A key aspect to improving your eyesight is active focus.

There are a number of posts dedicated to this topic, since it is quite important – and yet elusive until you find how it works, for you. Words don’t translate the connection between brain and muscle control, it is a bit of a process to find that connection.

I compare it often to figuring out how to wiggle your nose, or wink. Many of us discovered this and other obscure muscle control during our childhood – it’s that same process, of ‘finding’ how to control your eye’s focusing muscle, the ciliary.

Active focus is so important because it gives you the ability to re-focus blurred text. It allows you to push into distances that you had to rely on the use of glasses for. Little by little, active focus allows you to regain the ground that you lost by using minus prescription lenses, and the strain from excessive close-up focus.

In that effort to find active focus, I very frequently encounter questions from clients, to describe how to get there. Sometimes I will post my responses here on the site – the more ways you hear it, the more likely that something will resonate, and help you get this key conscious muscle control.

Here is the excerpt of a recent bit of dialog with a client, explaining how to find active focus:

It’s a bit like figuring out how to wiggle your nose – the muscle is there, it’s just figuring out how to tell your brain to access it. It’s the ability to focus consciously, where currently all focus happens without your conscious control.

It’s quite fun actually, once you get it.

The trick to find how to access the ciliary muscle consciously, works like this:

Written text, black on white background, is best. Printed, or high resolution monitor.

You move back till the text just barely, barely begins to blur. Stay there, blink once, think of wanting the text to be clear. There can’t be more than a very small bit of blur to start with, until you get the hang of it. It’s just the smallest possible leap. Perfectly clear text –> tiny bit of blur.

A blink. Does it clear up? No. Move back closer to where it is perfectly sharp. Read a little while. Move back again, probably as little as a single centimeter or less, see a bit of blur, blink again. Stare at the text. Blink. Stare. Blink. Just single blinks, sort of the physical manifestation of trying to will your eye to focus.

Don’t strain, stress, or get frustrated. No need to do it a whole lot at any given time. Just a couple of tries here and there, so you don’t get all locked up from trying to force it. Think of learning to wiggle your nose, it doesn’t help any to have any sentiments about it – other than just ‘willing’ it to wiggle. Eventually, somehow, your brain connects, and the nose wiggles. Eventually, somehow the image snaps into focus, and you’ve got it.

On average it takes clients about a month to find it. That’s pushing focus every day, the little centimeter movement back and forth from perfectly clear, to just a little bit of blur. Eventually, somewhere, it clicks, and you notice your eye refocusing on what was previously (just a tiny bit) blurred.

Once you get that, improvement is pretty much a certainty. Active focus is the key to all else. Once we got that, the other installments will be more helpful, especially the ‘locking in’ improvements, equalization, and all the other details.

If you are not in any of my Vision Improvement Courses, this may seem out of context. Reading some of the other topics will shed some light hopefully, and you might also browse the forum for client accounts and experiences.

Looking for more tips on finding active focus?  Here is another great article on the subject.

Enjoy!