Vision for Life

Chapter 6

Pathology Conditions

Correcting Cataracts

A cataract, put simply, is a cloudy spot on the lens of the 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.

Since the purpose of the lens is to transfer light to the retina, 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 midseventies. Upon visits to their eye doctors, they discover that they have cataracts.

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 is 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 the cases when cataracts begin, they can be stalled and even stopped for dozens of years, if not eliminated altogether. Moreover, cataracts can be prevented. The lens of modern life does not have the chance for full functioning. It becomes thick and opaque because it doesn’t move the way it was designed by nature to move.

With the exception a child whose lens is opaque in infancy, in which case medicine has proven to be a 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. Other times, we have glaucoma attacks that could blind the eye, or there is bleeding in the retina as a result of cataract surgery.

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 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 hospitals in the United States, and had cataract surgery. There were complications in the surgery itself. But after the four-hour surgery that should have lasted for only forty minutes, his vision became 20/25, 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, as with Brett, who had expected to see 20/20 in his right eye. Brett’s doctors didn’t take into consideration 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, the result of the surgery in his right eye was not nearly as positive as it was in the previous surgery in his left eye. But in Hannan’s case, where the physicians were sure there would not be any good 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.

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 halted the onset of cataracts, so they didn’t need the surgery. Some, however, have not improved. But even for those who did not improve, the fact that they did the exercises was good 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. The goal isn’t to avoid surgery; it is the health of the eye. If you can prevent the surgery, that’s 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 is to request that your surgeon correct both eyes 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, as well as to engage your peripheral and central vision in a dynamic and different way.

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 a 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, as in the Melissa exercise.

Figure 6.1. The point of bouncing is to distract your mind and body while you practice the 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 sugar (glucose) 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, from heart problems to a loss of limbs. And 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 in which new vesicles are formed. This response is very useful in every other part of the body. For example, if you are bedridden for a month because of a serious illness, you’ll have pain when you first stand up, partly because you don’t have enough blood flow to your legs. Very quickly, though, the body will 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 important, learn to exercise in a way that loosens the neck and brings more blood flow to your whole body and prevents lack of blood flow to your head and retinas.

Exercise Program for Diabetes: 40 Minutes Daily

• Massage: 20 minutes daily.

• Shifting/Looking at Details: 10 minutes daily.

• Extra Exercise for Diabetes: 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.

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 to overcome the disadvantages of your diabetes constantly.

For your extra daily exercise, you may choose from any of the following. On some days you might want to practice them all!

Figure 6.2. Bringing more blood flow to the head and retinas.

Extra Exercises for Diabetes

Tapping

I have found throughout the years 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 for you to sit down, hold your legs, and rub your feet one against the other. That can help you to create more circulation. The extremities, such as the feet and hands, are far from the heart. So are 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 every part of 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, and 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

Many people with diabetes develop a major blind spot in their retina. If this is happening to you, hang an eye chart on the wall at eye level and wave your hand 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 you are experiencing. Review all the exercises in the rest of the book and do them with the stronger eye while you wave your hand 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 place a piece of paper with a small opening in the area of blindness in front of your weaker eye. 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 chapter on glaucoma for suggestions on using blinking lights.

A Note about Laser Treatments

I would like to discourage you from having too many laser treatments. Many concerned physicians do preventive laser treatments in which 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 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 effects. My recommendation is to do the injections only when there is bleeding, and not 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 have them test you for bleeding and for any compromise of your retina or optic nerve.

Correcting Glaucoma

Glaucoma is a disease of the optic nerve, often caused by irregular pressure in the eyes, that 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 (the area where the nerve connects to the retina). 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 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, it has been difficult to determine what the pressure truly is after Lasik surgery.

We would like to assume that normal pressure in the eye is between 10 and 20 mercury points. Anything less than 10 could be insufficient 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 is even weaker in people who have glaucoma. 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, the optic disk degenerates and is destroyed even at a pressure under that which is considered to be desirable for most of us. The optic disk is a weak and 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 mercury points that most of us would desire to have), the optic disk can still be destroyed. Still, the prevailing viewpoint is that the problem is the high pressure in high-tension glaucoma patients, and if they have surgery to reduce the pressure, the problems will go away. 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 works only on the eye pressure without considering other factors.

Recently 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—there was 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. I am happy she refused.

I believe that the following can help people with glaucoma:

• Reduction of pressure (in this I agree with doctors)

• Balanced use of the two eyes and within each eye

• Sufficient circulation to nourish 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 was 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 do, the optic disk may be fine but could also 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.

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, and 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 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), or even 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 do. There are many different situations that can cause glaucoma, so apply this book in a way that works for your specific situation.

Some people may have 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 may have lost hardly any vision and, therefore, do the eye exercises to prevent any potential vision loss and to sharpen their vision. Some people may 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 situations 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 she had developed toward the end of her life. He discovered much anger that she had against some people which 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 a 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 run 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.

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 for 30 minutes a day.

• Sunning: 20 minutes daily.

• Headlines (from the section on astigmatism): 10 minutes.

• Block the Strong Eye (tape the medium-sized 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. Find time here and there to always work on healing your vision.

Physical Exercises for Glaucoma

Good thoughts and good prayer can be healing. Visualize that blood is circulating to your retina, making it soft and nurturing 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 the aqueous humor is flowing into the front area of your eye from the lens to the cornea, 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 power that brings rain from the sky and wind to the earth, the 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 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, will reduce it. Other exercises will be important to preserve your vision. All of them will be a pleasure to do. 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.

Special Instructions for Palming with Glaucoma

You should only palm for up to ten minutes at a time. Then wait at least five minutes before palming again. 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 a half an hour all at once, you can have an increase in pressure of 4 mercury points.

Exercises for Glaucoma

Sunning is one of the best eye exercises you can do for glaucoma because it temporarily reduces your 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 could 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 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 have 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, hold your head steady 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 throughout 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 up toward the sky and down 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 vertebrae 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. Do not massage around the eyes here, 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 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 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 the 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 from side to side in order to pump more blood into the head and loosen the neck. If you have good balance, then 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 second finger. If it’s hard for you to do three things at once (moving your head from side to side all the way gently and steadily, moving your legs up and down, and massaging your palm, all at the same time), then 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. Those are things that can help you to bring more blood flow and to 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. 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.

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, surpass 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 the chest muscles as well as the 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 people feel that the neck is looser when they do this exercise. Then put your hands behind your head and lift up your head without the neck helping you. Do this 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.

Figure 6.3. (a) Bend your knees, stretch out your arms, and turn to face your left hand. (b) Reach your right arm across to and past the left hand.

Another great exercise for the neck is to walk backward. Do that for 400 or 500 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. While you lie on the floor, your friend will put his or her legs on your shoulders to hold you in place, put one hand cupped under your chin and the other cupped at the occipital bone, and gently pull, stretching and elongating 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.

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. Now 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 the 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 6.4. (a) Also sit cross-legged and move your whole body in a rotating motion. (b) Let the head roll loosely as your body rotates. (c) Make big, full circles with your body.

Next (as long as you don’t have retinal detachment), get down on all fours and put the crown of your head 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.

Figure 6.5. Rotate your head to the left and to the right several times and then in a circular motion on the floor.

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 (i.e., 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 the 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 6.6. 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 so your forehead touches your knees about twenty times, which 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 had started. Start over again from the beginning, turning your head from side to side. You may find that your neck is much looser now.

Figure 6.7. Turn your head from side to side.

Figure 6.8. Push your knees to the left and then to the right.

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; Eye Bright tea, in particular, has been very effective for me.

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.

These exercises are essential for reduction of tension. After doing these exercises every day for a period of time of around three months, measure your pressure and see if it has gone down. If so, you may be able to prevent the need to use eye drops, as long as your ophthalmologist does not oppose the idea; at the very 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.

Correcting Optic Neuritis

Optic neuritis is a condition caused by a temporary swelling from inflammation of the optic nerve. The worst-case scenario with optic neuritis 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, the treatments create dependency.

When you suffer from optic neuritis, a very good thing 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 would 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 those would be intended 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 good for the optic nerve. You must rest your optic nerve for the inflammation of the nerve to disappear.

Staying in a dark room and 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 hospital rooms can exacerbate a problem like this. 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.

Medication can help in extreme cases, but sometimes it 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 would determine the urgency, or not, for you to be put on medication.

When the optic neuritis passes, diligently practice the ten steps in Chapter 2.

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. And 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, postcataract 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 higher 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 received a head-butt during a violent fight in prison. As a result of the fight, his retina detached, and the prison physician was not capable of diagnosing it. Only after he had served his term was he seen by a top ophthalmologist, who told him that he had already had a detachment for several months. So he had reattachment surgery, and to his amazement, as well as his ophthalmologist’s and my own, his vision returned to almost 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 (e.g., in the section on glaucoma) could hurt since they require you to bend your head down, which could cause damage. So in the acute time of retinal detachment, don’t do movement exercises; instead, massage is the best option for you to relax the tension in your neck and back. After the detachment has healed, then it is 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 one day 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 very 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: 20 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.

With retinal detachment, after exercising the blind or 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. When we wake up the dormant cells, we have access to more vision.

Figure 6.9. Look at details with the parts of your eyes that are not functioning well.

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 with paper obstruct the parts of your disabled eye that are still functioning. 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 dark room. Now you will want to 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 6.10. Use blinking or flashing lights in a dark room to activate the parts of the eyes that are not working.

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!

Figure 6.11. The small blinking lights we use at the school.

A much more subtle way of accomplishing this same exercise is to obstruct the functional part of your eyes and to 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. 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.

Figure 6.12. Our magic wands.

If you have some vision, obstruct your strong eye with a patch and your weak eye with paper with holes cut out for the weak areas to look through. 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 will 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 the gel-like substance that covers the surface of the retina, 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 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 pinholes and 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 surprising. The secret is to look at them! You just walk outdoors on a very 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, somewhere with a nice view to look at. As you look at the view, floaters will appear. As they appear, look right at the floaters; 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 and then 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.

Choose a floater to look at, possibly the largest one, and when it 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 mistakenly 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 is perfect now compared to how it used to be; it is better without his glasses, and it’s better with his glasses, and with much less correction. (This wonderful man volunteered to have his picture taken as the model on my DVD, Yoga for Your Eyes, which has helped many people to see better.)

Tony used the internal forces of his own body to improve his eyes, and the improvement was massive. You can do the same. 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 such a person’s viewpoint, one day he or she sees perfectly, and the next day his or her central vision has disappeared. When the person meets an ophthalmologist, the ophthalmologist has absolutely nothing to offer 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 Puckers and Holes:

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.

• Pinhole Glasses: 10 minutes daily.

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 become part of your daily life in an organic way. This is the way to improve for the long term.

Figure 6.13. Pinhole glasses and pinhole glasses with obstruction.

Extra Exercise for Macular Puckers and Holes: Pinhole Glasses

Put the pinhole glasses on and 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, preferably 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 see only 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, no more than half a centimeter. That’s enough for you to see the letter moving in the opposite direction from 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.

Figure 6.14. Use the eye that has the macular hole in it to look straight ahead at an eye chart.

Normally, when you have a macular pucker, you see better peripherally. So next, cover the entire lens over the weaker eye 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 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.

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 with only 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

Note: If you have turned to this section because you have retinitis pigmentosa, you should not read on without a broader understanding of our approach. Please go back to the beginning of the book and work from there onward. Be aware of all the deep concepts of life, vitality, and vision. Then you will be ready to work with this section.

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 did 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 first if I recognize you and then, only if I don’t, 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 (i.e., 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

• Palming: 24 minutes daily.

• Sunning: 20 minutes daily.

• Night Walking: 1 hour, twice a week (if possible).

• Shifting: 10 minutes daily.

• Extra Exercises: 20 minutes daily.

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—and 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 a man 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 enter a slightly darker room, 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. So these 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. Now, there’s no question that even though the treatment was very intensive and fruitful, the therapy did not regenerate 80 to 82 percent of his peripheral field in four days. In all likelihood, what had happened was that though 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 students in his classes raised their hands. He had been superintendent of education for Michigan, and whenever he visited classes before, when he looked straight ahead, he wouldn’t see anyone who had been raising a hand. Now he could.

So whenever you move to a differently lit room, palm. 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.

Extra Exercises for Retinitis Pigmentosa

The Mask of Zorro

A minority of people with retinitis pigmentosa 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 use most of the time, observe all the details that you can see. Look at smaller details than the ones 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 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 a hundred minutes a day. At first, you may not be able to tolerate the paper for more than ten minutes at a time; do it just 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 your walk. Look straight ahead while you walk.

Some people laughingly call this exercise “The Mask of Zorro.” So, walk with the Mask of Zorro and observe all the details you can see through it. You’re giving yourself 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 you saw it, 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. So, 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 an even brighter white and the leaves to be an 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 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 moonlight is way too difficult and above your capacity, and your central vision is good or even excellent, then sit in a dark room and turn lights on and off. At the School for Self-Healing we use fiber-optic lights, which look like many strands of plastic spaghetti sticking out from the end of a plastic wand. The wand projects a light that causes the strands to light up in many different colors. They turn on and off, and we can wave them sideways. The good thing about fiber-optic lights is that when you wave them—we call them magic wands—it stimulates your peripheral vision, provided you’re looking forward. In the past we would put down newspapers to protect the floor from falling wax because we used candles for this exercise.

If you wave either a fiber-optic light or a candle in the dark, the movement will wake up many of the dormant cells you have. The benefit of the flame from a candle is that it moves, and the movement of the flame activates the rods of the retina. What’s good about fiber-optic lights is that you can wave them. Also, they have stronger light than candles and do not drip wax. Sometimes, however, the fiber-optic 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.

After a few weeks of this exercise, gradually start to use small, medium, and large pieces of paper taped to the bridge of your nose. Wave the fiber-optic 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 use only 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 fiber-optic 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 light waves, 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 fiber-optic 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

If 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. Wave your hands in your periphery for a few seconds at a time throughout the day. This way, the two eyes will be 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 to the sides of your eyes and close one eye, you see only one hand waving. Close the other eye, and you see only the other hand waving. Open both eyes, and you see both hands waving. This way you know that both eyes are working together.