New Civilization News: Natural Sight    
 Natural Sight8 comments
2 Feb 2003 @ 14:41, by Flemming Funch

A number of years ago, after being annoyed about having to wear thick glasses all day since my late teens, I sought out natural methods for improving my eyesight. In particular, I found a vision consultant who taught me principles, methods and exercises, loosely based on the Bates Method. It started working right away, and after a couple of months I could take off my glasses. For years I would only need glasses for driving at night. And I would faithfully do my exercises every day. But at some point I got lazy about it, and didn't keep up the exercises, and my sight has worsened. Not as bad as it was before, but I have to wear glasses if I drive of I'm out shopping.

Now, looking around on the net, I found it depressing that the first thing I ran into was a lot of sites where eye doctors were claiming that this kind stuff is complete quackery, that myopia is genetic, and the only answer is glasses or surgery. Hm, I think I have a different opinion about who are the quacks.

What I found most profound about the principles of regaining natural sight is that they apply to many things in life. Here are some of them.

- Sight is primarily mental. If you can imagine something clearly focused, you can usually also see it like that with your eyes. If your mental picture is fuzzy, so is your eyesight.

- Everything in the world is always moving. Natural sight sees that continously, and natural eyes will glide gradually over the scene, rather than jumping around between fixed points. Bad eyesight starts when one begins to see things just as fixed items at fixed distances.

- Instead of letting yourself be thrown around by an apparently solid and immobile world, try turning your perspective around, and assume that you're still, and the whole world is constantly moving around you.

- The periphery is important. Natural sight sees the periphery, the context, all the time, although not as clearly as the portion being focused on. Bad eyesight starts when we focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, and when we insist that everything has to be clearly in focus. The periphery is never in focus - duh - but it is nevertheless very important.

- Natural sight is relaxed. You see better by relaxing, not by straining.

Just going for glasses or surgery, without changing one's habits, is almost as silly as taking a pain killer because somebody's standing on your foot. I feel bad that I've allowed myself to be so busy and stressed that I've forgotten about some of the fine ways I have of being relaxed and seeing better.

Here are some more sites: brief overview, method in a nutshell

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8 comments

2 Feb 2003 @ 18:50 by martha : eyes
I have read about this before and I think I'll investigate. thanks ming. I'll let you know when I don't have to wear my glasses all the time even if you've moved to France. By the way is that still in the works?  

2 Feb 2003 @ 20:52 by ming : Eyes
Yes, still headed for France. Looks like July.

Here in L.A. I was seeing a vision consultant named Gloria Ginn, who was very helpful. She does workshops in Learning Annex and that kind of places, which are excellent. She suddenly raised her personal consulting prices, which made it more difficult for me to go, from $40 up to $95 for a 50 minute session, and that was more than 10 years ago.  

3 Feb 2003 @ 00:49 by jazzolog : 2-Eyes & 4-Eyes
All this interests me mightily. When our daughter Ilona was born, Dana soon observed what she felt might be a developmental delay. This is her field, so Dana set up appointments with neurologists at Childrens Hospital in Columbus. They saw nothing. We went all over the place, seeking a diagnosis not only for a therapy but, quite frankly, to use our insurance benefits. Nothing doing. Finally we located an occupational therapist, who had suffered paralysis after a fall from a horse in childhood. She had rebuilt much of her movement abilities through exercises she invented. She recommended some movement therapy, and I quit a government job to stay home with Ilona and carry out this program. The same OT recommended vision therapy(!) a couple years later to further develop Ilona's coordination. I thought this was going too far, but by then Ilona was approaching 3rd grade and the idea was that she was going to freak out from the stress of concentration on reading.
We met a vision guy, who works out of Huntington, West Virginia, and he tested Ilona. He spouted various leftbrain/rightbrain jargon and I was losing patience. He then said to me, "Maybe you'd like to experience something of what Ilona may go through next year." I said, "OK, how will we do that?" He asked me to stand up and balance on my non-dominant foot. He asked me to extend my arms out to the side, which was handy in helping me balance there. He then put some glasses on me, with inch-thick lenses---one going this way, the other going that---so that my view was telescopically distorted; nevertheless, he asked that I try to focus on some spot about a foot in front of my face. Finally, he asked me to count aloud backwards from 100...by 3's. Crap, I thought, if it were by 2's this would be a piece of cake. 100...97...94...91... When I got that far...and had to figure out---let's see, carry the 10...I fell over. I fell over! He said, "That's called sensory overload."
I was sold. Since Huntington is a very long trip from Athens, he recommended a father-son team of vision therapists in Lancaster, Ohio...only about an hour. It turned out this was a godsend! John Streff, as you can see [link] is a distinguished pioneer in this field, accomplishing most of his work at Princeton before semi-retiring out here to Ohio---for some unknown reason. We took Ilona to the Drs. Streff every week for a year or 2. Now we go once a year. Ilona got straight A's on her report card last week.  

3 Feb 2003 @ 01:53 by ming : Ilona
That's great you found something that worked for her.

For me, part of my vision problem was (is) an imbalance between the two different sides. My left eye (right brain) is lazy, since high school. So part of the exercises I did was either putting a patch over my other eye, to get the left eye used to seeing, or doing exercises that involved both eyes seeing at the same time. There are various little games with pictures on cards that one can only play if one involves both eyes. Get the man to sit on the chair kind of thing, which involves creating an optical illusion which only works with both eyes.  

3 Feb 2003 @ 06:48 by martha : measles
when I was five had a serious case of the measles and the muscles in my left eye were damaged. I wore glasses until I was 14 when a stupid doctor said I didn't need them anymore. A few years ago my eye doctor told me I should have continued to wear glasses as a teenager and the problem would have been corrected and I wouldn't need them now. He told me though it was too late and I would need them the rest of my life.  

2 Feb 2004 @ 02:08 by alireza @213.121.247.65 : sights
hi i am photograoher i will natural sights thank you very much  

26 Sep 2005 @ 16:23 by Amalendu Ghosh @220.225.85.146 : BEST NATURAL SIGHT VIEW PICTURE
I LOVE THE NATURAL SIGHT VEW.  

23 Nov 2007 @ 13:39 by mohsin farooq @116.71.58.203 : friend of nature
good job done,keep it up,tc  

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