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 petals 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.