Chapter 7

Working with Children

We need to learn how to work with our children with the ten steps in chapter 2. I want to refer to how I’ve worked with my own daughter, using the balls that were far away from each other and then getting closer and closer. What’s amazing with my daughter is how well she sees without glasses—sometimes as well as 20/50, even 20/40, which is 80 percent of 20/20. Even these days, when my daughter—who’s already twenty-three—is being tested by a regular optometrist who simply is stressed and sees her like any other client, or gets a little bit nervous about her condition, as she has no lens—it’s called an aphakic eye, and she has a small cornea called microphthalmia—she sees worse. For example, when my daughter went to a new optometrist near a university where she studied in DC, he measured her vision as 20/70 with contact lenses, and she was embarrassed. She didn’t even want to show me the results because I had measured her vision as 20/20 at times. Then, here in San Francisco, she was sent to another optometrist who spoke in a way that made sense to her. She complained that her eyes get dry, so he asked her, “Do you drink coffee?” When she said yes, he told her that drinking coffee dries her eyes. He looked at her acidity level and determined she was too acidic. Then he told her that he did not believe in doctors and tried not to go to them himself. Because of her background and her feeling about doctors—although she loved her pediatric ophthalmologist and her pediatrician, and liked many doctors in general—her philosophy is the same: it’s holistic; you don’t just allow people to push medicines on you. She felt at home with this particular optometrist, and when he fitted her with contact lenses, her vision was nearly 20/25: almost 95 percent of 20/20. The assumption is that if you see with contacts less than 20/20, you will still see 20/20 or better with glasses. It was very interesting that even at the age of twenty-two—not a child any more, but a young adult—when she met a good optometrist, and one to whom she could relate, her vision got much better. I was told by some of my student optometrists that when they massaged children’s shoulders, with the same prescription those children could see two or three lines better on the eye chart; but to jump from 20/70 to 20/25 is to jump by 5 lines on the chart, and that comes only when you’re completely relaxed. Normally, as I mentioned before, when someone has cataracts and the lens is removed, they need glass lenses because glasses help you to see better than contacts. On the contrary, in the case of nearsightedness, contacts allow you to see better than glasses. And children who don’t have a lens replacement see much better through thick glasses.

Kids have to be played with. You can never simply show them exercises and expect them to follow the exercises. Take them to the ocean and show them the waves, patching the strong eye and looking with the weak eye at the waves; play ball with them using an obstructive lens (and to remind you: pop out one lens of cheap sunglasses and put obstructive paper over the other lens), and throw and catch the ball. If your child has blind spots, put him in the dark and cover the area that sees with a patch, then use blinking lights for the area that doesn’t see. These lights can be purchased at the School for Self-Healing.

When we work with our young children, it helps for it to take the form of a game. Some examples of this have already been described. The best game form is working with red and green glasses. Another is the one with balls rolling at different distances, starting with a short distance (like half a yard), then going to a yard, to two yards, and so on. We can put two bowls about two feet apart, then get them closer when the ball rolls between them, to a foot and a half apart, and then get them closer to eight inches apart when the ball rolls again. We can do eleven or twelve games that way. If you have a child with one weak eye, it’s most important that the child should obstruct the eye—which is even better than patching—with small obstruction glasses.

Figure 7.1. If you have a child with one weak eye, it’s most important that the child should obstruct the strong eye with small obstruction glasses.

You can also have the child look at flower petals or at a shifter while looking at black and white stripes, which are basically a nice way of looking up and down on each one of those stripes from beginning to end and vice versa. This will get the child to connect to central vision, to a central fixation. At the same time, it’s very important to work on the periphery. A good game for that is to obstruct the strong eye with a small piece of paper, wave your hand to the side of the strong eye, and catch and throw a ball—but it’s important that the hand has to keep waving.

When a kid is in his early adolescence, at the age of twelve or thirteen, make sure they are looking far into a distance and playing games after half an hour of computer use. And every time, after half an hour of computer use, have the child go out. There was a story in the Israeli newspapers about a mother who brought her daughter to get glasses. The ophthalmologist asked how long her daughter spent looking at a computer, and the answer was that she did so quite a bit. He advised her that after every half hour, her daughter had to play for half an hour, and glasses would not even be needed. Her vision became better than 20/20.

The same thing is needed for teenagers. One thing I’m seeing with many teenagers and young adults is that they like to go to bed late: 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. is common. And whether you’re a younger or an older adult, lights should be out earlier. We should all be sure to get an ample amount of rest. Listen to relaxing music, listen to a nice book on tape, but go to sleep early. Sleeping late leads to continuous fatigue of the body. Also, teenagers should always stretch in the morning and then do all the exercises in the section on myopia in chapter 4. It will work for them just fine, but it’s important to interest them as well. They should look at waves with their weaker eye or look at twelve different points on the horizon and then see twelve different points closer and closer, maybe even seeing boats at a distance. They should play ball; throw the teenager a ball and then kick it, maybe playing with three people together.

If a parent is working with their kid, the parent should do the same thing. That’s the only way that the kid will do it as well. For example, if you want your kid to work on his nearsightedness, work on your nearsightedness. If you want them to patch their stronger eye, patch your own stronger eye or use obstructive lenses. If you want them to look into the distance, do it yourself. The more you do it, the more you believe in it because you will see the results, and your belief will radiate to your kids. Again, playing ball and working at all angles will improve their field of vision. It would also be helpful to work on the peripheral exercises that we mentioned previously.

Years ago, Melissa, whom I talk about in this book, was a patient of Dr. Creig Hoyt, professor of ophthalmology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, and he was very impressed with the improvement she had made using our method. Because he was also impressed with other clients of mine, and because of his experience with my children, and because of his stature—at the time he was considered one of the top pediatric ophthalmologists in the world—Melissa asked him to write a letter recommending research be done on our work. This marvelous man has done just that.

We have no means to discover how one goes about doing this research; neither do we have financial means, nor do we have the personnel. The times that we have contacted the UCSF School of Optometry, the UCSF School of Ophthalmology, and Pacific Presbyterian Hospital—well-known institutions in the Bay area—we always had a warm reception, but they never sent us people to research our work.

Thus far, ten optometrists, ophthalmologists, and vision professionals have written wonderful acknowledgements, giving us tremendous endorsement, but we are still looking for others who will continue researching our work. I hope this quote by a top ophthalmologist will convince more medical professionals of the value that additional research could have for work that will revolutionize the field through natural vision improvement.

The plasticity and potential of the visual system is continuously being explored and redefined. Old notions give way to new potentials. Meir Schneider addresses these issues in his clinical work with patients with various visual problems. His reflections and theories are worth consideration and critical review.

■ Creig Hoyt, MD, professor and chair of the ophthalmology department at UCSF Medical School; director of Beckman Vision Center, San Francisco; and editor of the British Journal of Ophthalmology. Hoyt is regarded as one of the world’s leading pediatric neuro-ophthalmologists. His pioneering studies changed the practice of infant cataract care worldwide.

When we spend a great deal of time focusing on what is directly in front of us, we tend to ignore our peripheral field. To demonstrate the notion that urban life causes atrophy in the perception of peripheral vision, I’d like to present data from a study conducted in Sorocaba, Brazil, whose objective was to assess the effect of visual and physical exercises on visual acuity, based on the Self-Healing Method. The study was developed in four phases and took place over a three-month period, with a group that consisted of thirty-five students in the first to fifth grades, along with two teachers and the preventative purpose of acquiring healthy habits involving vision, body, and breathing. The amazing results reinforce the importance of the evaluation and visual therapy associated with neuropsychomotor development, facilitating learning and socialization of the student:

• In visual acuity, there was an improvement of 39.4 percent in both eyes in reading a line on the Snellen chart from afar.

• In close visual acuity, using the table of large and small letters from the Self-Healing Method, the most significant improvement observed was 24.2 percent in reading letters of type 4 font.

• In relation to the final evaluation of peripheral vision, there was an improvement of 42.8 percent of students who achieved the angle of 90 degrees.

• In the positive results of fusion tests with paper, there was an improvement of 8.6 percent, and on the fusion test with beads, an improvement of 22.8 percent.

This is the first credible research that was done on this work, after so many years of practice. The physical therapists that did this research did it on their own time and were happy to do so. The results were very good. My results are even better with my clients, including children. I would love to have much more research done at the School for Self-Healing and worldwide. If you would like to help us, please donate to the School for Self-Healing. If you have relevant knowledge, donate your knowledge and your time. Or, if possible, you can donate funds for the purpose of researching and saving children’s vision and adult vision with the natural therapy we do.

The conclusive data support my belief that many visual problems result from straining to see, read, and write, a bad habit acquired in the first years of school as students try to please parents and teachers. This tension can be alleviated with relaxation techniques as well as physical and visual exercises, leading to improved visual acuity, and learning that will last a lifetime.

Let me give you a couple of examples of what can be done for children. One that illustrates the body’s amazing power to heal is about Nancy, an eighteen-year-old indigenous Canadian who had suffered from a thyroid problem that resulted in an undeveloped optic nerve. Her left eye was legally blind: she could see 20/200—which is 20 percent of normal vision—with it, and could read from no farther than two inches; her right eye was completely blind, except for color and light perception.

Nancy’s mother had heard about my work and brought her to see me. Our first goal was to stimulate Nancy’s weaker eye by completely patching her stronger left eye with thick black paper, all the way from her nose to her temples, and from her forehead to her cheekbone. Then I had her also cover the patched eye with both hands, and in a totally dark room, I turned on a blinking red light. In about a minute, Nancy was able to see exactly where the light came from; a minute later, she was able to see the shape of the light bulb; after another minute, she saw my general features; two minutes later, she was even able to describe my face. It was a powerful experience that Nancy didn’t immediately comprehend because previous clinical tests failed to provide such dramatic results. The reason for this was that they had been conducted too quickly after covering her strong eye and didn’t give the brain and nerve pathways enough time to wake up.

With her strong eye still covered, I took Nancy outside for the next exercise: she bounced on a trampoline while throwing and catching large, colorful balls. Though she felt unbalanced, she was nonetheless able to accomplish this using her right eye alone.

For an entire week, we spent daily sessions with Nancy’s strong eye patched, walking up and down the street, looking at signs and other objects with her weak eye. When we finally measured, her supposedly blind eye was 20/400 from afar, while her stronger eye improved to 20/60; her vision was closer to normal than it had ever been. If she had not been sitting in that dark room with the blinking light, she would never have known that she had vision in her right eye, and the left eye would never have progressed.

From Nancy’s case we discovered that it takes about three to five minutes for a lazy eye to respond, because the brain is suppressing the activity of that eye. When I sat down and chatted with her during our first appointment, her vision had improved from 20/200 to 20/100. Her mother said, “But we went to all the big specialists in Canada, and she never saw that well.” I said, “She’s comfortable with me because I’m not an uptight physician.”

Her mother also realized that she was being overly protective because Nancy had enough vision to bike and to walk, which gave the girl much more freedom. Her mother acknowledged that Nancy saw just as well as her without her glasses. She said, “It’s not such bad vision, and I’m way too protective.” This is something that is so important for parents to know. One joke that comes to mind is that children wear sweaters when their mothers feel cold. We’re so protective of our children that even if they have vision that is manageable, like 50 percent or 60 percent of 20/20, we try to restrict them: we want them to wear glasses, and if glasses don’t help, we restrict their activity. Whenever her daughter rode a bicycle, walked, or played sports, Nancy’s mother was very afraid for her. As a result, the daughter had to rebel against her mother. Now, mother and daughter are united. In fact, Nancy’s father, who was skeptical at first, was so impressed by the results that he encouraged her to return for treatment, so the entire family made the trip together.

During that visit our emphasis was on eye teaming—getting the two eyes to work together. When she was seeing only with her left eye there was so much pressure on that eye and the whole visual system that her vision was fuzzy. Besides the exercises we did to clarify the vision in her left eye there was great relaxation in seeing with both eyes. By distributing the vision between the two eyes she improved from 20 percent to 70 percent of normal vision. And that’s the way to go with children and adults.

Another wonderful story is that one of my students in Brazil called to tell me that her grandson was born with toxoplasmosis—when you have bacteria or a virus sitting in the placenta and it attacks parts of the body after birth, quite often the eye; in this case, it was the right macula, the central, most precious part of the retina, which led to blindness in the right eye. She asked, “Should we just listen to the doctors who said he’ll have vision in the left eye, forget the right eye?” I said, “No way.” Then I told her to patch his left eye, and have a blinking light in front of his right eye. I said to play with him and use instruments with both sound and light.

In fact, I’ve seen something from an electric store that made noise and light like a traffic light: green, yellow, and red, blinking on and off and making different noises with each color. I asked them to reproduce that effect. Or simply use a light that blinks with a circuit breaker: 40 watts, or only 15 watts if the infant responds to it; sometimes as many as 60 or 80 watts, depending on if you see that the infant is curious. You can also use the simple, small light that we sell at the school, which blinks as you get close or far from the infant. Then take the infant outdoors with a patch and play games, but only after you did light and dark games in a dark room.

They called me twenty days later, when I returned from an overseas trip, and told me the doctor had said that there was only a small scar in his right eye and that most of the macula functioned. I told them, “Don’t stop working with him. Now stimulate the two eyes: patch one eye, and then the other eye, take him outdoors, show him details, and talk to him about all the objects you are showing him in spite of the fact that he’s only an infant.” What I eventually heard was, “There is no scar. The two eyes see perfectly fine.” At the age of four there was another attack, as the virus was still in his nervous system, and so we continued with the exercises. I met him when he reached the age of eight. His father was religious, and they were studying in a religious school, doing much reading, and we had to deal with simple myopia: no obstruction, no disappearance of the central vision; it was simple nearsightedness, corrected with glasses, and we worked on maintaining the clarity of his vision. It was hard because the kid was studying a lot. A couple of years ago, I met him again, but he was no longer a child—he was already a movie producer with good vision in both eyes, sometimes dry, sometimes fatigued with some weak tendencies (which happens to anyone who uses their eyes too much), but with no absence of vision.

Your children are precious. More and more people want to learn from me how to work with them. The key is not to let other people trick you into giving up on your own children. First and foremost, don’t listen to the optometrist who tells you that your child should adjust to eyeglasses. Glasses are like instruments: sometimes we have no choice but to wear them simply because education requires a lot of reading. But then, put them on and take them off as you study. That is true for adults as well as for children; it is especially critical for kids because those who keep wearing glasses will eventually have a great amount of nearsightedness. Therefore, the important thing is to use them as a tool, just like you use binoculars to see distance, or a telescope to look at stars, and not ever to use them as something that has to be a part of your face. This is extremely important. They are as addictive as drugs, as destructive as a bad habit, and a bad thing to do for your eyes. I would like to urge every parent and every responsible adult to have his or her child wear glasses only when the child gets tired of looking or doesn’t see well. It is also relevant to find time to work with red-and-green glasses. Let the medical profession give up on your kids; you shouldn’t.

I’ve been working with Lukas, who has an amblyopic eye (a lazy eye, 20/20 with one eye, 20/60 with the other) and does not use it. How very interested he was in that eye whenever he looked through the red-and-green glasses and saw pictures through the green lens. Then he stopped being interested in seeing pictures and was only attracted to reading letters; then he was fascinated by art. It is essential to discover along with your child—not just to tell him or her—what is interesting to the brain; this will help to stimulate the weaker eye. You can’t simply do an exercise with a child, because a child develops the brain through curiosity. And one of the most captivating things for both children and adults is that what makes us curious at one moment in our life may not evoke our curiosity at another time. For adults, what interests us presently might not interest us in six months. For a child, what may have been interesting two days ago may not be interesting now simply because of development. It is our job to know what truly interests our children.

It’s important to learn from your children what they want to see; you cannot tell them what is going to interest them. I will never forget the time my daughter went for a routine test and met an optometrist who was not familiar to her. She was used to a very nice young man who, in a very loving way, would measure her vision before her visit with the ophthalmologist. At this point, however, there was a new optometrist: a woman who measured her vision, and my daughter immediately saw worse. Consequently, the optometrist employed greater and greater corrections, as they normally and very mistakenly do. Instead of my daughter’s vision being around 20/30 or 20/40, it became 20/100. When I arrived at the hospital after that appointment and before the doctor’s appointment, I found my ex-wife very upset. I put my daughter on my shoulders, gave her an eye patch to cover her left eye, and asked her to look at the cars that were moving below the window of the seventh floor at UCSF’s hospital. It was a wonderful view, and she became extremely interested in everything: the cars, the trees. Though I personally wasn’t interested in cars and trees, who am I to discourage someone, about to be ten years old, who looked and looked and looked. I had to take a break for a moment, and when I returned to the doctor’s office, I discovered that her vision without glasses was 20/60—way better than the 20/100 with correction. And the doctor looked at her eyes and started to joke with her, saying, “I see that you have boyfriends in your eyes.” And she yelled at him and said, “I have no boyfriends.” He asked her then, “What do you like to eat?” She said, “Pizza.” He asked, “What do you think about the pizza in the cafeteria here?” She said, “Pizza!” and she yelled at him like you would yell at a beloved uncle. He made a lot of money from her surgeries; she was an external patient. But the connection between them was very deep, and she was one of his most successful cases: a bright young kid whom he held in high regard while at the peak of his career. There was such a deep connection between them that when she was near him, she saw much better. The first time—three days before she turned ten—she saw 20/20 on the eye chart. His interest was piqued because I was there and I had put her on my shoulders. Her need to see better increased because she was there with a physician who wanted to see her at her best, who looked at it like an objective test he needed to pass; she cooperated because she wanted him to pass. Both of them had a unity and a union that neither was aware of. That’s how you should feel as a parent: Encourage your child to see best just by being concerned.

I was able to stretch the interest in certain ways with my daughter for as long as three years, but no more than that. For ten years she wasn’t interested in the waves near her home even when she was looking at them. She became interested in waves ten years later as she became a young woman. I had to find other ways to capture her interest, like putting her on my shoulders and taking her to the beach. Another way was going to a museum and getting her to close one eye while looking at different pictures.

The point is not only to evoke interest in your children, but also to be interested in the same things ourselves in order to best understand our children. And then, if there is an amblyopic eye, a strabismic (cross-sighted) eye, or a weak eye, to stimulate it. I was able to persuade my kids to be interested in clouds, rain, and signs, while they were blocking their strong eye with an obstructive lens and looking with their weak eye. I cannot tell everyone through this book what will interest their own children, which could be different things in different times. In Lukas’s case, it was pictures at first, then letters, then art, and now we’re waiting to see what’s going to interest him next. The interest can also be the way in which we do things. For example, when I get my classes to sequentially put the small, medium, and large pieces of paper between their eyes and wave their hands to the side quickly, they are interested in it as a new exercise; however, their interest soon wanes. What then draws their attention is playing music and dancing and clapping hands with each other. As you can imagine, my classes become very dynamic. People stand up with a small piece of paper between their eyes and, looking at the paper, they clap each other’s hands, seeing their hands and each other’s hands in their periphery, which wakes up their periphery greatly. Next, they do the same with the medium piece of paper, then the large one, and then they repeat it with the medium and small pieces of paper. All of a sudden it seems that the small paper doesn’t exist for them, because their periphery has become so wide, and when they remove the small paper, they don’t understand how their field of vision has become so large. There is also a sense of more light in the room, even though there is not actually any additional light—it only seems that way because the retina receives so much more light in 90 percent of the people who have done this exercise. The Melissa Exercise can attract curiosity, and as I also mentioned, so can the Melissinia; the small piece of paper that you put on one eye is beneficial because the vision in that one eye expands.

Similar to children, adults also lose interest; however, children lose it first. As adults, it is our job not to fight with them, and not to demand from them, but to actually learn what gets them interested. I can vouch for my twenty-six-year-old son and twenty-three-year-old daughter, both of whom will take an interest in obstructing the strong eye (for my daughter, it is the left one; for my son, the right) and playing ball with each other for at least a short while. After five minutes, however, I’d better find something different because it will lose their interest, and I still want them to do the exercise. That’s why we have invented so many exercises: to bring the curious mind into activity so that the eyes can function at their best, with the same principles we have brought to you through this book.

Sônia, who gave a wonderful acknowledgment and dedication to this book, is a relatively young practitioner of my work, as she’s approaching her late forties. She was born and raised in Brazil and has been practicing for many years in a town called Rio Claro. In the past, when Brazil was still a Third World country, some generous donors from England had donated funds to build a special room specifically for Sônia’s practice in Rio Claro. It’s a dark room with many lights, swings, and computers. Sônia is well educated; she studied at four different universities and learned how to help the visually impaired use computers with both sound and large print. She also learned how to work with mentally challenged people and helped them reach the maximum of their capacity to function well in life. Sônia has also worked with deaf people. With her great work, people from all the region of São Paulo came to work with Sônia at the public clinic, to be helped by her to adjust to their disabilities and function well. But Sônia has never felt comfortable to simply help people adjust to being disabled; she always wants to find a way out of their limitations. This is probably because she had a very rough adolescence herself. She was sexually assaulted at gunpoint, but decided to help humanity, to help individuals move forward and be in a better place. This is a different attitude than many others who are assaulted. She became pregnant as a result of that assault and decided to keep the kid, which was a wonderful decision. That kid became a beautiful woman, a very good dentist, and a wonderful professional.

Sônia heard about my work as it became more known in Brazil and came to one of my big workshops. She approached an ophthalmologist who worked with her and had been sending people for her to train to function with their disabilities and to reach their potential. She asked him to come with her to the workshop, but he said that I must be a charlatan. He wasn’t the first or the last to say that, but I hadn’t heard that for a long time. I heard it in my adolescence and lately I’ve heard it only once, during a talk show in Berkeley, California. Sônia brought the ophthalmologist to my workshop, and he was so impressed that at the end of the workshop, he bought all of my literature. She then decided to attend training in my work, and eventually became a trainer. While the apprenticeship program or intern program takes 500 hours, she studied for 1,500 hours. Everything that Sônia does, she does in a deep way. And so you can assume that any time that she meets a person in need, she has a great desire to help. Which is what happened to Maria.

Maria came crying to the public clinic that Sônia was running. It was the same clinic that started with donations from England and became one of the most famous public clinics in South America, thanks to Sônia. Maria was sent by an ophthalmologist because her four-month-old infant was born without an iris, which was a disaster. The iris does many things for the eye: it expands the diameter of the pupil and shrinks it; it expands for night vision and shrinks for day vision. Also, the pupils, to a great extent, affect your sense of well-being just as the autonomic nervous system that puts you on alert or puts you in a place of relaxation is affected by pupillary diameter. And the pupils, to a great extent, determine how much light will get into your retina. It affects your nervous system. The ophthalmologist said to the mother, “This baby is not going to see. She’s going to be blind.” So when Maria came to Sônia she said, “My baby is going to be blind for life.” Sônia looked at the baby. She understood the feeling of the ophthalmologist, but she experimented for herself, as she always does. She is an explorer. She shined light in the infant’s eye and she saw that the infant was responding. She looked at the mom with a great sense of concern and said, “Can you imagine the possibility that your baby will not be blind?” The mother was startled. “Of course not. The ophthalmologist said she’ll be blind.”

Sônia knew that at that age, a mother and a daughter are one unit; nothing truly separates them, and their skin is nothing but a connective tissue between them. Sônia felt a great affinity with the mother and connected to her situation. Her eyes were asking the mother to look at a different possibility and a different reality, and their connection was heart to heart. She then asked, “Would you imagine the possibility that your baby can see?” The mother said, “Maybe. Maybe she won’t be blind after all.” And then Sônia taught her sunning and how to palm her daughter, as well as massaging, light therapy, blinking light in the dark, and all the therapies that she learned from me. Only she did them better. The mother came back again and again, and after four months, a full, normal iris was formed. The ophthalmologist said, “I don’t understand this.” And Sônia showed it to me with great relief and with tears. I looked into Sônia’s soul and I told myself this is how the world should be.