As the incidence of pathological eyes diseases increase, it’s good to learn about some of the ways that you can help to support your eye health with the food you eat.  With the long term effects of diseases such as macular degeneration becoming common in larger numbers of the population, especially as we age, we hope that preventive measures can become better known.

Macular degeneration is a disease affecting the light receiving retinal cells of the area behind the pupil called the macula lutea.  The retinal cells in this area die off, resulting in a loss of the central area of our vision that provides our coloured, detailed and sharp eyesight.  As you read you will see that to prevent this disease (and others) we must provide the nutrients needed for cellular integrity and immune strength.

Feast Your Eyes, a book by Sydney doctor Minas Coroneo, discusses his discoveries from working in a clinic he set up in an old people’s home in Greece.  The greatly reduced number of incidences of macular degeneration he saw there compared to Australia, along with other similar studies, show that elements in the traditional Mediterranean diet may help to protect against developing macular degeneration.

Those who eat a serving of omega-3 rich fish every week appear 30% less likely to develop the disease, the same is applicable to those eating one or two serves of nuts each week.  Olive oil has recently come under view as not being suitable for frying foods in, due to its low burning point, however those who eat about 7tbsp of olive oil per week reduced the likelihood of developing the severe form of the disease by 50%.

Extra virgin olive oil can be added to salads and other foods once they are on the plate, in the same way that we have learned to use other sensitive yet highly nutritious oils such as linseed (flaxseed) oil.

Green leafy vegetables and citrus fruits also help to fight macular degeneration, providing a wide range of both vitamins and minerals essential to eye health and the immune system.

Low –GI foods also help to reduce the risk of macular degeneration as well as helping to sustain a balanced blood sugar level.  Choose foods with the lowest level of processing possible, ie whole grain foods over white flour foods, and preferably whole grains over breads, pastas etc.

These nutritional studies illustrate once more the important of not just elimination ‘bad fats’ from the diet, but also how vital it is to include ‘good fats’ on a regular basis.  Good fats are essential to cellular health and good nerve function, and therefore to healthy functioning today – and also to maintaining that good function over time, and preventing future illness.

So some reminders about important elements of nutritional care for your eyes and body include:

• Eat a regular supply of good fats, preferably from unprocessed food sources such as fish, nuts and avocados.
• When using oils, ensure they are cold-pressed, organic if possible, and are stored in opaque, not clear, glass bottles. Buy small quantities and use them up within 3 weeks.  Store them in a cool, dark place. Remember that heat, air and light all transform good oils into bad oils.
• Remember that you cannot always tell by taste or smell if an oil has gone rancid.
• First choice for foods is raw, next is steamed, then last choice is cooked with oil.  If you choose the last option, cook with small amounts of oils that have a high heat tolerance, such as coconut oil.
• If using linseed oil, ensure you purchase it refrigerated, and in a dark bottle or box, and keep it that way, removing it only to pour your serving onto your food on the plate (never heat it!) and then return immediately to the fridge.  Write the opening date on the bottle and discard according to the usage suggestion on the bottle.
• Vary your ‘good fat’ foods to ensure you get the widest spread of nutrients possible.
• The same applies to the rest of your fresh foods – vary your fruits and vegetables to obtain the greatest spread of nutrients.  The colours in fruits and vegetables give some indications of what nutrients they are high in ie; red and orange colouration indicate good levels of vitamin C.
• Remember that cooking foods can destroy some nutrients, such as vitamin C, so also ensure you eat the same foods both raw and sometimes cooked, to unlock all the nutrients.

Notice what foods come out locally and seasonally and endeavour to include fresh seasonal foods where possible in your diet.  Generally these will offer good nutritional support to your body for the coming weather conditions.

Although our ability to obtain foods from distant climates in our supermarkets does make seasonal availability less obvious, keep an eye out for produce available in quantity and at lower prices than the rest of the year, and ask what is sourced locally.   It’s a great way to eat healthy and economically too!

You can also ask your green grocer what is coming in freshly harvested, and what has been in long term cold storage before being offered.  While they may appear fresh, foods that have been stored for long periods also will have decay in their nutritional value.

Nutritional studies over the years tend to show us the same basic principles: eating food as fresh, unprocessed and varied as possible.  Are you eating something ‘off the vine’ ie; in its natural unaltered state, every day?

Last month I gave a series of talks at the Sunshine Coast libraries. It was wonderful to be working with people in person again after several years of working at a distance due to being home with Zinnia (my little girl who is now 2 ½). I noticed a number of interesting things while discovering more about each group of attendees. They came from all walks of life, but had so much in common in regards to eyesight.

Unlike giving talks in previous decades, a significant number of people had already heard of the concept that eyesight can improve.  Yet only one person had ever heard of important eyesight functions such as saccadic movement, and he heard about it from attending a seminar with Janet Goodrich years ago.

At the talks I spoke about the history of Natural Vision Improvement, from the origins in Dr Bates’ clinic in New York nearly 100 years ago, through the years of Margaret Corbett and her group of instructors in Los Angeles. Then on to Janet Goodrich who studied with the youngest of the Corbett teachers, and used Reichian therapy and the Bates method for her own vision. Janet worked for many years in international practice and then trained me 16 years ago, bringing us to our modern practice of vision improvement.

Dr William Bates

Margaret Corbett

Dr Janet Goodrich

Discussing what the numbers on a prescription mean is a very important start for those learning about their eyesight.  We need to know what our eyesight is doing right now in order to know where to go, so I always cover what it means when there are numbers in the sphere, cylinder, axis and add sections of a prescription and what this means for an individual’s eyesight.

Anatomy is also important so I illustrated the six large exterior muscles of the eye and their positions.  These muscles work in pairs and one muscle in each eye passes through the trochlea, a cartilage structure connected to the skull bones.  This configuration means that skull bone alignment can play a role in turning eyes.

The Six Large Exterior Eye Muscles

The eye has seven muscles in total so we also looked at the seventh muscle, the interior ciliary muscle, which surrounds the lens in a circular ring (seen in cross-section below) and is responsible for changing the shape of the lens for focusing up close.

I covered a basic overview of the common refractive errors, emphasizing this particular label.  I find the phrase ‘refractive error’ very important.  When we describe eyesight, what we are describing is a process of the refraction of light. Light enters the pupil, passes through the lens, and must be perfectly refracted onto the fovea centralis (a tiny area of the retina packed with detail and colour receiving cone cells).

Good refraction equals good eyesight. With the blur of the common eyesight problems, we have the same physical structures – no damage, no deformity, no disease…but  the lens and eyeball are not making the correct shape to refract the light perfectly onto the fovea, and so we get refractive error – short-sightedness, long-sightedness, astigmatism and over-40’s reading blur.  So in general these are an error of function, not a condition of disease or damage.  This is the concept that led Bates to want to discover the underlying causes and correct the functional error, rather than just offer a physical crutch (such as prescription lenses) to compensate. I will touch on refractive error more later in this article.

I am always surprised that we are not taught these interesting features of the visual system in school

When explaining how vision improvement activities can change the way we use our eyes, I have to explain a few interesting facts about how eyesight works.  I find saccadic motion endlessly fascinating.  It’s the most important thing your eyes do in order to see anything at all, yet it is something that we never learn about in the course of our daily lives.

We know that light needs to get inside the eyeball in order for us to see, but we don’t think about the implications of the fact that the pupil is a very, very small opening. Saccadic motion is the tiny vibrational movement that the eyes make to ‘scoop’ light into the pupil and inside the eyeball onto the retina.

Alfred Yarbus, a Russian biophysicist, demonstrated that if saccadic motion were to stop, an ‘empty field’ would be created within one to three seconds. No saccadic motion means no light into the eyes, meaning no sight at all.  Conversely, the faster the saccadic movement, the more light enters the eye and the better eyesight can be.  Tension in the visual system and eye muscles slows down saccadic motion, thereby playing an important role in visual blur.  This is why we say ‘the eyes must move to see’.

This principle is the opposite of the tense and still ‘staring’ habit that comes with refractive error.

Central vision and everybody has a night blind spot

Another interesting fact has to do with the cells of the retina. We have two types of retinal cells, rod cells and cone cells.  Rod cells give us vision in low light, monochrome and not very sharp or detailed.  The rod cells cover the peripheral areas of the retina, and reduce in number towards the back of the eyeball, especially in the important areas directly behind the pupil.

Here is where we find the macula lutea, with a higher concentration of cone cells, those that give us sharp, detailed, colour eyesight.  At a point at the centre of the macula lutea is the fovea centralis, a small area packed only with cone cells in their millions. This leads to a couple of visual effects that you may not have previously been aware of.

Firstly, it means that our only area of actual clear, sharp eyesight is the tiny circle provided by the fovea centralis area of the retina.  This tiny circle moves so smoothly and effortlessly along with wherever your attention and gaze goes that we generally never notice that everything outside this small circle, (everything else being our peripheral vision), is actually blurry.

Check this out for yourself by looking at one object and noticing that while that object is clear, everything peripheral is blurry.  Move your gaze and the clear circle moves with it, bringing the light bouncing off the new object to fall onto your fovea and give clarity there.

The other effect of this physiology of the retina is that in conditions of very dim light, where the cone cells are not responsive, we must use our peripheral vision to function. And where there are no rod cells to provide this low light vision, we have a blank spot.  So in the area where there are only cone cells, at the centre of our vision, we can actually have a blank space in our vision in low light conditions.  The light may be low enough that we don’t actually notice this unless we are looking for it.

You can check this effect for yourself by going outside at night time, and finding a dim light in the distance.  If you look directly at it, it will disappear. Only by looking slightly to one side of the light will you get those light beams falling onto rod cells to one side of the fovea, and get a response such that you can see the dim light once again.

Fun tools for eyesight

Another benefit of working in person with people is that they get to try out the pinhole glasses.  The amazing effect of these in making eyesight clear without any prescription can really only be appreciated by experiencing it.  Pass a pair of pinholes around the room and the same lenses will amaze all refractive error types with the clarity they achieve whether up close or in the distance.

If you have blur and haven’t yet tried a pair of pinholes, you can get a similar effect by taking a piece of black card or paper and poking a clean hole in it with a pin.  Looking through this hole will demonstrate the effect.  Play with the size of the whole depending on if you want it to work better for close or distant vision.

Pinholes work by cutting out the scattered beams of light, allowing only straight beams into the pupil, through the lens and onto the retina, in effect eliminating the need for refraction.  This is why they work for all refractive error types.

We love students to use pinholes wherever possible in their daily life as a substitute for prescription lenses, even transition glasses(see definition below), to keep the stress in the eyes down while still giving clarity for reading, TV and other daily tasks (but not driving.)

Refractive Error Overview -

Those with over 40’s reading blur (presbyopia) are a bit off the hook when it comes to the emotional stress side of refractive error, as it does relate most strongly to physical aspects of aging. Attendees at the talks found it makes a great deal of sense to acknowledge that the lens and muscles of the eye can stiffen with age, just like other parts of the body, and just like other parts of the body, they can also be maintained in good health and flexibility with the right input.

In standard myopia, the eyeballs have the same structures as normal eyeballs, and they have the capability to obtain clarity as evidenced by clear flashes in those doing vision improvement activities. In myopia, physically the eyeball is maintaining a shape that is too long, and the light is refracted to a point in front of the retina rather than on it.

Visually this makes objects in the distance blurry. Physical usage of the eyes can play an important role in developing myopia, most usually in combination with other factors including tension in the visual system relating to underlying emotional stress. The emotion of fear is strongly relevant here, as illustrated by some of the common emotional traits of myopes;  anxiety, worry, perfectionism and so on. 

I love to discuss that while myopes may consider these traits to be an inherent part of their personality, in fact they are greatly to do with the condition of myopia when looked at holistically, and therefore can be changed when the condition is worked with holistically.  This means myopes can become more relaxed and easy-going in their daily lives.

For hyperopia the principles are the same except the eyes are holding a shape where the eyeball is too short, and the focal point falls behind the retina rather than on it. This makes close objects blurry.  The underlying emotional stress here is usually related to anger; some common traits include temper, trouble with intimacy and similar. The same applies in terms of working holistically, meaning hyperopes can become generally more peaceful and relaxed about closeness.

Astigmatism can be described in similar terms, but this warp across the cornea giving blur at specific angles is very changeable – which is why we ask that correction for it come out of transition glasses as soon as possible.  (Transition glasses being reduced lenses that give vision improvement student’s eyes room to improve) Astigmatism has been found to relate to pain and anger combined.

Learning and practicing vision improvement activities is the best way to experience how vision can change for the better, and to personally understand how our daily habits and underlying stresses affect our eyesight. So for those at the talks I taught the Magic Nose Pencil activity to assist with regaining faster saccadic movement and improving vision habit awareness.  You can revisit this activity by watching our video lesson here:

Solid Foundations to Improve Eyesight Video

I also guided the groups through the Tromboning activity, good for everyone but also one of the four most important activities for preventing and reversing over-40’s reading blur.  This activity is outlined in our book and kits and I hope to create a free video version very soon.  We will keep you posted on that.

I hope you have enjoyed this overview of my latest lectures, and perhaps even gained a fact or two about eyesight that you hadn’t been aware of before. Remember there are still a small number of places available to work with me in person next month on the Sunshine Coast or by distance education. (See our website products page for the May 2012 Weekend Seminar and International Teleclass details).

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:

1. 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?
2. 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.
3. Reassure them that you will never get rid of them but let them help you stay safe always.  
4. 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.)
5. 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.

1. Take this child in your arms and take him/her to a safe place in your heart.
2. 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.

There is so much involved in the ability to see clearly that when we break it down its quite amazing any of us can see at all. And it goes way beyond the physical shape of the eyeball. Let’s take a look at what elements are in the flow of clear eyesight.

First the eyes must be in reasonable physical condition, and this is affected by our overall health and wellbeing, as often the lens of the eye can be used as a dumping ground for toxins.

The eyes and brain need lots of energy to operate well, so the other organs and systems in the body should be in fairly good working order so as not to divert too much of the body’s resources. (In our last newsletter, we mentioned that we support this most vital of senses with ¼ of the body’s nutrition, and ⅓ of the body’s oxygen intake.)

Then there is the condition of the various parts of the eye. The lens must be able to flex, the muscles must be relaxed and mobile, the retinal cells to receive and respond to light, the optic nerve to transfer the information. All of this can be    worked with through the physical vision improvement activities.

Then we come to the most important component of eyesight of them all…the brain.

The physical ability to process the light information in the brain cells is just the start of the brain’s influences on visual acuity.  The brain also tells the eyes whether or not it’s OK to move, to flex, to take in and send along lots of information or only a little.

Even if everything else is working great, and lots of messages full of clear light information are coming along, the brain will decide what to do with it, whether to process it into a clear image or a blurry one, whether to fuse the images of the two eyes together into a fantastic 3-D panorama, or not to do this.

And what makes the brain decide these things?  Other factors may play a part at times but the most overwhelming effect comes from the fundamental cause of refractive error: emotional stress.

What else has such a profound effect as to cause a person with perfect eyesight to quite suddenly develop visual blur, even though there has been no damage or other alteration to the still structurally normal eyeball?

Yes, physical stresses such as excessive hours of study can play a role. But not everyone experiencing those physical stresses develops the same symptoms. (And not everyone experiencing emotional stresses develops the same symptoms, but may instead develop issues in other areas of the body.)

However, in every vision student I have worked with there have been identifiable and unresolved emotional stresses that correspond to our guidelines of which refractive errors correlate to which emotions, and to which eye the blur is in. And the primary of these stresses have generally occurred in the 6 to 12 months prior to the person first being diagnosed with myopia, hyperopia or astigmatism.

Additionally, students can get fantastic results doing the physical activities, but especially for those with high prescriptions, they often will reach a stage where the physical improvement will not progress further until some emotional work is done. Why is this the case?

Based on the principles I was trained in and my 16 years of teaching experience it is because these unresolved emotional stresses create physical tension in the body and visual system that preclude the flexibility and relaxation necessary for fast saccadic motion and good visual accommodation. But not just that.

The emotional set-up also incorporates the blur (and the glasses themselves) as a form of protection.  Until the emotional tensions are addressed, there is a physical, mental and emotional habit that says ‘It’s not OK to see’, and this is what the brain acts on.

This means that the student will also have blocks to changing the physical habits that create and retain tension and blur in the visual system. The simplest example of this is breathing. The eyes and brain need lots of oxygen to work well, yet many people tend to breathe shallowly, with tension and frequent unconscious breath-holding. This is a strongly identified habit in those with refractive error.

Our eyesight is like a finely tuned instrument, and our visual system is like a microcosm of our whole self. This sensitive array of processes functions in accordance with our physical wellbeing, mental clarity and emotional state. In order to change our eyesight we generally must also work with the underlying patterns in our brains about how we use our eyes.

Alwin den Biesen, a Personal Eyesight Training Kit student wrote to me yesterday that “It’s silly that we all our lives care about our body, except…..our eyes. We shower, clean our fingernails, do our hair, (and do exercise and massage and a plethora of other types of maintenance) but for our eyes we just clean our glasses.”

Until now perhaps……..?

Next Month:

The Many Layers of Us….I will discuss why we can’t change – and how to change that.

And in April:

Staying on a new path….We look at how to maintain our intended thinking and feeling habits.

Carina

P.S. After a 3 year break we will be again offering a rare opportunity to participate in LIVE seminars with Carina Goodrich this coming May 2012. 

Due to many requests from our valued customers and subscribers we will be offering both an International Telephone Class Series and a Weekend Seminar at Cooroy on the beautiful Sunshine Coast Hinterland (Queensland, Australia).  Stay tuned for further details.

Whether it’s breaking out a new calendar or just the idea in our minds, the coming of the new year is a great marker for starting something new, or coming back to something old that needs revisiting in a new way. My goal is to get you to give a little of this year’s attention to your eyesight, that most precious of our senses.

It helps when we remember that 90% of the sensory information we live by comes in through our eyes. It’s motivating to think that we support this most vital of senses with ¼ of the body’s nutrition, and ⅓ of the body’s oxygen intake.

A few simple ways you can recharge your vision and body care this month include:

• Recharge your nutrition and energy levels by boosting the amount of raw and unprocessed foods in your diet, and drop out some of the packaged foods that may have become habitual over the holidays. The latest interesting nutritional food boost is Chia seeds. Very high in antioxidents, they are appearing everywhere these days, even in some dishes in our local health food restaurant. I love these little black & white seeds. They are delicious sprinkled on salad or porridge, and in baked goods, but for best use they should be soaked in water. They absorb many times their weight in liquid and therefore in dry form can be dehydrating if you don’t drink enough water separately. However when wet they bring fluid into the body. I love to drink the gel they form with the addition of a little warm milk (nut or cow), honey and vanilla, it’s my healthy substitute for beloved custard, and the kids love it! Try lemon and honey for a non-fat version.
• Deflect the stress by getting enough rest, whether it’s sleep or just downtime doing something relaxing and enjoyable. If you are having trouble sleeping, train your brain with a routine visualization before bed. Try imagining 10 steps down into a cozy sleeping place. As you imagine yourself moving down each step, visualize either a stress you are releasing on that step or imagine a positive you want to happen. Over time you should find that by step ten you are out like a light!
• Care for your eyesight by introducing or reinstating fun and relaxing vision activities, for yourself and the whole family! Remember that many whole body activities are good for the eyes. For those who are having warm weather, create an obstacle course in the back yard that involves balancing, crawling, jumping, then throwing and catching a ball while circling it with your Magic Nose Pencil. For those in cold climates this time of year is great for snuggling up and telling vividly described stories while Palming.

Start up or re-inspire your vision improvement with our book, which is getting rave reviews around the world. USA vision instructor Gene Younger writes:

“Carina, like her mother, has written a great book. She has taken the natural vision improvement field a step forward with this wonderful manual. I love the way Carina has organized the material and presented it with clear illustrations and explanations. Nothing is left out of this book!

This book will stand alone as a complete guide to self-healing of one’s vision and eyesight correction. It is elegantly simple and yet complete in its scope and application. This will be the very first book which I will be recommending to my clients here and around the world.

As a vision educator myself, I suggest that you read this book with an open mind, practice it’s exercises and activities and allow your vision to get better. When you do this I will guarantee you positive results for your vision, eyesight and Life!”

Gene Younger, Certified Vision Educator
Yoga For Better Eyesight Instructor
Portland, Oregon www.clearvisionnaturally.com

You can access this wealth of information about caring for your precious visual system, and even start your programme right away with a pair of pinhole glasses. When you order the Practical Guide to Natural Vision Improvement book we offer pinhole glasses for $13 off the normal price – and no additional postage.

http://www.janetgoodrichmethod.com/NVIbook

Happy New Year and best wishes for 2012
from Carina Goodrich & Dan Sheehan

Whether you are a beginning vision improvement student or have been practicing for a while, maintaining the good body habits and skills that come with the basic vision activities is very important.  Like a martial artist who practices all the forms from white belt to black, vision students benefit from reviewing the foundation activities to ensure they haven’t dropped off some of the important basic principles.

• Remember that regaining faster saccadic movement is vital to clear eyesight.  The faster your saccadic movement, the more light falls onto the retina.  The more light information coming in, the better your eyesight can be.
• The habits of steady breathing and blinking while using our eyes is crucial
• Keeping the body relaxed, especially the neck, shoulders and facial muscles, is also important.
• Checking in with your visualizing skills must be emphasized. These train the brain to better visual processing and assist the connection between the eyes and brain.

Finally, a picture is worth a thousand words, so we have created these Magic Nose Pencil videos so you can clearly see all these important aspects of this simple yet vital activity. Abilities learned by practicing the Magic Nose Pencil activity form the skill base for many of the more advanced specific vision games.

For the introduction to the Magic Nose Pencil, including what to remember when practicing, start with video 1 (5 minutes):

If you would like to skip ahead to our video guide to practicing the activity, go to video 2 (5 minutes):

We hope these help you to keep up your motivation and excitement for nurturing your visual system all year round.

NEW! Text guide of the above videos in PDF format now available. View/download here.

P.S. Remember the amazing special offer of 30% off our wonderful eyesight training kits is available until December 31, 2011!

Receive $44 off and throw away your reading glasses with the Read Clearly Naturally Kit:

“The RCN Kit is a really fantastic package! In a short time (5 days) I can definitely feel how improvement will take place, and it’s already helping to change my habits for the better.

I was thinking I was powerless about my eyesight, and just the knowledge that I can take control over the situation is really important to me. It’s so simple and straight-forward, yet informative and life-changing.  And you can do it anywhere, anytime.”
Lorelle Fisher, Qld Australia

Get more in-depth training and receive up to $74 off the kit that gets reviews like this one:

“(The Personal Eyesight Training Kit) is an incredibly well put together programme with huge insight into the characteristics that make up the myopic personality.”
Sue Ferguson, Qld Australia

Remember – to receive your discount when ordering the Personal Eyesight Training Kit or Read Clearly Naturally Kit use coupon code: EYEGIFT 30 (valid until December 31, 2011.)

For more information on these kits visit our products page:

http://www.janetgoodrichmethod.com/vision-improvement-products/

Below is a letter written by Patricia Carrington Ph.D. of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Piscataway, NJ. It lays out some interesting concepts about the way we have been taught to think about our eyes and eyesight.

In a book written many years ago, the then Director of the General Electric Company’s Lighting Research Laboratory, Dr. Matthew Luckiesh, asked his readers to imagine what would happen if “crippled” eyes “could be transformed into crippled legs.” His comments were: “If this (transformation) happened, what a heartrending parade we would witness on a busy street! Nearly every other person would go limping by. Many would be on crutches and some in wheelchairs.” He was at that time referring to the widespread use of eyeglasses (now we would add to this the even more widespread use of contact lenses) on a PERMANENT basis, as usually being the sole treatment for eyesight problems. Many years later, that is still, regrettably, the case.

If it is legs that are crippled, however, doctors typically refuse to let their patients rely just on crutches. They regard the use of crutches as a necessary temporary strategy, and while paying attention to external conditions, they do their best to improve the internal conditions of the defective limbs, so that nature is allowed to do its work of healing.

If respect for the power of natural healing is applied to our limbs, why is a similar respect for the recuperative powers of the human body not applied to defective eyesight? This question is not generally asked by the medical establishment which, until now, has simply taken it for granted that defective eyesight is incurable and inevitable with age, and this is in spite of the eye’s demonstrably close relationship with the mind and the emotions. It is not generally assumed that eyesight can return to normalcy through improvement within the mind-body sphere, and you yourself may unwittingly have adopted this point of view, as do most people.

This book therefore presents a radically new approach to defective vision and for this reason requires somewhat of a leap of faith. To change one’s eyesight by behavioral means (i.e. EFT in this case) seems impossible in terms of what we have been told countless times. Yet the fact is that psychological experiments have determined that the act of seeing involves consciousness and that in fact our perceptions and our emotions are intrinsically linked.

Patricia Carrington Ph.D.
Associate Clinical Professor
UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Piscataway, NJ

This letter introduces the EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) for vision improvement programme by Carol Look that we brought to your attention this month. This is one of the techniques that we can use to overcome the inner tension that hinders good eyesight.

To check out the EFT programme for vision improvement click here.

Every obstacle in your progress (in any endeavour) is a message from your body (and eyes) asking for attention to a particular process that it needs you to go through, a particular blockage it needs you to learn about and let go of. Each time you do this you will move to a new level of emotional and physical well-being. But like an onion there are many layers to us, and we have to explore ourselves in many ways and from different angles to really get there.

I seem to have found that to individually develop, and improve our relationships and our lives, we are asked to do the things that are most difficult to us personally, no matter that another person might find the same task easy.

This idea can actually give us encouragement….if we can find someone who has an easy time with something we find really hard, we can learn about their perspective on it and perhaps find ways to adopt some of those ways of looking at it – making our own process go a little bit easier.

What is your area of resistance? Is it the act of doing the physical vision activities and actually letting yourself relax into it, the processes of going through the various strength transition glasses, or the need to give some attention to your emotions? For everyone there will be the easy parts and the parts we resist when making changes in our lives and our eyesight. This is another reason why it’s good to explore a variety of techniques to find those that suit you.

When looking at our emotions it’s sometimes good just to do what we can to relieve the pressure, without having to explore the origins in depth and detail. EFT is very useful for this.

Other times it may be necessary to look at our lives and our past to discover the source of our tensions and fears. To become consciously aware of our emotional and mental coping mechanisms and how they may be holding us back, in order to be able to fully choose to let them go. This type of work is discussed in our Personal Eyesight Training Kit. (Look out for the digital version coming soon!)

Changing the way we see does involve changing some of the ways we think and experience our emotions, and this is a big job. Seeing well involves not just our consciousness, but also becoming more conscious, about our physical and mental habits, about what effect our emotions are having on a daily basis, about how we perceive many things. When you are embarking on your vision improvement programme, do keep finding many different ways of supporting and nurturing yourself through this courageous undertaking!

This activity is done while Palming, an ancient technique for promoting healing in the eyes. Palming combines sending healing energy through the palms of your hands into the eyes and visual system, and resting the retinal cells in the soothing darkness. While Palming you can use the power of your mind to achieve a variety of different effects on both your inner world and physical body. (For more details on Palming, refer to our previous post: Palming and Imaginative Seeing + a Special Gift)

A good Palming position

Deliberately going back into our memories can be a powerful tool for self-understanding, helping to acknowledge and release feelings we are holding from the past. Understanding the events and relationships that have formed our perspective on life can be vital in making choices free of restrictive emotional patterns. And revisiting the times and places where we felt loved and at home can bolster our emotional foundations.

One of the most powerful memory stimulators is our sense of smell. Specific smells will bring out both memory pictures, and recapture the feelings of that memory.

This activity works best with a helper, who can hold objects under your nose for you. We begin with Palming, sitting or lying down comfortably and cupping the palms over the closed eyes. Breathe deeply and relax your whole body for a few moments.

1) Have ready a selection of pre-prepared objects, or tissues dabbed with your chosen scents. Suggestions include fresh grass, tree bark or leaves, vanilla and other essences, cinnamon and other spices, foods, flowers, soap, just about anything!

Have your helper hold or waft a single object or scented tissue under your nose for a few seconds and ask ‘what does this smell remind you of’? Keep yourself relaxed, breathing deeply, and allow the scent to evoke memories and feelings for a few minutes.

You can describe the images out loud if you wish, even having your helper make a note of what each smell awakens within you for an ongoing self-awareness journal.

2) Choose a particular meaningful smell for a personal memory journey. It might be a familiar smell from your childhood or a relative’s perfume. If the memories evoke tears, allow them to flow and the feelings to be released from your body.

If the memories evoke feelings of love and nurturing, then allow yourself to feel these emotions fully and in your whole body, to take them with your back into your daily life.

3) You might like to have a soothing scent ready to help return yourself to a state of peacefulness after any emotional release.

4) Use scents to tell a story. Gather a selection of smells as above and take the Palming person on a adventure using the scents to connect to the places and events in the story. Take turns to gather the smells in secret and guide each other on a surprising journey. This can be very absorbing, fun and relaxing….do with with all ages!

Remember that long-term memory is in the right-brain, so the feelings we hold from the long ago past can affect other right-brain functions including our whole body, and distance vision. The effects go both ways, so keep stimulating your right-brain with positive actions to obtain the benefits of its functionality in relaxation, distance clarity, peacefulness, vivid imagining and forming good body habits.

When teaching vision improvement I have the intriguing job of impressing upon students the need for enjoyment in their endeavour.  Myopes like to do things perfectly and correctly at all times, so they often take some convincing that doing their vision activities with strict adherence to a schedule and a rigid style of compliance is not the process we are looking for.

The same applies to parents teaching their own children Natural Vision Improvement, where the parents are there to do a job (which is important and often emotionally laden for them). This style of working can quickly become boring, stressful and creates resistance in the child.

Why is fun important in vision improvement?

While doing vision activities regularly is important to ongoing eyesight improvement, how the games are done is almost more important than when they are done.

In Playcamps I teach the parents that the vision games will not be as effective as they can be unless the child (and parent) is enjoying themselves. One reason for this is because the entire purpose is to achieve not strength, but relaxation in the eye muscles and visual system.  In myopia, hyperopia and astigmatism, the eyes are not weak, they are tight.  So you see that our attitude towards the child and vision games cannot be one of pressure, performance and strict regularity over enjoyment, or we achieve more stress and tension rather than less.

The same applies to adults, especially since grown-ups with these types of refractive error will almost always have developed it during childhood, and therefore are in fact still in some ways working with that child within.  Or better yet….playing with that child within J.

Activate the ‘Right Brain’.

Many people have become familiar with the discovery that our human brain has two high-functioning hemispheres, each responsible for opposite and complimentary abilities. It has become common knowledge that each hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body.  But there are many more qualities divided into these two sides of our brain.

Left and Right Brain qualities in pictures.*

The left hemisphere is our logical, thinking, language and numbers brain, aware of time, in charge of the small details, close vision and activating action in our muscles.

The left-brain seems to be the popular one these days, with lots of status given to its abilities and functions. Yet using mostly only one side gives us an unbalanced life that becomes a strain and burden to sustain over time. It also limits our physical, mental and emotional abilities and our opportunities to enjoy life to the full.

When you look at a list of brain hemisphere qualities (see below), it is easy to see how living mostly in one side or the other can affect our visual function as well as personality and behaviour!

Most myopes and presbyopes (over-40s reading blur) have left-brain action in plenty yet are not as strong in using their right brain as they may have been when young. Hyperopes are the opposite, and may find they want a bit more left-brain action in their lives.

When we need to relax our muscles, to let go of tension in our mind and hearts and bodies, to balance the driven and sometimes stress laden lifestyle of being predominantly in the left brain, we need to bring the right hemisphere and its abilities into action.

Left and right brain qualities in words.

Right-Brain Qualities

The right-brain is where the messages regarding muscle relaxation come from, the balancing action of the left-brain’s activation of muscle tension. It is also in charge of distance vision, making the activation of the right-brain very important in the goal of regaining good far eyesight.

To activate the right-brain we do the Cross-Crawl activity, a whole body movement that brings in both sides of the brain. We also make use of the other qualities of the right-brain that we can intentionally choose, helping to ‘turn-on’ that side of the brain, and making all its features more available.

These qualities include; deep breathing, images rather than words, the timelessness of a relaxed meditative state, music, whole body movement, the childlike sense of wonder at the amazingness of everything, rather than the precise focus on the minutiae of daily life. When we give our attention to these things more often in general and specifically when doing vision

games, it helps us to relax and achieve the state of seeing rather than staring that we are ‘looking’ for.

Deep breathing (all the way down to the belly)
activates the right side of the brain, helping us relax.

When improving vision we also want to let go of old stressful habits and learn good vision habits, in how we use our eyes all the time.  Since long term memory is in the right brain along with whole body movement, music and visualizing, the most effective way to learn new habits that become effortless is to do it with our body, learn it with music and imagine ourselves doing it.

So to get the most benefit from vision games, whether as an adult or a child, we must find a way to enjoy ourselves and have fun with it.  Use interesting toys, pleasant venues, and keep the programme flexible to the feeling of the day.  When doing vision games for your child join in yourself with the games (your eyes will benefit too!) and show her that you can be silly and do funny things and so she can too.

For myopes one of the most effective self-awareness techniques and habit changes for good vision comes from letting go of the left-brain’s “Trying and straining to see“, and bringing in the right-brain’s “Letting everything come“. Do your best to use this principle each time you find yourself squinting, leaning forward and straining, and you may be surprised at how effective it is!

Remember from the last article that the more you do this, the more you train your brain to make it an effortless and ongoing new habit.

*Image from ‘Help Your Child to Perfect Eyesight Without Glasses’ by Janet Goodrich

In these logic and language oriented times we often leave behind the benefits and powers that our ‘right-brain’ and its ability to imagine can bring us.  In recent times sports coaches have been using the power of imagination to increase the skills and abilities of athletes.  These same techniques can benefit us in many ways in our lives.

The brain doesn’t know the difference between an event that is real and one that is vividly imagined. This can be used to train the brain and affect the body.  In fact it is happening all the time without us really being aware of it.  Let’s start to use this feature of our brain/body connection for our own good.

The brain likes full featured ‘inner movies’. Bring all your senses into your imaginings to increase their effectiveness. This includes your physical senses, imagining the smells, sounds, textures and even tastes of your visualization.  But also it includes the sensory features of our inner world, our feelings.  Ensure that you imagine the good feelings that you want to go along with the skill or event you are creating in your mind’s eye.

Brain events follow pathways.  The more you think or feel about something, the more ingrained that particular pathway in the brain becomes.  Get skilled at new habits and new ways of thinking by moving out of old ‘thought pathways’ and creating new ones that fit the life and feelings you want to have.  Deliberately wear a groove in your new desirable pathways with regular visits.

1) Vision games – tell the eyes and brain what you want

Most vision improvement activities include a portion where the eyes are closed and we ask the vision student to vividly imagine the object of their attention. This gives the cells of the retina a chance to clear and refresh themselves. Most importantly, imagining the object with clarity, bright colour and detail tells the brain where we want it to go in its function.

It’s after the eyes closed part of vision activities that students notice the most difference in their acuity and/or get ‘clear flashes’! Make sure you are giving full time and attention to the eyes closed and visualizing parts of your eyesight activities.

Take in the visual information (here we are using the Magic Nose Feather).

Close your eyes and vividly imagine the objects, bringing in all your senses. Make everything 3-D and alive!

Open your eyes and notice the increased clarity, colour and detail!

2) Decreasing the stress of events – use the brain to train the body

We often allow ourselves to imagine the things that can go wrong, with the subsequent physical stress reactions this brings.  Our hearts start to pound, our stomach to hurt, muscles tense up.  And it’s not surprising that in this state things can easily go wrong or overwhelm us with stress. Let’s reverse this process by intentionally imaging things going well.

When doing martial arts drills or kicks I now take a few seconds to clearly imagine what my body is going to do.  If I don’t do this I have often made mistakes.  Every time I vividly imagine what I am going to do, it happens easily and I don’t get caught by ‘thinking too much’ while my body is moving.

Thinking about an upcoming plane trip has had me tensing up all over!  After sitting myself down and clearly imagining the whole trip in detail, with everything going smoothly, I can now think ahead to my travel without feeling my mind and body going into stress overload.  I know that when the time comes to get on the plane my body and brain will remember the feeling that ‘it’s all ok and going smoothly’ and I will stay reasonably relaxed as the events happen.

3) All senses are go! – use the powers that you have

When we create an image in our mind, the more complete it is the more effective it will be.  Our inner world is comprised of the information we receive and how we respond to that.  Even though the vast majority of sensory input in humans comes in through the eyes, our other senses still have a dramatic effect on our subconscious.

Use this to fully inform your visualizations and make them as powerful as they can be.  You can use real objects to inform your senses then take this information with you. When you want to improve your reading ability, you imagine white to increase the contrast with black print. Find pictures of white objects and landscapes to inform your conscious mind, then bring those images back in your visualizations.

Imagining white helps to improve reading clarity!

Bring in the smell of snow, the warmth of a white rabbit’s fur, the softness of cotton balls, the taste of vanilla ice-cream.

4) Train the brain

We often think that we are helpless in the face of our brain function. But the brain is an amazingly changeable and flexible device that will receive training gladly. While there are commonalities in what the brain does in different parts of its anatomy, modern medicine has begun to realize that brain function is not fixed and can be changed. This is illustrated by specific functions being learned in wholly different areas of the brain after the original area of that function is damaged.

The really astonishing thing is that we can have input into what our brain does. One of the inherent tools we have for this is deliberate visualization, and deliberate thinking and feeling.  If you feel sad much of the time, this means there are sad pathways grooved into your brain function.  Electrical signals are sucked into those pathways and flow along them to their predetermined end, and the process starts all over again.

Try this experiment; whenever you have a recurring feeling you don’t enjoy, such as fear, immediately stop and notice the feeling of being in a rut (give attention to this only the first few times).  Then imagine a new pathway and vividly visualize a feeling of happiness and lightness, with images and full sensory input. It might be sitting on the grass with the warm sun and a feeling of being loved and safe. Imagine it fully for 30 seconds.

Deliberately take yourself to a place of comfort and happiness.

Do this every time the feeling of fear comes up, whether as tension in your tummy or anxiety about an event or person. Notice that as you do this over and over again, it becomes easier. Notice how it starts to become automatic and you are no longer trapped in the old fear pathway, but instead easily flow along the pathway of support and reassurance!