Sunning: 20 minutes daily.
Headlines (from the section on astigmatism in chapter 4): 10 minutes.
Block the Strong Eye (Tape the medium-size piece of paper onto the bridge of your nose so that it blocks the central vision of your strong eye. Now read with your weaker eye while waving your hand in the periphery of your stronger eye): 10 minutes.
Physical Exercises for Glaucoma: 20 minutes daily.
Note: While working on your eyes, also address your emotional state and create a good emotional environment for yourself. And remember to work on your eyes throughout the day. Always find time here and there to work on healing your vision.
Physical Exercise for Glaucoma
Good thoughts and good prayer can be healing. Visualize that blood is circulating to your retina, making it soft and nurturing to your optic disk. Also visualize that the fluid in its clear form is flowing in the area between the cornea and the macula. Visualize that good blood circulation is nourishing your optic disk and retina. Visualize the blood coming from the back, and from your neck to the back of the head, and nourishing your optic disk. Visualize that blood is flowing into your eye and draining from it. Then visualize that plasma, the white and clear area of the blood, is flowing into the front area of your eye from the cornea to the lens, nourishing both, and draining into the area of your nose. It’s amazing how powerful the body is and how much it does all at once. It’s not power that belongs to you but to nature, and you are a wonderful guest of nature’s within your own body. There is a connection between that power and of all universal powers around you; this connection gives that power a tremendous amount of strength.
The same power that brings rain from the sky and wind to the earth, the same power that is mysterious to all of us and runs the whole universe, is the same power that moves your blood and your fluids. It does so constantly. The more you acknowledge its power and its strength, the better it will work for you. There is a connection between your mind and your soul, and the natural functions of your body. When you have glaucoma, physical exercises are important to prevent the pressure from mounting and growing in your eyes and, in fact, reduce it.
Other exercises are important to preserve your vision. All of them will be pleasant to do and a pleasure to work with. When you work on your body, you work for the purpose of having fun with it, and it is a pleasure to do the work. When you have that feeling, it’s going to be wonderful to heal your glaucoma and to overcome it. It will create a better connection between you and your internal forces, and it will help you to tune in to the forces of the universe. It’s probably the best antidepressant you can ever have.
Exercises for Glaucoma
Sunning is one of the best eye exercises you can do for glaucoma, because it temporarily reduces your eye pressure. It also contracts the pupils and creates better fluid flow within your eyes. So, for the time that you do it, your pressure is being reduced. And the reduction of pressure will last if you can also release the tension in your neck. This exercise will help you do that.
If you are a typical glaucoma patient, if such a thing exists, most likely you have a very tight neck. Tension of the neck, to a great extent, is a result of mental stress as well as physical stress, but not in all cases. Nevertheless, I have found that many people who have a tendency for glaucoma exacerbate that tendency with either injury or tension in the neck.
It’s important for you to know that you need to work on your neck, first spiritually, then mentally. It’s good to write about your thoughts and feelings in a journal. Then meet with a good friend or maybe with a psychotherapist who can help you. Hopefully, with holistic inclinations, you will see your whole life and all phenomena as one unified experience.
Sometimes, it’s important for you to take a good vacation or to do things that can improve your life. For example, let yourself be drawn into having a relationship if you don’t have one, or into finding a way to get out of your shell of loneliness if you are lonely. And, if you have a relationship, allow yourself to examine it and to find out if you really spend enough time with your partner; allow yourself to develop good communication skills with your partner in order to bring smoothness into your life. It’s important to do the work that will help you to feel that you are doing well emotionally and that you’re advancing yourself spiritually. Then, you just may find yourself in a whole new place of physical self-improvement with these exercises. Often, the exercises will bring back emotional phenomena, which you’ll want to deal with whenever they come, in order to reach a place of neutrality and tranquility.
These days, many people do not understand the value of neutrality. Somebody jokingly wrote me a postcard that said, “Meir, never tell me to relax. My tension is the only thing that holds me together.” That’s why many people function with tremendous amounts of tension and think it’s good: because they always do it. Life is much happier with less tension. In a place of relaxation, you feel security and love in the universe.
Now, while facing the sun with your eyes closed, continue to move your head from side to side and stroke your cheekbones, massaging around your eyes and nose. Massaging the areas around your eyes is very helpful for relaxation. Quite often, the tension of the eyes leads to squinting, as I’ve mentioned in the beginning of this book. That is a tension that you want to undo. When you take away squinting, you take away pressure, and when you take away pressure, the eye becomes healthy.
Move your head from side to side. Then move your head up and down while moving from side to side. Your chin points upward toward the sky and downward toward your chest. You should move your head up and down four times, from the edge of your shoulder to the middle, and four times from the middle of your shoulder to the edge. This really helps to loosen up your neck and to create more space between the first vertebra and the crown. After doing this forty times, palm for thirty seconds. Then you should do it another forty times, if you can relax while performing the exercise. (No longer massage around the eyes, because it’s not safe to do this when you move the head up and down.) Just move your head up and down as you’re facing the sun with your eyes closed. Then you palm again. Do this exercise a third time and then palm yet again for thirty seconds to a minute. Next, move your head from side to side and massage your eyebrows and cheekbones. Now, go into the shade or sit in a dark room and palm for six to eight minutes at a time, with an emphasis on slow, deep breathing.
You can also take the glow-in-the-dark ball into a very dark room. It normally energizes with light, so you can bring the ball into the sun during sunning to make it glow. In our school we use a closet or the accessible restroom and close the door to make it very, very dark. Then, as a group, we throw the ball from person to person. At first the room seems to be awfully dark, but with time even the pale light of the glowing ball in the dark gets us to see the room much better. Then you go out and do sunning again. That leads to tremendous movement within your eyes because when you do sunning, your pupils constrict. When you throw the ball in the dark, your pupils relax. So when you do sunning and then the throw ball in the dark about six or seven times, each time for two or three minutes, you will find that all of a sudden, your pupils respond better to the light and constrict better in the light. Consequently, the light bothers you less and you respond better to the dark because your pupils expand quicker and better in a dark room. For this reason, you see better in a dark room; it becomes much lighter and clearer.
Now bend your knees and straighten them again. Try to bring your knees to the level of your abdomen or chest (this depends on how flexible your hips are), while moving your head from side to side. If balance is an issue, hold onto a wall or a chair as you do this exercise. Make sure that you don’t fall while doing it.
Now march in place and move your head from side to side while moving your legs up and down, in order to pump more blood into the head and loosen the neck. If you have good balance, as you move your legs up and down and move your head from side to side, massage your hands. Especially massage the place in the palm that is between the thumb and the index finger. If it’s hard for you to do three things at once (gently and steadily moving your head from side to side all the way, moving your legs up and down, and massaging your palm), you can do two things. Massage your hand and move your head from side to side, or move your head from side to side and just move your legs up and down. These are things that can help bring more blood flow and calm your nervous system; don’t strain to do them.
After massaging your palm, and while moving your legs up and down, just simply move your head from side to side twenty or thirty times; then go indoors and palm for eight minutes. When you relax from the palming, you will have time to loosen up your neck.
Before doing neck exercises, determine how well your neck moves from side to side. Lie down on your back, bend your knees, and move your head from side to side about ten times to sense the neck’s restriction. Then, once you have an idea of the range of motion available to you, begin these exercises so that, at first, you stay within your comfortable range of motion. Gradually, this range of motion should increase over time. Also, with all these neck exercises, you should strive for fifteen to twenty repetitions on each side for each exercise.
Figure 6.4. Bend your knees, stretch out your arms, and turn to face your left hand (a). Reach your right arm across to and past the left hand (b).
Now lie on your back, bend your knees, stretch your arms, and look at one hand; let’s say the right hand. Take the left hand and bring it all the way to the right and, in fact, pass it. Stay there for one deep breath. Keep your head looking at the right while bringing the left hand all the way to the left. The shoulder will then stretch in two ways. For one, it will stretch in the back muscles, the trapezius and the rhomboids, in order to bring the arm forward. The second time, when you bring your arm back to where it was, the pectoral muscles of the chest will stretch, and chest muscles as well as back muscles are directly connected to neck muscles.
Then move your head to the opposite side and do exactly the same exercise with your right hand reaching to the left. You can let your legs move after your arm if that’s what your body needs to do to complete the stretch. Repeat the exercise thirty-five times. Then move your head from side to side; 90 percent of the people who do this feel that the neck is looser when they do it. Then put your hands behind your head and lift up your head without the neck helping you. Do it six or seven times. See if you can let go of your neck and just let your hands do the work. Then put one hand on your forehead and move your head from side to side, with your hand on your forehead and your neck loosening.
Another great exercise for the neck is to walk backward. Do it for four hundred or five hundred yards a day, every day. Look over your shoulder from time to time, which is also a great exercise to stretch your neck. At the same time, it’s good for you to work with a friend, at least once a week, although a few times a week is even better. Your friend will put his or her legs on your shoulders and stretch your neck.
Another wonderful exercise for the neck is to sit on a chair, put your chin on your chest, and then slowly bend down until you touch the floor. Then straighten up with your legs first, and then with your whole back. Now do the same thing from a standing position. Bend over, putting your chin on your chest, and slowly bend down, vertebra by vertebra. Put your hand on the floor and, only after you do, sit on the chair while still bending. Then, keeping your chin on your chest and your hands on the floor, you straighten.
Figure 6.5. Sit cross-legged and move your whole body in a rotating motion (a). Let your head roll loosely as your body rotates (b). Make big, full circles with your body (c).
Next, if you do not have a tendency for retinal detachment, which many people with glaucoma do not, you can also sit cross-legged and move your whole body in a rotating motion. Sit on the floor with your legs crossed. Put your hands on your knees. Bend forward and rotate your whole body in a broad circular motion, bending at the waist, rotating all the way around one way and then the other, feeling your spine elongate and your neck stretch. Go both directions: left, then right. Now put both hands on your right leg and lean forward so that your forehead touches your right knee. Lean forward, then straighten back up. Do this five times. Then put both hands on your left knee. Bend forward so your forehead touches your left knee, then straighten back up. Do this five times. Now bend at the waist and rotate your whole body again.
Figure 6.6. Rotate your head to the left and to the right several times and then in a circular motion on the floor.
Next (as long as you don’t have retinal detachment), get down on all fours and put your forehead on the floor. Rotate your head to the left and to the right, keeping your forehead in contact with the floor. Go right and left slowly, gently breathing in and out. Now, keeping the crown of your head in contact with the floor, rotate your head in a circular motion on the floor. You might just feel your scalp coming to life. Move the crown of your head on the floor, in a rotating motion, breathing deeply and slowly. If this hurts, simply modify the pressure on your head by using your hands to support your weight. Go back to sitting cross-legged again, and move your body once more in a rotating motion, bending at the waist. Take your time and breathe. Really feel how relaxed your neck is becoming.
Next, you will want to sit down on the floor with your back against a wall, and your knees bent in front of you. If for any reason (if you have a very large belly) you have a hard time bending your knees, sit cross-legged instead. Otherwise, bend your knees. If you want, you can put a small pillow behind the middle of your back, underneath your shoulders, to make it more comfortable.
First, move your head all the way to the left so that you are stretching your neck muscles as you breathe deeply. Tap your fingers on the stretched muscles on the opposite side of your neck. Massage the neck muscles with your thumb and fingers. Now turn your head in the other direction, stretching the other side of your neck, and do the same thing on the opposite side, tapping the stretched muscles with your fingers, and then massaging that side of the neck with your thumb and fingers.
Figure 6.7. Tap your fingers on the stretched muscles on the opposite side of your neck.
After several repetitions on both sides, interlace your fingers underneath your knees and bend forward until your forehead touches your knees, and straighten back to the wall about twenty times. This loosens up the middle of your back.
Put your hands on your knees and push your legs to one side and then the other, using only the strength of your hands, not your legs. Push your knees to the left and then to the right. You will feel yourself starting to scoot forward and to slip down on the wall; that’s okay. Just pause and scoot yourself back up into the seated position with which you started. Start over again from the beginning, turning your head from side to side. You may find that your neck is much looser now.
It’s also a very good idea to close your eyes and to put a warm towel over them. Moisten the towel with warm water or with herbal tea; there is one in particular called eyebright tea, which has been very effective for me. For those of you who use computers, look into the distance and apply warm and cold towels to your eyes after using the computer. If there is not enough time for both types of towels, apply only cold towels to take away the inflammation. Apply warm and cold towels over your eyes at least once a week.
Figure 6.8. Turn your head from side to side.
Figure 6.9. Push your knees to the left and then to the right.
Another thing that my clients like very much is the steam machine that my sister, who owns health spas, has donated to our school. Steam in a dark room can be very relaxing when you have your eyes closed. While not a necessity, this is a nice luxury, and people who have experienced the steam machine, along with cold towels around their eyes, say they felt wonderful. It’s one of the reasons that so many people love to have facials, which are very useful for relaxation.
Reduction of pressure, moisture in the eyes, clear vision, a loose neck, and a sense of well-being are all good indicators of improvement. You should create a peripheral chart like the sample in this book, with a point in the middle and many numbers at the side of that chart. Copy it somewhat larger, and each time see how the chart looks. If you found that, let’s say, the right part of the chart is not clear but it became clearer after you did exercises, you know that your periphery is better. You can have some stress when you’re being measured at a doctor’s office. I have heard of people who were measured by one machine that showed their periphery was diminished, then being measured by another machine that showed their periphery was doing well. Sometimes, the machine is accurate and we should listen to what we’re being told; however, it’s usually best to measure yourself at home, to determine if you see better. In summary, work on your periphery, work on areas that were lost, and work on central areas as well. Balanced use within each eye is very important, and so is doing the Melissinia Exercise.
Figure 6.10. Peripheral chart.
Please look back at the Melissa and Melissinia exercises in chapter 5, and also look ahead at the Melissinia exercise in “Correcting Optic Nerve Damage” section.
These exercises are essential for reduction of tension. After doing these exercises every day for a period of around three months, measure your pressure and see if it went down. If so, you may be able to prevent the need to use eyedrops, as long as your ophthalmologist does not oppose the idea; at least, you may be able to reduce them gradually with supervision. Find a friendly ophthalmologist or optometrist who is willing to measure your pressure frequently, ideally twice a week, so you will know that you are on the right path.
Neurological Problems and Vision
In my forty-four years of work—and I’ve been doing this work before I was even seventeen—I’ve encountered many unusual phenomena. Some are diagnosed, some are not. For instance, I met a lovely Austrian woman with an unusual nerve disease for which a diagnosis has only recently been found, but it’s still not in the books. She was affected all over her body: she suffered from dizziness, repeated headaches, a general weakness of the body, and a strange phenomenon where her right eye saw the world in a reduced way; it would see things smaller than they really are, while her left eye saw the actual size. And she would see them smaller through the side of her left eye. Bodywork, sunning, and palming helped, but what helped her the most was the work with red and green glasses. The card games with the red and green glasses, the light work with the card games, and the Melissinia Exercise all made a difference. What surprised me was that as we did the Melissinia—patching the right eye and putting three different sizes of paper over the left eye—sometimes she would find it relieving, but other times she would find that it caused her headaches. So we worked in two different ways. We used a thin piece of paper, threw the ball above her head, and got her to catch it. Then we did the same with the medium-size paper, and also with the large-size paper, which is about three-eighths of an inch wide. Next, we took the same three pieces of paper, and first patched her right eye with the small piece of paper and waved the blinking light (called a magic wand) in the dark. This was repeated with the medium and large pieces of paper. Gradually, we reduced the size of those papers.
We discovered later on that her headaches were reduced when we also patched her left eye, which was the weaker one, and worked a little on the stronger eye with the same exercises. First came the ball that we threw in the sun or bright daylight. Then came the thin paper, which was one-eighth of an inch; the wider, which was two-eighths of an inch; and the widest, three-eighths of an inch. We learned that when we put the longest piece of paper—and also the widest one—in front of her left eye and then in front of her right eye, and used the three thin pieces of paper, her headaches disappeared. We also learned that when we used the large piece of paper, which we call a “Melissa” and which did not block the whole eye like a patch would, and put Melissinias on the other eye, it worked better for her. It surprised us because we were trying to get only one eye to work at a time, where only different parts of that eye would work. But we found that even when the other eye would work a little bit, it made it possible for her brain to have a sense of expansion. In essence, we were affecting different parts of the brain—the thalamus and the occipital lobe—through working on the eye. By blocking different areas of one eye, but as long as there is some openness in the other eye, there is activity in different peripheral areas of the eye. Therefore, balanced use of the eye is very important, especially for a very unusual neurological condition.
Meanwhile, her situation has improved amazingly because she works on herself several hours a day. Her exercises include crawling, which balances the use of different parts of the brain, and falling from side to side, which loosens up the neck and uses parts of the brain that are not normally used.
The exercise for the eyes that we call the Melissinia is something everyone who reads this book should do. In fact, my recommendation is that, when you read this book, don’t look only for what would help your case; instead, look at everyone else’s cases and see which exercises might be relevant to your particular situation. I don’t know of one person who has not sharpened their vision simply by practicing the Melissinia, because more parts of the visual system are working. So, while patching one eye and throwing the ball from area to area is a very important thing, using a small piece of paper and then larger ones is just as significant.
As in the section on glaucoma, working with a glowing ball in the dark, in combination with sunning, was very powerful for a woman named Magdalena. It was very helpful because it affects the pupils, and the pupils affect the nervous system. The autonomic nervous system comprises two opposing systems: one is more active and includes the fight-or-flight mechanism (sympathetic); the other is more relaxing and includes the digestive mechanism (parasympathetic). The latter is compromised through long-term stress—emotions that don’t resolve themselves in any way—and through our lifestyle, like looking at computers a lot and being in unfavorable light conditions. The activity of the pupils relaxes and balances that system. And, for that reason, the body can function much better with the autonomic nervous system.
Correcting Optic Neuritis
Optic Neuritis is a condition caused by a temporary swelling from inflammation of the optic nerve. When experiencing optic neuritis, the worst-case scenario is that less blood will flow to the optic nerve; because of poor blood flow, there will be ischemia of the nerve, a part of which could degenerate and wither.
In most cases, optic neuritis comes and goes. Physicians believe they can help this condition with steroid treatments. Sometimes, the steroid treatments work and the optic neuritis does not return frequently. At other times, however, they create dependency.
When you suffer from optic neuritis, a good thing to do is to spend a lot of time in a completely dark room. This gives your whole body, as well as your eyes, a great chance to relax. By far the best solution for optic neuritis is a long session of palming. This is true whether the cause is the optic nerve itself or a systemic illness like multiple sclerosis that impacts many other nerves besides the optic nerve.
Imagine that you walk a lot and step on your legs in an imbalanced way. Consequently, you develop swelling in your legs. Physicians would correctly tell you to rest your leg, maybe to put a brace or a bandage on your ankle, or perhaps to use crutches. Any of the these actions would be to give your leg the rest it needs to heal so that it can return to its proper functioning. In many ways, the same approach is appropriate for the optic nerve. You must rest your optic nerve for the inflammation of the nerve to disappear.
Staying in a dark room, covering your eyes with a light cloth for a day, or perhaps two days, and not walking much in daylight could be the best solution for optic neuritis. It’s also good to massage your neck and your back.
This is a very important piece of information for millions of people. No one gives you the suggestion to lie and rest in the dark. Hospital rooms are fully lit all the time for the purpose of security and control. Lack of darkness in many hospital rooms is the reason why a problem like this can be exacerbated. Being at home in the most familiar surroundings can make a difference, especially with fresh air and loving palms over your closed eyes to give you a sense of nurturing. When you lie in the dark with your eyes closed, or when you sit in the dark and palm, you allow for complete replenishment of the optic nerve, which is more important than any medication you can possibly get.
In extreme cases, medication helps. Sometimes, though, medication produces terrible side effects. Sitting in the dark has helped the majority of my clients who have had different attacks of optic neuritis. I advise the clients with whom I work in person that only if this doesn’t work should medication become an option. Since you, the reader, are not working with me in person, I advise you to work with a physician who is not opposed to your self-healing practices. Be sure, as you follow my recommendations, to consult with a trusted physician, one who knows your condition well and to whom you have easy access during this process. This will determine the urgency, or not, for you to be put on medication.
When the optic neuritis passes, diligently practice the ten exercises in chapter 2 as well as the previous exercises for unusual nerve phenomena. Also, practice the exercise of throwing the glowing ball in the dark and sunning, along with everything else used for correcting glaucoma.
Correcting Optic Nerve Damage
Most people believe in the absolute determination of extreme conditions; for example, if you are blind, you will never again be able to see. That seems to be your destiny. Nevertheless, there are cases that disprove this notion, and one in particular stands out in my mind.
In February 2009, Simone, a middle-aged pediatric dentist, had a terrible traffic accident in Brazil. Though the surgeries for her fractured skull went very well, her optic nerve had been damaged: she seemed to be completely blind in her right eye and was 97 percent blind in her left eye. She took my six-day course and several individual sessions.
At first, all Simone could see was the first two lines of the Snellen chart from three feet away. Sônia, who worked with me on Simone, was used to seeing many people whose vision was diminished, but it was still difficult to watch a person go from 20/20 to seeing so little in just a few months. In fact, I also find it difficult to see people lose the function of their eyes. Sometimes we have to deal with it as therapists, but it’s difficult nonetheless.
I immediately started to treat Simone with eye exercises: sunning, where she closed her eyes and moved her head from side to side while facing the sun, to strengthen her pupils; palming, where she would rub her hands and put them gently over her eye orbits to relax and energize them. Then I patched her left eye, put her in a dark room, and used a blinking light that she was able to see. After that, I took her outdoors and waved a white piece of paper in front of her that reflected the sun; she was not able to see the paper, but she was able to sense its movement. Simone wasn’t able to see the paper, nor could she see the strong light of the sun reflecting from the paper, but she could sense from her stronger side when the reflection disappeared. We played a game where she tried to take the paper out of my hand, and she succeeded very quickly. We did it many times. After removing the patch from her left eye, she was able to see four more lines on the chart from the same distance of three feet.
Eventually, Simone traveled with her family all the way to San Francisco to work with me at the School for Self-Healing, where we spent hours together daily. Despite a language difference, because my Portuguese was broken, we understood each other very well. First, I treated her in a dark room; then I massaged Simone’s face, had her bounce on a trampoline, and took her to the beach to have her look at the waves. I also patched her left eye and activated her right eye, which seemed at first to have absolutely no vision. One of the biggest accomplishments was that the blinking lights became much clearer, and she was even able to see some shadows and shapes with her blind right eye. The work in the dark room with steam and a cold towel, the love of her husband, who helped me massage her, and the warmth of my good friend Jan, who also helped me work on Simone, not only melted the skepticism of her daughter but also gave Simone a great sense of support—and with that, her healing began.
In January 2010, I met her again in São Paulo, Brazil, and I was surprised at what she saw: 90 percent of normal vision with pinhole glasses. Two years later, I was struggling with the idea of having a root canal; even after five dentists—including some of my students—pressured me to have it done, I still didn’t want to do it. So I decided to confide in Simone, as I trusted her completely. At that point, I had not spoken with her for an entire year, but called her long distance anyway. She suggested that I have the root canal, so I went ahead and had it done. Then she told me, “Meir, you gave me my life back. I’m practicing dentistry, and I’m teaching pediatric dentistry at the university. Also, I got my driver’s license back.”
Despite the fact that physicians had pronounced her incurable, Simone was ultimately able to see again. This was greatly due to our wonderful rapport, but also partly because of her commitment to travel far just to make that connection, regardless of language barriers; the support of her husband didn’t hurt either. Interestingly, Simone’s daughter—who at first had reservations about my work—decided to study ophthalmology so that she could combine it with self-healing and refer people to practitioners of my work. This was just one unexpected result when someone who used to see only 3 percent of normal vision now sees 97 percent, and who used to walk supported by her husband and daughter now drives to the university on her own. It proved to everyone that a deep connection will not only produce the desired outcome but can also lead to innovation.
Another extraordinary case happened during a visit to Mexico, where I had a small vision class with twelve people, some of whom suffered from normal farsightedness, for which I taught them the principles of natural vision improvement. To their amazement, they started to see well and could even read letters for the first time without wearing glasses. I discovered that three women in the class were blind in one eye, so I patched their seeing eyes and placed blinking lights in front of their blind eyes. The dynamic of the class was that we kept working on vision improvement. And because three of the women were each blind in one eye, I sent them with my two apprentices, Patricia and Laura, to practice the exercises that have been described. Two of the subjects saw it as an exercise and received it pretty well, but one of them cried hysterically because it had prevented her from seeing; she left the room and, half an hour later, returned to the class to work on her presbyopia. The one who cried was named Esperanza, and I met her two days later for a series of three sessions.
When she came for the first session, I asked her, “Esperanza, why did you cry hysterically when Patricia and Laura worked with you in the dark room?” She hugged me and cried, saying, “Meir, when I was seventeen, my father died from an accident. And when my right eye was patched, I felt that sense of loss; it brought it all back.” I hugged and kissed her, and then she went to the treatment table. We massaged her face, and put cold and warm towels on it. My apprentices, Patricia and Laura, helped me work with her, and we measured the vision of her left eye; it was perfect. We patched the left eye; with her afflicted right eye, she could not even see the large E on the chart from one foot, which is one-twentieth of the normal distance. Instead she saw a black spot. We took her into a dark room where we used blinking lights. She could see them, but only on one side. We covered that side with the paper, and with the light blinking in the left nasal area of the right eye, she started to see the lights. When we took the patch off, she felt that her vision system had improved. She had the feeling that more light was coming to her eye.
In the next session, we started sunning. As she faced the sun, the pupil would constrict, and as she moved her head away, her pupils would expand. We patched her left eye again and she was able to see the first three lines of the eye chart from two feet. My apprentices and I were amazed and were in awe of the event.
In the last session, we used the Melissa, a strip of paper taped from her forehead to her chin. She threw a ball from hand to hand above her head and was able to catch the ball with her right hand. When we took the Melissa paper off, she felt that she could see better with both eyes. When we finished, Esperanza said to me, “Right now I feel like I got my best forty-sixth birthday gift, because my retina was torn in six different pieces, and no doctor thought I would even see light through it. But now I have peripheral vision with my right eye, and I feel that I’m a safer driver.”
She liked the rest of my work because her presbyopia (farsightedness) had improved in her seeing eye, and she could see well from near. As we worked, we discovered that on the right side of her blind eye, even while her strong eye was patched, she could actually see blinking lights. This made no sense because there had been six botched surgeries on her, and any physician would say there was no way she could ever see; however, we were curious enough to find out if there was. After all, Esperanza had come from Bogotá, Columbia, to Cuernavaca, Mexico, in order to work with me. Since she could see from her side, though not from near her nose, I first gave her the blinking exercise: I got her to hold two small blinkers of light; she would look at one, cover it, and then she’d look at the other and cover it. Next, while her strong eye was patched, I also patched the left side of her left eye. When Esperanza blinked her eyes at the nasal area, which she couldn’t see before, she started to see that as well. I always teach that legally blind people first have to have a sense of the picture in order to clarify it in the brain and then be able to see it. The beginning of the transition is basically moving from total lack of vision to sensing blinking lights in the darkest possible room.
On the first day, Esperanza had not been able to see the large letter of the eye chart from a foot and a half; if you can’t see that letter from twenty feet, then you’re considered legally blind. Though she had not seen that letter with her left eye, she still saw that the page was white and that something was interfering with the white. On the second day, she did the sunning exercise: Esperanza closed her eyes and moved her head from side to side. As she faced the sun, her pupils would constrict; when she moved away from it, they would expand and relax. After that, when I patched her right eye, she was able to read the first three lines of the eye chart without any difficulty. Because this attempt was only from a foot and a half away, she was still considered legally blind; however, Esperanza was now sighted.
I situated her in a dark room, put a cold towel over her eyes, and massaged her; my two apprentices massaged her body, while I massaged around her eyes and neck, bringing blood into her head.
When Esperanza was about to return to Columbia, she told me that for several years she had believed she’d never be able to see from her left eye. This is one of the strongest cases I ever had, where, in four days, a woman who was blind for four years was finally able to see—without medication or surgery, but with exercise and massage.
Correcting Detached Retinas and Retinal Tears
A detached retina is a very serious problem that almost always causes partial or full blindness unless it is treated.
The retina performs a function similar to the film in a camera. Located in the back of the eye, it receives optical images, converts them to chemical reactions, and transmits them through the optic nerve to the brain for interpretation.
The retina is considered to be detached whenever it is removed from its normal position in the back of the eye. This can occur in anybody at any age. People who are experiencing retinal detachment report seeing “floaters” (dark spots that seem to move around in their field of vision) or a gray curtain moving back and forth across their eyes.
There are many reasons for detached retinas. The most familiar ones are myopia—mainly high myopia, when the eyeball is very long—as well as post-cataract surgeries and traumas. Blows to the head can also create retinal detachments. In my opinion, this is another reason to avoid LASIK surgery, since it weakens the eye, creating greater chances of a retinal detachment simply by bumping your head forcefully.
If the retinal detachment is very large, you must see a physician soon, because the detachment can cause lack of blood flow to the photoreceptors and can kill them. Within a short period of time, possibly a week or two, you can lose your vision. As an exception, I met a person who had a violent fight in prison, during which he received a head-butt. As a result of the fight, his retina detached and the prison physician was not capable of diagnosing it. After he had served his term, he was seen by a top ophthalmologist, who told him that he had already had a detachment for several months. He had reattachment surgery and, to his amazement, as well as his ophthalmologist’s and my own, his vision returned almost to normal, and the retina was functional. But this is extraordinary, and most of the time it doesn’t happen that way. Usually, within a couple of weeks of lack of blood flow to the photoreceptors, they die. What should we do then?
A female patient came to me once, complaining of a retinal detachment in one eye and poor vision in the other. One thing I noticed was that she wasn’t blinking. She told me it was written in her medical chart that she wasn’t blinking, but none of her doctors had paid attention to the notation. Therefore, I told her to blink, and her vision improved very quickly after that.
Pay attention to your demeanor. Are you blinking? Are you not blinking? Do you pay attention to your retina or not? Also, when you have a retinal detachment, make sure that you don’t bend your head, or the retina can fall even more. After the healing process, it’s important for you to get a lot of massage on your neck and on your back, in order to bring more blood to the head and to strengthen your retina with nurturing blood flow to the eyes. But some of the exercises for loosening your neck (for example, in the section on glaucoma) could hurt, since they require you to bend your head down, which could cause damage. In the acute time of retinal detachment, don’t do movement exercises; instead, massage is the best option to relax the tension in your neck and back. After the detachment has healed, it’s okay to return to the movement exercises.
Some of the reasons for retinal detachment are emotional. A boy I once knew told me that, after his retinal reattachment surgery, he woke up after the surgery and discovered he had some vision. But, because his mother was not in the room, it traumatized him and he became blind again. There are tissues that respond to our emotions, so it’s important to be as calm as you can be, even in the hardest of situations. It can preserve both your sanity and your retina.
Exercise Program for Retinal Detachment
Look at Details (with the parts of your eyes that are not functioning well, by covering the parts that do see well): 10 minutes daily.
Look into the Distance: 40 minutes daily, in 10-minute intervals.
Palming: 24 minutes daily, 6 minutes at a time (once a week, as long as you do not have glaucoma, sit down and palm for an hour, listening to something pleasant like music or a book on tape).
Darkness and Light Exercise: 20 minutes daily.
Figure 6.11. Look at the details with the parts of your eyes that are not functioning well.
With retinal detachment, after exercising the blind or the fuzzy spot, quite a few people start to have some more vision in it, which is a wonderful phenomenon. It happens because some of the cells are only dormant, even though some are dead. So, when we wake up the dormant cells, we have access to more vision.
Extra Exercise for Retinal Detachment: Darkness and Light
If parts of your retina are dead, or if you have a sighted eye, patch your sighted eye and obstruct the parts of your disabled eye that are still functioning with paper. Then look at the world through holes in the paper, using only the parts of your eyes that do not function well.
Four times a day, after six minutes of palming, go into a closed room and use blinking lights. At the School for Self-Healing we sell small blinking lights you can use for this exercise, but any different-colored blinking lights will do. The object is simply to turn on the blinking lights to activate the parts of your eyes that are not working.
Figure 6.12. Use blinking or flashing lights in a dark room to activate the parts of the eyes that are not working.
Figure 6.13. The small blinking lights we use at the school.
Figure 6.14. Our magic wands.
When you have the functional parts of your eyes covered and you are looking at blinking lights in a dark room, you may not see anything at all at first, but over time you may start to see small changes in the darkness. Small flashes of light may start to occur. Be patient. In time you may start to see more and more flashing lights and, eventually, shapes may start to occur. Sometimes a picture comes; when it does, it’s wonderful.
A much more subtle way of accomplishing this same exercise is to obstruct the functional part of your eyes, and walk outside in bright sunlight, crossing between a brightly lit area and a shaded area. Walk with somebody who can help you to make sure you do not trip. Move your head from side to side, but do not move your eyes. Look up at the sky, where you can see the light of the sun and the sky, and look down at the shade, where you may be able to see that it is darker, and that distinction may start to give you a sense of contrast. The extremes of light and dark may start to become apparent over time. In this way, you are accomplishing the same thing as with the blinking lights. You are activating the part of your eyes that does not function well, so that vision in your blind spot will start to develop.
If you have some vision, obstruct the sighted area in your eyes with a patch over the strong eye, and paper with cut-out holes for the weak areas to look through, over the weak eye. Now walk in your garden or somewhere safe, with a companion who can hold your hand or catch you if you fall, and move your head from side to side slowly so as to help you notice more details. Then take off your patches; 75 percent of people who do this see an immediate improvement in their vision. The improvement is temporary, but repetition of this exercise makes it become stable.
Correcting Vitreous Detachment
The vitreous is what we call the gel-like substance between the retina and the lens, and it is in fact attached to the retina via millions of fine, intertwined fibers. As the vitreous shrinks from age and neglect, detachment from the retina can occur.
Vitreous detachment is much more common, but less harmful, than retinal detachment. Only in rare cases does vitreous detachment lead to partial blindness. But it does lead to a tremendous amount of floaters that obstruct vision. A floater is what we call a tiny dark spot that seems to be “floating” around in your field of vision, obstructing what you are looking at.
In a minority of cases, vitreous detachment can lead to retinal detachment or puckers, by pulling apart the retina; this, in turn, can lead to bleeding and flooding of the photoreceptor cells, causing blindness. But most of the time, it’s relatively harmless and just leads to some floaters.
Normally, with a retinal pucker, after looking at an eye chart and seeing it to some extent, there is a sense of clarity in the rest of your visual system. If you take off the patch, you will find that your vision is very much clearer. That’s why repetition of these exercises is so useful.
If you experience vitreous detachment, however, I recommend getting checked by two or three ophthalmologists, especially retinal specialists, to be sure that the detachment didn’t cause any harm to the retina at the same time.
Often, people are afraid of the floaters. A good way to deal with them might seem rather amazing and unpredictable. The secret is, you look at them. You just walk outdoors on a sunny day, or at least on a bright day, and look at the floaters one by one. If you cannot see them one by one because there are groups of floaters, look at them group by group. When you isolate and look at the floaters, you cause the vitreous fluid to collide against the floaters, which breaks them up and causes them to disappear.
For example, if you have more floaters in your right eye, patch or obstruct your left eye, and walk for twenty minutes in the sun, with a nice view to look at. As you look at the view, floaters will appear. As they appear, look right at the floaters and, as you do, the vitreous fluid will collide against them and destroy them. Normally, what happens when you look at a floater, is that it floats away, then it comes back; when you look at it again, your vitreous fluid hits the floater and breaks it into pieces. Then you see smaller pieces, and you look at either one of them or at several pieces, and you break them once again.
Look at a floater that you choose to look at, possibly the larger one, and when the floater floats away, look into the distance. Then look at that floater again when it comes back, and exercise with that floater, back and forth, every day. Most likely, after a few weeks, that floater will disappear. Then you choose the next one. Do it in a neutral state of mind, blink, and breathe. If you have floaters in both eyes, but more in one eye than the other, patch the eye with fewer floaters and look at the floaters with the other eye.
I had a patient named Tony who had laser surgeries, retinal detachment, and terrible vitreous floaters. Moreover, he couldn’t drive. His doctor had unfortunately told him to wear sunglasses. That only made the floaters worse. I told him to do a lot of sunning, to walk, and to look at the floaters. I will never forget the time I walked with him up and down a hill around my previous office. He looked at plants, he looked at the view, and very quickly, he improved his vision from 20/200 with glasses to 20/20 with glasses; he also reduced his diopter level significantly, from 13 to 8 diopters.
Tony reduced his myopia and reduced the floaters, and his vision became much better compared to how it was; it is better without his glasses and it’s better with his glasses, and with much less correction. (This wonderful man volunteered to be the model on my DVD, Yoga for your Eyes, which has helped many people to see better.)
Tony used the internal forces in his own body to improve his eyes, and the improvement was massive. So can you. Your internal forces are only partially known, and they’re stronger than what anyone can imagine.
Even though many floaters are not a result of vitreous detachment, the treatment is the same. You have to mentally accept the fact that it’s okay for you to have this floater; then you have to look at it. If you’ve lived with floaters for many years and it’s familiar to you, it will probably be hard for your mind to believe they can disappear. If it is one floater, look at it. If there are groups of floaters, look only at one group. If it is a big floater, look at one part of it. Repeated exercises will show you that you can actually decrease it, change its shape and, with time, rid yourself of it. The only thing that keeps the floater going is your disgust for that floater and lack of willingness to look at it. That’s what happens with most people. We have forces within us that can destroy that which impedes us, if we only let them do it.
Additionally, what we learn from the fact that we are experiencing vitreous detachment in the first place is that the health of the eye is going in the wrong direction. Therefore, once we eliminate the floaters, we must return to the basic eye exercises in the beginning of this book in order to strengthen and heal the entire eye.
Correcting Macular Puckers and Holes
Some people suddenly discover they can no longer see centrally. It’s a scary situation. From the person’s viewpoint, one day he or she sees perfectly, and the next day the central vision has disappeared. When the person meets an ophthalmologist, the ophthalmologist has absolutely nothing to offer that person except sympathy.
Often, this situation is caused by macular holes and macular puckers—basically, detachment of the vitreous that takes with it a part of the macula. Other times, we simply have cells that have withered and died. In all cases, the treatment is the same.
Exercise Program for Macular Holes and Puckers: 80 Minutes a Day
Palming: 24 minutes daily, 6 minutes at a time.
Sunning: 30 minutes daily, in three 10-minute intervals.
Skying (if there is no sun): 8 minutes daily.
Long Swing: 5 minutes daily.
Extra Exercise: Pinhole Glasses: 10 minutes daily.
Figure 6.15. Pinhole glasses and pinhole glasses with obstruction.
Remember not to simply take one part of the day and do your eye exercises all at once. The best results come from working on your eyes all the time, throughout your day. Find a few minutes here and there, and let the eye exercises in this book find their way naturally into your routine. Thus, vision improvement will be created in an organic way in your daily life. This is the way to improve for the long term.
Extra Pinhole Glasses Exercise
Pinhole glasses are opaque glasses with many tiny holes punched through the lenses.
Put the pinhole glasses on, then cover the eye that sees normally. Use the eye that has the macular hole in it to look straight ahead at an eye chart. You should put the eye chart in full light or, if there is sun, in full sunlight. The pinhole glasses will protect you from the temporary glare, and your tendency will be to tilt your head to see. Don’t tilt your head; instead, look straight ahead. Then close your eyes and remember exactly how the letters looked to you.
At times, you will only see the very big letter from a very short distance. If that’s what you see, it’s okay. Allow that area of your eye to be functional. After you remember the exact shape and contour of the letter or letters that you saw, open your eyes and look again.
Now move your head very slightly from side to side, less than a quarter of an inch. That’s enough for you to see the letter moving in the opposite direction than the way you are moving, through the fuzz or the veil that you are looking through.
The next step is to put masking tape on the pinhole lens covering the area that would be the central periphery, and do the same exercise.
Normally, when you have a macular pucker, you see better peripherally. So, next, cover the entire weaker lens with construction paper that has only a tiny hole, made by a pen or pencil right where the main blind spot is in your vision. Now look at the eye chart through that pinhole you made.
Note: It is dangerous to create a hole in the paper while you are wearing these glasses. Do not create the hole while the paper is on your face. Even though it seems easiest to do it this way (since only then can you test whether or not the hole is in the correct spot), it is best to find the blind spot and to create the hole on the paper when it is away from your eyes. It may take you a few tries until the hole is positioned right in front of the fuzzy or blind spot, but do not do it in front of your face, even if it seems more convenient to do so.
Figure 6.16. Use the eye that has the macular hole in it to look straight ahead at an eye chart.
Sometimes it’s impossible to see any print through the hole. If that is the case with your vision, you should start this exercise by stimulating that area with blinking lights, like the ones you can order through our School for Self-Healing in San Francisco.
With a macular pucker, some cells are still alive, but they are dormant in most cases, and they’re not being activated. Looking at the eye chart, only with the fuzzy area in your central field, will clarify your vision. Even slight clarification can make a big difference to your visual system because it eases the burden on the rest of the cells.
Correcting Retinitis Pigmentosa
Retinitis pigmentosa is an inherited disease characterized by a gradual, progressive degeneration of the retina. This leads to loss of peripheral vision and night vision difficulties, and can also lead to central vision loss as well.
If you know that you are predisposed to retinitis pigmentosa, you should start to work on shifting and peripheral vision exercises at a very young age. If you do this, you would simply be diagnosed as having some missing spots in your visual system, but you would basically see well.
Although retinitis pigmentosa is genetic in nature, it is exacerbated by the normal stresses in life. What are our stresses? It is stressful when you look at someone and can see only their head and not the rest of them. It is even more stressful to see everything fuzzy. Another major source of stress is caused by the vision loss itself. It is especially stressful when you see well enough to get by, but not well enough to function fully. You may walk on the street and see people, but you don’t recognize your friend’s face immediately. Mental stress occurs from people having their feelings hurt by that, and from you criticizing yourself about it, even though you would forgive anyone else for not being able to see someone’s face.
I think it’s very important to announce to the world, “I do have an eye disease and, if you want me to recognize you, just say, ‘Here I am.’ Sometimes don’t say it, see if I recognize you first, and only if I don’t, then say, ‘Here I am.’ And if I do recognize you, that’s a great thing. I’m seeing you, and you acknowledged that.”
Let people know that there is suffering involved in your life, and don’t have them feel bad or guilty about it. You’d be amazed how much people’s intelligence grows when they understand how to treat other people, and how much it shrinks when you hide a phenomenon that you are experiencing.
From the very first year that I had started to work on overcoming my blindness while also working on others, I found out that those people who hide a serious problem always suffer for it. Even if they have a good reason to hide (for example, because they would be fired from work), at the end of the day, they still suffer more from hiding than from revealing it.
Other people revere their problems and use them as a crutch or as a tool to gain favors; they try to get others to do special things for them that they wouldn’t have done had they not known of a problem. Those people don’t heal either.
The people who heal are the ones who look at the problem as a matter of fact. I could be short, I could be tall, I could have cataracts, I could have retinitis pigmentosa, I could limp; either way, I’m a whole person, I’m okay, and I just have to deal with my problems as well as my triumphs. The problem becomes much less of a problem when it’s being discussed.
Exercise Program for Retinitis Pigmentosa
Note: You should not start this book with the section on retinitis pigmentosa. If you did, go back to the beginning of the book and work from the Introduction on. Be aware of all the deep concepts of life, vitality, and vision. Then you will be ready to work with this chapter.
Palming: 24 minutes daily.
Sunning: 20 minutes daily.
Night Walking: One hour, twice a week (if possible).
Shifting: 10 minutes daily.
Extra Exercise for Retinitis Pigmentosa: 20 minutes daily.
A Note about Night Walking
Sometimes night walking is not possible because your vision is not strong enough in the dark. In this case, you cannot walk at night. The ability to night walk could come as a result of improvement in your peripheral vision.
There’s a big difference between simply sitting in a dark room and actually walking around in the dark. The body is meant to respond to visual information, therefore the brain receives the impulses much better through movement in the dark than through being still.
If your vision isn’t clear enough at night, because so many people with retinitis pigmentosa lose that capacity, you may still see well enough to adapt to your room with some light from the outside. In that case, spend about an hour each night for the next six months exercising in the following sequence: first walk back and forth in your room; then sit cross-legged on the floor (occasionally moving in a rotating motion just enough to create the sensation of movement); finally, walk forward and backward again. This should begin to stimulate some cells that are just dormant and not dead. If you do that, there’s a good chance you will slow down the retinitis pigmentosa greatly, and eventually develop good enough night vision to go night walking.
I will never forget the person in his forties who came to me with retinitis pigmentosa. His mother had lost her vision to retinitis pigmentosa, the same way he did. His vision was very clear when he looked at an eye chart: it was 20/30 with his glasses on, which was within the normal range; peripherally, he didn’t even have 3 percent vision. Whenever he would step to a slightly darker room, not even completely dark, but just slightly darker, he would be blind momentarily. So I taught him to palm for fifteen seconds whenever he stepped into a dark room. When he took his hands from his eyes, he saw much better.
In order to improve his peripheral vision, we created an exercise that required three assistants but ended up being very successful. Remember that the periphery senses movement, and the central vision mainly senses a still picture. The exercise we created made use of this principle in a dynamic way. I had one assistant stand in front of the patient and throw a ball back and forth to him. While they played catch, I had two more assistants stand on either side of the man, throwing a ball back and forth across his field of vision. The tennis balls were crossing each other in the backyard. Slowly, he started to notice the ball going side to side more and more. It was gradual, but he was becoming more aware of the periphery.
After four days of intensive training, his peripheral vision improved to 85 percent. There’s no question that, even though the treatment was very intensive and fruitful, the therapy did not regenerate 80 percent to 82 percent of his peripheral field in four days. In all likelihood, what had happened was that, although many cells had already died, most others were simply dormant and, by doing the work that we did, we woke up the dormant cells, thus helping him to regain and to maintain his vision for many years. Later that year, he reported to us that he no longer bumped his head against airplane compartments, and that he was able to see when hands were raised by kids in his classes. It turns out he was Superintendent of Education for the State of Michigan, and whenever he had gone to class in the past, when he looked straight ahead, he wouldn’t see anyone who had raised a hand. Now he could.
So whenever you move to a more dimly lit room, palm at most for forty-five seconds. Put your hands over your eye orbits and visualize that you’re seeing darkness, or maybe even blackness. Breathe deeply and slowly. The breathing will bring you oxygen and relaxation. The palming will widen your pupils and will allow the healthy cells in your retina to function better. Then you will find that the room becomes clearer.
Extra Exercises for Retinitis Pigmentosa: The Mask of Zorro
The majority of people with retinitis pigmentosa lose their peripheral vision, but for a while keep their central vision. A minority of people with retinitis pigmentosa just see better peripherally and worse centrally. Other people lose their vision almost completely. In each case, it’s very important for us to work on ourselves, confronting our own personal manifestation of the problem, patiently and frequently.
If you lost most of your central vision to retinitis pigmentosa, place construction paper, with a hole poked out in the area of your central vision, over your eye. Walk in daylight, whether in the garden or in the street, with someone who will hold your hand, unless you’re independent enough. Even though you blocked the vision that you are using most of the time, observe all the details that you can see. Look at smaller details than the ones that you can easily see. So, on the one hand, you would say, “I already have a much smaller portion of the picture.” But, at the same time, you want to build a sense of central vision. Central vision is such that we always look at smaller details than the ones we see.
Look at smaller and smaller details and you will start to see them better and better. Walk with the paper on your eye for a minimum of forty minutes a day, and a maximum of one hundred minutes a day. At first, you may not be able to tolerate the paper for more than ten minutes at a time; in that case, do it eight minutes at a time, and never strain. Always palm before you do it, sometimes palm in the middle of doing it, and often palm after you finish walking with the obstructive construction paper that does not let you see the periphery. Look straight ahead.
Some people laughingly call this exercise “The Mask of Zorro.” Walk with the Mask of Zorro and observe all the details you can see through it. What you’re giving yourself is a chance to wake up all the dormant cells in the center of your retina.
One thing you need to remember is that memory is a powerful tool. Whatever you look at, as fuzzy as it may appear (due to the cells that were destroyed), if you close your eyes and remember it exactly how it was seen, when you open your eyes, it will be at least a tad clearer, and sometimes much more so.
After a few weeks of closing your eyes and remembering what you saw, close your eyes and remember contrast. If you look at white flowers versus green leaves, close your eyes and say, “The flowers are white; the leaves are green,” and in your mind, visualize the flowers to be even brighter white and the leaves to be even darker green. In addition, you could visualize greater sharpness of the different colors that you saw. You could look at the sky and say, “The sky is bright blue and the clouds are white.” To create as much contrast as you could, close your eyes and say, “The ocean is blue, and the waves are white.” The imagery has to come with a sense of realistic colors.
Then visualize larger objects. Visualize that the petals of a flower are large and distinct, even though they may look small, or almost nonexistent with the poor vision you have. Visualize a greater amount of details than the amount of details that you saw with your eyes open.
When you look with the area that is nearly blind, the most important thing is to look through it as if that’s all you can see with. Many people are very disturbed with the whole concept of looking with an area that is damaged. But that’s where healing begins: where you accept exactly the space that you are in. Nurturing your weakest area and feeling okay with it will strengthen every part of your life. You will take away the pressure on the rest of your visual system, and it will be easier for you to use your eyes. Parts of your brain that are no longer active, because of a lack of stimuli from the exact blind spots, will start to work.
You will gain back some of the normal vision in the blind spot. Sometimes the blind spot decreases, and you can slowly control and manage your vision. The loss you would have experienced over a period of five years stretches to a period of twenty-five years, and your visual life becomes more normal and more predictable.
Waving Lights in the Dark
If walking outside in the starlight or in the moonlight is way too difficult and above your capacity, but your central vision is good or even excellent, then sit in a dark room and turn the lights on and off. We also have large glow sticks, which are plastic wands that light up gently in many different colors and blink. The good thing about the wands—we call them magic wands—is that when you wave them at the side of your head, on both sides, as you look straight ahead, they stimulate your peripheral vision.
If you darken the room, use a room that has no windows, or if you put heavy curtains on your windows, and you wave either the wand light or a candle in the dark, the movement will wake up many of the dormant cells that you have. The benefit of the flame of a candle is that it moves, and the movement of the flame activates the rods of the retina. What’s good about wand lights is that you can wave them. Also, they have stronger light than candles and they don’t drip wax. Sometimes the wand lights are too strong for the eyes to exercise and improve as compared to candles.
Spending positive time with your eyes will eliminate the negativity you hear about or experience with them. I once had a patient who came to me in San Francisco from Australia. She was able to improve her central vision from nearsightedness to nearly normal vision, and did not need glasses to look straight ahead, but she had severe retinitis pigmentosa. For ten years, she did not walk freely outdoors at night, but she did walk freely outdoors in the daytime. After she practiced waving lights in the dark, and also having extensive amounts of massage, she was able to walk at night on dark streets for the first time.
For the first few weeks of this exercise, do not use the pieces of paper taped to the bridge of your nose. Then gradually start to use the small, medium, and large pieces of paper taped to the bridge of your nose. Wave the wand lights to the sides of your eyes, and you may get a sense that one eye sees more light than the other eye. If this is the case, close the eye that sees more light for a short while—about five or six seconds—and only use the other eye; then open both eyes and use both. The idea is to create evenness between the two eyes and to make the brain immediately use peripheral vision.
Sometimes, the wand lights will not be visible. Other times, people with retinitis pigmentosa will not notice the color of the lights. So it is better to start with red blinking lights because red has the longest wavelengths, making it the easiest light to see. Then, over time, you can change to different colors.
Truly, anytime someone is experiencing a blind spot, blinking lights and wand lights in a dark room can bring to life the parts of the eye that are not functioning. In this way, you start to create that process of slowly expanding that which you are capable of doing.
A Final Note about Peripheral Exercises
When you have retinitis pigmentosa, no matter what condition your eyes are in, make it a habit to notice the periphery throughout the day. Work the periphery every waking moment. For a few seconds at a time, do the waving of hands in your periphery throughout the day. This way, the two eyes are working together. In the center, one eye can dominate; with the periphery, however, both eyes must work, so one eye cannot dominate the other.
When you wave your hands quickly to the sides of your eyes and close one eye, you only see one hand waving. Close the other eye and you only see the other hand waving. Open both eyes and you see both hands waving. This way you know that both eyes are working together. Go back to chapter 2 and focus mainly on the ten steps.