I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t more a test of positive thinking and paradigm shifts.

Riding my bike 30 minutes to work, about 10 minutes in I’m starting to hate everything being slightly blurry again, and questioning my own good judgement for doing this stupid experiment in the first place.

Then, I relax. Change my mind. Imagine as vividly as possible that my eyes could instantly see everything clearly and crisply, and, as I relax, my vision does improve. Slightly, but noticeably. My jaw also relaxes and starts to feel sore (I’ve been chewing a pack of gum this week).

I wonder that if I could just accept a new paradigm -that my eyes are perfectly healthy and capable of perfect sight, if I could trick my brain into using another section or new wiring schematic or something to help me see better.

When I imagine that my eyes work perfectly, I can actually feel them trying to work perfectly. I have to physically relax the eye muscles to give them breaks when they strain, but they are working. I wonder just how much stock there can be in the fact of exercising just the 3 pairs of eye muscles to improve eyesight. I wonder if those eye muscles are at all responsible for the overall shape of the eye, therefore causing distortion if one of the pairs is not optimally functioning.

I notice that the eye exercise that bothers/strains my eyes the most is “drawing” lines from the floor up to the ceiling in the far left and right sides of each eye. Second to that one I suppose is “drawing” circles on the ceiling, looking up.

So there are 2 things going on that I can observe. My eyes themselves seem to strain/bulge to see distant objects, especially if I focus on staying relaxed in the face and the mind. This feels like exercise, and exercise tells the brain that it needs to change, so this makes me feel a little more optimistic.

Secondly, I am doing many eye exercises that do not involve focus, just controlled movement of the eyes. The only way I could imagine this improving vision is by slightly changing the tension on the eyeball itself, AND by bringing circulation to worked parts of the eye at the attachment sites.

I went to the big Safeway grocery store in Potrero tonight and just for fun tried to look for organic wheat pasta (unsuccessfully, haha). That was an excellent eye exercise in focusing on the overhead isle labels and then individual items. I may just start doing that daily or every other day for the practice! It was quite challenging.

To science, and positive thinking…

It’s terrifying going out at night with blurry vision. It reminds me of the time I had traveled to Pakistan in planes, got out of the airport in Karachi, and was blinded for a good 45 minutes. I couldn’t see due to the light level change. No fun stepping foot onto foreign soil without your vision.

Today my eyesight adapted some after walking outside for a few minutes at night. People’s faces still totally unreadable, went to fashion showing and out dancing at club. Did 2×100 near/far today plus normal routine.

Not feeling less blind. There must be a more scientific way to do the near/far exercises so that improvement can be monitored.

Whether or not my vision is improving, it seems not wearing glasses/contacts is making my romantic life exponentially better day by day. Ironic that I attract even better-looking men when I can’t actually see them clearly. Pause for your joke. Ok. Possible my blurry vision boosts my self-confidence and deactivates my give-a-damn. N-E-way…

Having said that, I did do 2×100 near/far eye exercises today in addition to the other 13 exercises, vast improvement over yesterday. As housemate R said, “Even God took one day out of seven off!”. Love ego-pumping enablers in my life. Me and God, on the same page.

One online test I took said my vision was 20/20 in my left eye and 20/100 in my right, which would be great if it were true, seeing as I’ve started at 20/50 (L) and 20/300 (R), respectively. Kinda doubt the validity of that test, however.

I will hold fast and keep on until end of the month.

Fought the urge to immediately put my glasses on this morning. It is not fun waking up with blurry vision, and this experiment is already getting old after just 5 days.

I have slumped from doing my eye exercises first thing in the morning to doing them late at night. I feel like my eye control is improving, my vision not-so-much. I still really like the idea of removing the crutches to see how well you can walk on the injured foot. My eyes are definitely still “working” without the glasses on, especially when I make an effort to ready blurry things in the distance, like road signs, as I approach them.

Again, I wore my glasses for about 3 hours tonight. Not sure how this will impact my experiment. I guess I really didn’t have to wear them for most of that 3 hours, but I was just really getting tired of my blurry vision, and when I had to put them on to drive, I couldn’t peel them off my face.

Ug.

Maybe I will start up tomorrow morning with more vigor and do my exercises first thing in the morning. I still have 3 weeks of this experiment to go. I feel like I ought to be doing more than the 100 repetitions of near/far exercises throughout the day if I am really to improve the vision. Maybe I’ll bump that up to 3×100 reps per day starting tomorrow, and try to space them throughout the day.

I’d really like to see some improvement when I go to have my eyes tested again in September! 20/20 improvement of course ;-)

5/7 of a week down. Haven’t been doing my solarization exercises faithfully since the sun has been hiding in the mornings the past coupla days.

But all other exercises seem to be slightly starting to get easier. Still not sure how much vision, if any, I’ve recaptured. I have noticed, however, just how hard the body fights the change and creates tension near the eyes. I actually begin to see somewhat clearer when I relax this tension, remembering the admonition to always be comfortable and happy doing the exercises and/or being without glasses.

I’m trying to get my body to adapt to a correction-free way of being, and I think acceptance and not fighting against the body, rather relaxing and giving into that tension may very well be a ticket to the kind of miraculous health change the authors promised and I expect.

Since I am not seeing any obvious visual improvements, I’ve been working on giving my mind permission to see clearly without corrective lenses. I don’t allow it to strain and just keep attempting to focus on blurry objects without discomfort of any kind.

Onto Day 6!

Learned today:
-Already losing motivation

-Eye exercises still feel good/sore

-I’m getting better at doing eye circles with closed eyes. Today was the first day I actually felt my eyeballs moving around 360 degrees with closed eyes. Mastering a new talent! Ha

Went downtown to the Castro on Muni and everything was fine w/out glasses. Kinda freaked out a passenger doing my near/far focus eye exercises x100 on the bus (look at an ad near ceiling, then focus on store windows outside).

Still getting strain headaches that I have to just mentally relax my brow and eye muscles as they tend to strain naturally since things are all blurry. Objects appeared sharper today, but had to wear my glasses for an hour driving and dinner, and after they felt more blurry. Went out to clubs later tonight and everything looked quite fuzzy (no alcohol).

But, I will march on toward day 30. It’s difficult not getting perfect results after 4 days. Patience, child.

I feel like my eyes are slightly sharper today. I got a slight headache when putting my glasses on to drive. Eye exercises still revealed weakness in the upper eye muscles.

A couple different activities today: driving and going to a club without glasses/contacts. Driving was not as dangerous at night as I thought it could be. No I don’t recommend this, it’s illegal. Had to be less than 2 cars back from a street sign to read it, but saw all shapes and movements fine. Of course still missing all other people’s facial expressions, which could be important tertiary information when driving.

Going to a club blurry was fun/fine. Danced up on stage and enjoyed the fog and laser light shows through me.

Every once in a while I’d feel a slight brow headache come on then just relax the eyes and it’d go away.

Not yet convinced, not yet defeated…

My eye muscles cooperated well this morning with the new exercise routine. There is still the most discomfort when looking up, esp. in the right eye (poorest vision). It was my first day really out in the world without glasses/contacts in. I rode my bike 30 minutes to the University, and got a feel for how handicapped I am! I tried to focus on distant signs, words, objects until they came into focus.

I found I would start to get a mild headache as my eyes tried to focus, due to a mechanical strain inside the forehead. I seemed to feel an upward pull of a set of eye muscles (there are 3 main sets). When I relaxed these muscles the headache went away and the eyes were forced to focus without the help of structural change around the eye socket. I think this might be key in getting the eyes to start focusing again without strain or squinting.

I went into a mall which made it very clear to me just how out-of-focus everything is right now. It was all a big blur, and I just tried to focus on what I could without straining.

My eyes watered quite a bit on the ride to the University. The ride home I had very little watering. Probably going without contacts for 30 days will help re-calibrate my eyes to a higher level of oxygen supply, which can only be good.

I have also been doing the controversial practice of looking “at” the sun for one minute in the mornings. I haven’t actually looked directly at it yet, just focusing on a very bright cloud next to the sun, and only to tolerance. I’m finding that this is immediately painful to the eyes to continuously focus on something bright (slight burning feeling), but that it may be expanding my homeostatic range of acceptable incoming light frequency. The dark shadow negative only lasts about a minute after, which assures me that no long-term damage is likely being done. I feel this is a helpful experiment because I have been almost blinded in the past by bright environments and perhaps I can prevent this by small, regular exposure to bright lights. Side benefit of eye attention.

In five more days, I expect my vision to have improved 1 point per eye, as “promised.” I plan to have an optical exam at the end of my 30 day experiment to see how much my vision has improved. I can pretty much guarantee my vision baseline is the same level of last year’s prescription.

Unfortunately I had to wear my glasses for about 4 hours tonight for my hobby as a valet car runner. Kinda necessary. Hope it didn’t set me back any! I should be able to go all day Friday without any correction (no driving).

SCIENCE!!

So, this morning I started what will be a 30-day study in the ability of eye exercises to improve my vision. I completed 15 different eye exercises within about 30 minutes this morning. My eye muscles/brow were quote sore today, particularly the ones that pull your eyes upward. No huge change in vision yet. My right eye has always been about twice as poor as the left.

I am following a free program I found on Scribd, which claims a 1 point improvement in eyesight with each week on the program. So, within 30 days I should be seeing 20/20! Let the games begin…

I ran out of contacts lens supply finally, a little over the year’s worth. I didn’t budget to buy more. So I am in a kind of glasses purgatory. And it’s got me thinking…

It has got me thinking about why I need eye crutches at all. Is it possible that eye doctors are simply in the lens-selling and laser treatment-selling business? And that the large profits there prevents them from helping your eyes see better on their own?

I met a guy recently that works for a high end optical shop. He is personally confounded by the profits that are made on lenses for glasses where he works. They cost a couple of bucks to manufacture then he sells them for hundreds. I noticed this when I went to Pakistan: perfectly good lenses, made to order, ready next day, 10 bucks, with frames.

I think there is a conspiracy here against healthy eyes. I wonder how long it will take me “exercising” my vision before it improves to where I can drive without vision correction?

Time to find out…