Working with our emotional issues is a lifelong task as you are probably very aware, and it can be frustrating to have so many layers that we need to work through to make changes. But remember that the rewards are not just the potential for clearer eyesight, but also a happier and more emotionally capable you.
I want to mention a helpful concept when feeling overwhelmed by the idea of attempting to work with our emotions. Remember that if you are open to being self-observant, what you start to notice about your eyesight (perhaps pushed along by your frustrations with your eyesight) will guide you to discover what inner changes are needed to make it emotionally safe to see again.
Yet before you can even start to look at understanding the effects of old fear, anger and pain, the main emotions refractive errors are based on, you need to deal with those parts of yourself that resist change.
What we have found in our work is that we all create forms of strong emotional protection in early life. This protection usually consists of inhibitions that affect many aspects of our lives, personalities, behaviours and choices, as well as the physical aspect of blur to protect us from seeing what is ‘out there’ (this is for myopes – the opposite being what is ‘near me’ for hyperopes). Change (such as changing visual and emotional habits) represents a threat to this vital protection and so we also create barriers to making any fundamental changes in ourselves and our habits.
To uphold these barriers we create ‘guardians’, our internal watchdog(s) who provide a constant inner dialogue on our behaviour and choices, and distract and disparage us when we start to make moves to change. The trick here is that if we try to imagine getting rid of our guardian they hold on even stronger. We may think he/she hates and wants to control us for negative reasons. However we must realize he/she loves us and their entire existence is based around protecting us. These inner parts of us are doing it the way they learned to when we were children and they haven’t learned anything different yet.
When we can consciously realize what is going on, and choose to acknowledge and love our guardian, we can then help them to change – towards protecting us in ways that are not so limiting. Then, and only then, can we start to change the way we deal with our deeper and most long-seated emotions, and as a result, we can discover the ways in which we are doing the vision activities that are tense and distracted, rather than fully present and relaxed.
This is a simplified explanation of this important factor of our inner emotional world that I hope might shed some light on areas that you are getting near but perhaps haven’t yet had your full attention.
An important tool in your kit for working in this way is to know that our emotions and subconscious work in metaphorical images. Knowing this means we can use it to our advantage to understand ourselves and make changes to this mysterious inner world that so impacts on our thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
Below I offer a suggestion for all those who want to improve vision that deteriorated in childhood.
Do an internal visualizing process to begin to discover, acknowledge and work with the following two vitally important elements of your inner world:
- Find and draw your guardian (actually physically draw the image in colour). Acknowledge the ways in which they currently protect you. Does he/she make you small, inferior, scared, inhibited or other?
- Start to talk to him/her about your desire to change the way you deal with tension in your life and the new ways in which you can still be safe doing this.
- Reassure them that you will never get rid of them but let them help you stay safe always.
- Visualize the changes to your guardian and their protection tools/behaviour as they begin to relax and let the adult you take over some of the protection job. (For instance, let a ‘wall’ that blocks vision and interaction become a ‘translucent cloak’ that moves and flows where it is needed.)
- Redraw your new version of your guardian.
When this is done you may be also able to go into a similar process and find the child inside you who is stuck at the age right before you first got glasses.
- Take this child in your arms and take him/her to a safe place in your heart.
- Begin to talk to directly to this child about being in your life once again, about your love for him/her and how you will keep your child safe but allow him/her to express herself in your life, and allow your child’s joy and visual clarity to become a part of your conscious world once again.
This is one type of work that numbers of students who come to work with me in person, or Personal Eyesight Training students contacting me for assistance are finding useful. Particularly those who have been doing great work with their activities but are finding some areas frustrating.
It is a refined concept based on parts of the emotional healing processes of many, many vision students.
I hope you are able to do any of these processes in a small or large way, or even allow just the ideas to help you direct your steps more towards the pathway back to emotional and visual clarity.
This is excellent. some of the same work I’ve been doing to reduce my own lifelong myopia, first getting glasses at age 5. My guardian is very like my mother, anxious and fearful, always warning me to pull back and not try anything new, seeing danger everywhere. Ongoing journaling has helped a lot, and laughing at myself (with my child firmly in hand) helps even more. Thank you for the excellent important work you are doing to empower people to improve their vision.