Vision for Life

by Meir Schneider

  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 peta
ls 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.

  Chapter 7

  The Blind Spots of Conventional Wisdom

  The Hidden Danger of Sunglasses

  It has become common for people in our culture to put on sunglasses as soon as they step out of the house on a sunny day. People see the sun as some sort of enemy that is about to cause harm to their eyes. Doctors warn us of the dangers of sun exposure, and there certainly are reasons to take the proper precautions to protect our bodies from too much exposure to ultraviolet light. Our eyes, however, are made to function at their highest and best when they are exposed to a full range of light and darkness.

  It’s important to be in touch with our bodies on a cellular level. You can’t normally see your cells unless you have microscopic pictures taken of them and are able to look at the pictures. We tend to ignore our body and our body parts. But it is very important to have a very thorough feel for our own body.

  Enjoy the sun and also the dark of night. Seldom wear sunglasses because they weaken the pupils. Enjoy the sun throughout the day, and don’t use a flashlight when you take a walk at night. Enjoy the expansion of the pupils at night. Make your eyes more vital and more alive. Give your eyes a sense of love so that, in many ways, you love your life and you love the universe. Allow your eyes to develop good fixation, which is the ability to allow the proper amount of light to enter the pupils in order to see better in whatever situation you find yourself. When your pupils become firmer and not sluggish, you can then have a better fixation and allow the exact amount of light you need for your sight to improve.

  In the daytime, you will end up seeing details seeing details with much greater clarity. This will take the load and distress away from other parts of the visual system, like the retina and the lens. At nighttime, your pupils will be wide enough to see all that is around you in the dark. Your whole system will become stronger as a result of your pupils being able to absorb more light.

  Ignoring your eyes, and not giving them enough darkness or enough light, will weaken the system through the years. Renewing our strength by reducing the amount of time we wear sunglasses, and reducing the amount of time we spend indoors, can make a huge difference.

  Be wary of the sun scare.

  Many people do not realize that there are pigments in the eyes that darken the light. Melanin pigment is in the choroid area, the area that nourishes the retina. One of the ten layers of the retina is melanin. So the retina itself has a whole layer of melanin pigment that darkens the light. Therefore, you have “sunglasses” inside the retina itself! When you wear sunglasses, it takes away the usefulness of this layer in the retina. It also darkens the light as it arrives at the retina, so you do not use your own pigments to darken the light. Consequently, your pigments migrate to the back of the retina and are not as effective as they could have been otherwise.

  Believe it or not, sunglasses hurt your retina just as much as crutches can hurt one’s legs. If your legs are weak and you are too quick to use a cane or crutches or braces to walk with, you may never give up your crutches. But if you work very hard on strengthening your legs, there is a possibility you will regain their full use. In some cases there isn’t such a possibility, and that’s when crutches or braces are very useful. But if it’s at all possible for you to strengthen your legs yourself, do not use crutches as a method of healing, since it’s best to work on the body’s indepe
ndence.

  The same is true for sunglasses. The more you use sunglasses, the weaker your pupils become. You are also weakening the defense mechanism that exists in your retina and that has existed in your ancestors’ retinas for millions of years.

  If, on the other hand, you practice sunning for at least twenty minutes a day, you will find that your eyes adjust much better to the sun. The sun, throughout the years, will become very comfortable for you. You will also find that darkness is easier for you to handle. As your pupils grow wider and your retinal cells become more sensitive, the dark will not appear to be as dark. Best of all, you will enjoy opening your eyes wide in both the strongest and the weakest lights. You will also be happier because the combination of the sun’s rays and the hemoglobin in the blood releases many hormones and neural transmitters, such as serotonin, that lead to a sense of joy. You will probably also have an easier time releasing melatonin at night without taking any vitamins or drugs, simply because of your good sun exposure. The joy of this will lead to many other good things in your life.

  If your eyes are sun-sensitive and do not widen enough in the dark, the other mechanisms, even if they’re healthy, may not function to the best of their potential. Most of what the visual system does consists of absorbing light and processing it. Therefore, it’s important that that process be easy and relaxing for the body.

  The Dangers of Corrective Lenses

  There are three essential dangers from utilizing corrective lenses. If you wear glasses, you tend not to use as much of your external muscles because you depend on a focal point. For this reason, you weaken them throughout the years, which is very bad for your total mechanism.