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 system 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.
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.