Vision for Life

by Meir Schneider

  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 sy
stem 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.