Note for Astigmatic Readers
Beyond your program, you must do extra looking into the distance and extra palming throughout your day. Even though you do the astigmatism program, when you sit at your computer again for four hours or so, the benefit you have gained with these exercises is going to decrease. By regularly looking into the distance and palming, you give your eyes the opportunity to rest and to maintain more of the progress you have made with your vision.
Therefore, you must take moments throughout your day to add to your program. If you have been looking closely at your computer screen for an hour, take some time and look into the distance. Palm two or three times a day, for no less than six minutes each time, but don’t forget to blink and to breathe freely and deeply.
Exercise Program for Astigmatism
• Sunning: 10 minutes daily.
• Palming: 12 minutes minimum, 6 minutes at a time.
• Headlines: 20 minutes daily.
• Glow in the Dark: 20 minutes daily.
Extra Exercises for Astigmatism
Headlines
Note: If you are farsighted, this is a great exercise to practice before starting to work on your other exercises.
For this exercise, you will need an eye chart taped to the wall at eye level, your cheap sunglasses with the lens on the strong eye’s side covered with opaque tape, and the page with large and small print or a newspaper with a large-print headline.
Stand at a distance from the eye chart so that you can see the top third of the chart clearly without much straining, but you have to strain to see the bottom two-thirds. Basically, you are going to look at the eye chart while quickly waving the headlines in front of your face. Look past the blur of the headlines being waved in your face and try to read the eye chart. Every few seconds, stop waving the headlines and look quickly at them. Blurt out the first letter you see clearly. Now wave the page back and forth again and go back to reading the eye chart. The object is to quickly shift your focus from far to near and back to far again.
Figure 4.6. Headlines exercise for astigmatism.
If you have a partner with whom to practice these exercises, you can do this exercise a little differently. While you are reading the eye chart, your partner can flash fingers in front of your face, very close to your eyes, and you can tell your partner how many fingers he or she is holding up. Of course, this method is not good if you are by yourself because you cannot surprise yourself with your own fingers!
So when you are practicing by yourself, pick up the page with the large headline and quickly wave it back and forth in front of your eyes while looking at the chart. Read the chart aloud even if all you can read is the first three lines; do so repeatedly. Now for less than half a second, stop waving the headlines, look at the large print, and say the first letter you can see. If you are in a phase of half-guessing and half-seeing because of the speed, that’s exactly where you want you to be. Then return to waving the page back and forth.
Figure 4.7. Variation on the headlines exercise for astigmatism.
Let’s say that you are reading the letters on the top line of the eye chart. As you wave the piece of paper with the headline back and forth in front of your face, you might see the words “moving economy” in your periphery. What you want to do is to wave the paper so quickly that when you stop you may only see “e”; then you keep waving it and say the letter “e” as you return your gaze to the chart and read the top line of letters once again. Then you stop waving the paper, and you may see the letter “c” or the letter “o.” Announce it aloud; then wave the paper and read the top line of the chart again. It is good to speak with a loud voice as you do these eye exercises, as it helps to distract yourself from focusing on the exercise itself. This will make it much more effective.
The next phase is to improve your near vision by trying this same exercise reading the large and small print on this page–this page. This way, you are working with the eye chart to improve your eyesight for distant objects and with the large and small print pages for objects nearby.
Now put on your cheap sunglasses with the strong eye’s side covered with opaque tape. Again wave the paper with the large print in front of your weaker eye while looking at the chart. Read the top line of the chart aloud while waving the headline back and forth in front of your face. From time to time, stop waving the headlines in front of your face for half a second, enough time to guess a letter that you see. After ten times of doing this, look at the chart with your weak eye, but without waving the headline in the air. You may be able to clearly read an extra line on the chart. Then take off the glasses, and you may be able to clearly read two extra lines on the chart.
Glow in the Dark
Note: We do this exercise because we want the eye to move around. We have found, in our experience, that many people have an easier time moving their eyes in a rotating motion in the dark.
The idea is to follow the glowing objects with your eye, not by moving your whole head. Move your eyes only, so that your eye muscles are stretching. The stretching motion changes the structure of the eyes with time. People say the cornea cannot change shape, but they are wrong.
For this exercise, you will need a glow-in-the-dark ball, a dark room, and a strip of paper to tape to your nose. The paper should stretch from the top of your forehead to the bottom of your chin, the same as in the Melissa exercise mentioned earlier in this book and also in the next chapter.
Eventually this exercise gets simple, but it’s difficult to master at first. All you do is tape the paper to your forehead and to your chin, turn the lights off in your room, and play catch with the glowing ball. Throw the ball from hand to hand so that the ball crosses the visual plane in front of your face. It should disappear briefly as it passes the paper taped to your head. You can also practice bouncing the ball off the wall, throwing it with one hand and catching it with the other. Remember not to move your whole head to track the location of the ball. Move only your eyeballs so that they can stretch through their full range of motion in both directions.
Imagine doing curls with your biceps but only bending your arms a little bit. You would not be getting the full benefit of the exercise, and you may even damage the very part of your body you are attempting to build up. This idea is the same when it comes to your eyes. Exercise the eye muscles by watching the glowing ball in the dark and moving your eyes through the full range of their possible motion; this will stretch, and even change, the shape of your cornea over time.
Chapter 5
Overcoming Cross-Sightedness and Lazy Eye
Correcting Cross-Sightedness
Amblyopia and strabismus are both terms for cross-sightedness, and they have something in common. They both refer to a “lazy eye,” but with amblyopia the eyes do not look cross-sighted from the outside. With strabismus, however, the eyes actually look crossed.
I have heard people sometimes joke that strabismus is when one eye is so beautiful that the other eye just wants to look at it all the time! It is okay to have a sense of humor. And this really is true: every part of you is beautiful, even your strabismus!
With amblyopia and strabismus, the brain shuts off the information coming from one eye, but only in strabismus do the eyes look crossed to the outside observer. And the term “lazy eye” is actually a misnomer. In reality, the brain is just not using one of the eyes.