The Power Behind Your Eyes

Improving Your Eyesight with Integrated Vision Therapy

Robert-Michael Kaplan

• Publisher: Healing Arts Press
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9781620552995
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Opthalmology & Optometry

Good vision is more than the ability to see 20/20 on an eye chart. Any vision problem is a message alerting us to an unbalanced inner state. Eyeglasses, medications, and surgery may correct poor vision but they cannot correct this inner imbalance. In The Power Behind Your Eyes, Robert-Michael Kaplan presents Integrated Vision Therapy a comprehensive daily program that can actually improve as well as treat the inner causes of poor vision. More comprehensive than other vision care techniques, Integrated Vision Therapy takes a holistic approach to identifying the causes of vision problems and developing noninvasive, natural strategies for treatment, including clear, easy-to-follow exercises, diets, and changes in daily habits.

Chapter 1

The Doorway to Vision

What Is Vision?

If I were to ask you what vision means, you might say it is how accurately you see, how sharp your eyesight is, or possibly how well you see a perfect 20/20 on an eye chart. Others might understand vision to be esoteric insights from the mind. All these definitions are valid.

We have been programmed to believe the eye is like a camera that captures an image on a film equivalent, the retina. In reality, however, your eyes merely contribute to your vision; they are the doorway to your mind. They receive and organize light and then dispense that light, which sets in motion the transfer of energy to the understanding mind, which then constructs the experience of what you perceive and see. These incredible organs are microcosms of your whole body. The light interacts with live tissue, and the combined energy is fed to your brain, where 90 percent of the process we call “vision” occurs. Yet, most optometrists (vision doctors specializing in diagnosing vision disturbances) and ophthalmologists (medical doctors specializing in eye diseases) determine the quality of your vision by examining only your eyes themselves. Their professional focus has been on the disease process, or on what’s wrong with the way you look.

The unfortunate reality is that during routine eye examinations, most assessments focus on checking only the quality of eye health rather than the effectiveness of your individual capacity to organize and process incoming light. Why don’t most eye doctors consider other aspects of the person?

This style of practice is modeled around a medical-insurance system that reimburses payment to the attending professional when a physical problem is discovered, and thus encourages discovery of such problems. Patients, however, often pursue cases of false diagnosis, and ultimately the lucrative industry of malpractice suits has become a giant threat to health-care professionals.

Vision-care professionals, like most medical doctors, have responded to this threat by implementing more and more tests for their patients, to ensure the identification of any possible eye diseases. The initial idea of prevention was good, but the situation reached paranoid proportions in the mid-1980s, when 80 to 90 percent of the total time allotted for an eye-vision examination was devoted to a search for the presence of eye disease. Only 10 to 20 percent of the assessment time considered how well the eyes worked and how well they were able to convey information from the eye to the brain. Only a small minority of eye doctors, possibly 15 percent (mostly progressive vision therapy or behavioral optometrists), ventured into seeing the patient as a person with eyes. These behaviorally trained optometrists are skilled in examining vision from a functional and enhancement point of view. But just look in the Yellow Pages to note how many ophthalmologists limit their practices to the retina or the cornea or to a specialty in microsurgery.

When optometrists advertise their services, they often seem to highlight their fashion-frame selection. In the 1980s, consumerism reached its maturity in North America. The vision-care industry focused on the mass marketing of eyewear products because it seemed more money could be made by selling eyeglasses or contact lenses than through preventative vision care. Some of the corporate giants in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals took contact lenses under their product wings. Designer-frame manufacturers also got in on the action, preying on vanity-conscious eyeglass wearers.

This end-product approach to eye care has overshadowed the emphasis on vision. Less money is invested in the vision examination than in the vision-care products (eyeglasses, contact lenses, solutions, medications, and the like). As consumers, our thinking about vision has been relegated to the physical plane of getting our vision back to 20/20. The Power Behind Your Eyes suggests a fresh and empowering way of seeing vision and the care and maintenance of our eyes.

Vision is a process, a dynamic state of doing and being. “Doing” is associated with the rational and logical day-to-day existence of busy-ness and accomplishing tasks. “Being” is the time out, the relaxing, the letting go, the kicking back from the busy-ness of life. Ideally, these two behavioral states interweave to produce a physiological dance that harmonizes our internal organs, muscles, and, most importantly, our nervous system.

For most of us, this dance is not occurring in balanced measure. For the majority of people, “doing” dominates daily existence. An astute vision therapy optometrist (a doctor who prescribes eyeglasses from a conservative and therapeutic point of view and who offers special exercises for enhancing vision) can measure deviations from the norm in your eyes and can interpret the relationship between these measurements and the way you use your vision in life.

Clinical research tells us that the eye responds to most of the physiological processes of the body. The nervous system that warns you to slam on the brakes of your car is routed through your eyes; the sugar processed through your pancreas affects the way you focus; a stimulating landscape modifies the size of your pupils. A larger pupil reflects the fight-or-flight response, and a smaller pupil indicates a relaxed state. Learning as much as possible about visual function can help you make healthy life choices and help you teach your children how to have integrated, powerful, and clear vision as they get older.

I was once afflicted by double vision during 50 percent of my waking hours. In spite of clear eyesight and perfect 20/20 vision, when I was looking far away or attempting to read, two images of the scene would suddenly appear. Have you ever tried dealing with two sets of headlights hurtling down the freeway toward you? (I recall driving Interstate 5, south of Seattle, when my double vision contributed to the arrival of my car and me in the center highway ditch.) Try reading what appears to be two books at the same time. It is very disconcerting. (Not surprisingly, I chose the path of being a non-reader.)

The times when I wasn’t seeing double generally were times when I felt relaxed. My double vision taught me that I needed to focus my attention more in order to be present and single in my vision. It was easy for me to “space out.” My double vision seemed to increase with the amount of distress I experienced when I worked long hours; it also increased when I ingested refined, fatty foods and when I deprived my body of sufficient sleep, fresh air, and exercise. These variables affected my ability to stay focused and present and encouraged me to “space out.” As children, the importance of these elements to a healthy life is drummed into us and we, in turn, preach it to our children. But sometimes we forget. When I realized that lack of exercise, for example, was affecting my vision and my state of well-being, I woke up to the need to modify my unhealthy lifestyle.

I also discovered an emotional connection to my vision. Each time my father, who lived abroad, visited me, I had episodes of double vision. Our relationship has always been rather turbulent, and when reacting to him, I would experience dramatic changes in my vision. My patients have reported similar changes in vision: negative, fearful, or angry thoughts and limiting beliefs seem to cause increased blurring. In his book And There Was Light, Jacques Lusseyran talks of being blind at the age of eight and of his subsequent recovery process. In the beginning, he was able to experience the full richness of nonreflected light within his eyeball only when he could free his mind of limiting thoughts, self-pity, and other self-defeating perceptions.

In my case, after undergoing specific vision therapy exercises and routines, I developed the ability to use my brain to control my eye muscles. The periods of double vision diminished, but not completely, because I still hadn’t learned how to control my limiting thoughts and fears. Certainly the prismatic lenses in my eyeglasses helped me maintain single vision, but when I took them off, my double vision became worse. Only when I used the full, mind-controlled vision, seeing through both my eyes, did I understand that the patterns of my unconscious perceptions caused blurry and double vision to surface.

The Anatomy of the Eye

• Almost 50 percent of the cranial nerves that emanate from the brain and control all bodily functions are for the specific use of the eyes.
• Some structures in the eye function without a direct blood supply of their own.
• The internal lens of the eye, which is like a transparent windowpane, has its own metabolic system for regenerating cells.
• The outer surface of the eye (the anterior layer of the cornea) can regenerate itself in twenty-four hours.

The retina has two structures, rods and cones. The cones are used for daytime vision (most of the cones are in the macula and fovea area, the place for 20/20 central sight), and the rods are for night vision. Another aspect of the way our eyes work, which most non–vision therapy eye doctors don’t really consider, is that the fovea and retina of one eye have to collaborate with the fovea and retina of the other eye. The thoughts, feelings, and emotions we experience through these eye structures influence our perceptions of life, and most of the decisions we make—as well as the ways we play sports, are drawn to careers, hobbies, and mates, and use our vision—are influenced by these inner perceptions.

You may be one of the millions who have excellent 20/20 eyesight. However, perhaps you cannot concentrate efficiently for more than thirty minutes of reading, working at a computer, or sewing, for instance, without having your mind wander, forgetting what you just read, or feeling pain in your eyes. If that is the case, the right fovea and retina are not cooperating with the left fovea and retina. They’re having a fight; they’re dysfunctional together.

Clear 20/20 eyesight is achieved through the fovea, which metaphorically represents clarity, focus, detail, logic, precision, rationality, and analysis. The foveal qualities of perception are culturally associated with a doing mode. The peripheral retina relates to being and represents feelings, emotions, creativity, sensing, and intuition. In my earlier book, Seeing Without Glasses (formerly Seeing Beyond 20/20), I termed the foveal, or doing, process “looking” and the working of the peripheral retina, the being process, “seeing.” The terms are borrowed from the great teacher Frederick Franck, who, in The Zen of Seeing, teaches an innovative drawing process.

While studying with Franck for a weekend, my wife and I found ourselves looking at leaves. Dr. Franck had us draw their physical details—a very demanding visual exercise. We had to remember to breathe and let our eyes scan every inch of the leaf while our fingers guided our pens over the sketchbook page. The representation was amazing. But an element was missing: seeing the leaf. Without allowing the emotion and feeling through the retina to also be involved in the drawing, it became too technically perfect and lacked warmth and heartfelt connection.

Through the retina, we feel and sense emotions and open up another form of awareness triggered by movement and blurring. This may come as a surprise. Seeing with the retina reveals double and blurry vision perceptions. The more we could remain aware of the blurring, or “ground,” around the edges of the leaf, the more life we were able to put into the leaf drawing.

After I finally gave up the disciplined looking mode of my formal education, I came to describe the combination of looking and seeing as a process called Integrated Vision. The power behind your eyes is a way of using your eyes in which you become simultaneously aware of what is in front of you as well as what is on the side (peripheral seeing). My own double vision, for instance, had actually been activated in my mind through a combination of hereditary factors and life experiences. Without looking directly at my father or mother, that is, by only focusing behind them in a farsighted way, I was only seeing them, which created the double vision. I learned that this kind of vision was physiologically acceptable and emotionally contained. When I experienced blurry and double vision, I would bring forth my new power, which was the ability to focus close and inward. When I integrated my looking and seeing, my double vision experiences occurred less than 3 percent of the time. Within six months, I didn’t need prismatic prescription glasses anymore. I was set free.

Now in my forties, I still have excellent eyesight for reading, yet I have been warned repeatedly by my colleagues that inevitably I will need reading glasses because of the cursed “short-arm” syndrome—someday, they say, my arm will not be long enough to bring details into focus by moving an object farther away. What I haven’t told them is that I practice my Integrated Vision Therapy daily and intend to do so forever, just as I brush my hair and floss my teeth. My vision is well worth the few extra minutes a day.

FOCUSING AND CLARITY

When we were kids, my brother and I had an old projector lens that magnified the details of our stamp collection. One sunny day we were playing outside. To our delight, we found that when we focused sunlight through the lens onto a piece of paper, the page started to burn. Similarly, an eyeglass or contact lens focuses light fiercely onto the fovea on the retina at the back of the eye. This explosion of light causes an overstimulation of foveal energy at the expense of retinal function. This means most lens prescriptions cause more doing and looking in our lives, and less being or seeing. Is it possible that our perceptions are influenced by the way strong 20/20 eyeglasses and contact lenses focus light to the fovea? It’s horrific to think, for example, that workaholism may be encouraged by the artificial lenses we look through.

In the United States alone, 132 million people wear eyeglasses and contact lenses. Twenty-five percent of the world’s population is nearsighted. If something seems wrong with our eyes, we often give away our power of choice to the optometrist or ophthalmologist and he or she substitutes an artificial power in the form of a lens prescription. Eyeglasses or contacts replace our innate power (the power behind our eyes), and we become dependent on an outside source of power. That outside source of power becomes a crutch.

I felt compelled to experiment with different lens prescriptions to see if behavior indeed changed when the light through the eyes was more widely dispersed over the retina and not just concentrated over the fovea. What I ultimately observed, over twenty years of clinical investigation, seems to support my hypothesis: not only do weaker lens prescriptions encourage more seeing than looking, they create the perfect biofeedback mechanism for you to observe your thoughts, emotions, and feelings. This witnessing process helps you be aware that the blurring of your seeing can fluctuate in certain circumstances. This process will be explained in more detail shortly.

This connection between eyesight and emotion is the future of vision care. It is available to you now if you are willing to commit to being an active participant in your personal healing journey.

Eye Symptoms—No Problem

My friend in Oregon drives a BMW—a sleek and technologically sophisticated automobile. One day while driving with him, I noticed some black tape covering a flashing red light on the dash. “Dick, what does this light mean? Why is it flashing?” I asked. He replied, “Oh, that’s just to let me know I need to service the engine. I have about three thousand kilometers left before I really need to do anything about it.”

For a moment I thought how strange it was that he would question German technology. The light was on because something needed to be checked in the engine, and here he was covering up the light. How much in denial are we about what’s really happening to us? How often do we just cover up our symptoms, the blurring of our life? How often do we try to cover up these symptoms that could help us wake up and perceive?

The example of the red light made me curious. I began to look at my own eye and body symptoms and at every little message transmitted by my body. I recall a profound conversation with my daughter when I felt an incredible pain in the right side of my head as she talked about her life with me. As she shared her feelings, my pain seemed to fluctuate. Before I had begun to notice the messages my body was sending me, I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention to the pain—I wouldn’t have been that aware. But in this moment, I happened to be tuning in. I felt my chest becoming very tight. I was beginning to shut down and to feel anger and frustration. I seized the moment and, with it, the opportunity to face my own fears of rejection and losing love.

With an honest assessment of our particular needs and fears, and with clarity of mind, we can begin to understand that physical symptoms are revealing something very important. I began to talk to my patients about vision with the understanding that important information was being communicated fro...

Table of contents

• Cover Image
• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Doorway to Vision
• Chapter 2: Opening the Door to the Brain
• Chapter 3: Focusing your Mind
• Chapter 4: What Do You Want?
• Chapter 5: The Challenge To Be Clear
• Chapter 6: What You Say Is What You See!
• Chapter 7: Your Secret Purpose
• Chapter 8: Renewing Your Vision
• Chapter 9: Life’s Opportunities
• Chapter 10: Living Your Daily Vision
• Appendix: The Essential Integrated Vision Therapy Program
• Resources
• Footnotes
• Bibliography
• Additional programs and services
• About the Author
• About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company
• Copyright & Permissions