Ryan posts in the forum:
I had a bit of a breakthrough late last week with what I believe to be fully relaxing my ciliary.
Some background first. I’ve been using a sign about 30 or 40 feet away from my desk at work as a static test to gauge how my eyes are doing every day. It’s a red rectangle with the words “Fire Extinguisher” in white text on it. For the longest time I’ve had to squint to be able to sharpen the white text against the red background. Some days I’ve had to squint less to sharpen it, and some days, albeit much fewer, more.
Skip forward to last week. I was looking down at a drawing and began to zone out a little. My focus shifted from the crisp letters on the paper to the space beyond it, consequently blurring the contents of the page. I remained in this state for what must have been a good minute or so. When I snapped out of it, I looked up, and happened to glance in the direction of the sign. To my surprise the sign was crystal clear – not just clear enough to be able to make out the small letters, but extremely sharp, as if I had glasses on. I immediately credited this increase in acuity to my extended state of defocus, though I knew I could conclude nothing until the results could be consistently replicated. I appreciated the clear flash and looked back down to continue working. When I looked up again, the sign had returned to its slightly blurred state. As you can probably guess, I tried the defocus technique again. I focused on a paper close to me, looked “past” it, intentionally allowing the text to blur. After some time in this state, I looked up and back at the sign; sure enough it was perfectly clear again.
I feel like I’m onto something here and am finally close to taking my vision to where I want it to be. Though I can now consistently replicate this clear flash, it seems to elude me after bringing my focus back to anything remotely close for just a few seconds. The only way to bring back the sharp distance vision is to use the defocus technique. Will I ever get to a point where I don’t have to use this trick to sharpen my distance vision? It’s like my ciliary locks back up immediately after any near work.
This experience isn’t something you will necessarily have, the way Ryan did. I’m not posting this one as a how-to guide or practice suggestion.
Instead, here’s the take-away:
*engage hippie mode*
You want to make friends with your eyes. These aren’t robotic implants. They aren’t always perfect, or always the same. Rather, they respond to stimulus, to your mood, to lighting, to the environment, and many other aspects of your day. Lots and lots of subtle feedback is constantly happening. You just don’t realize it, because …
Full prescription glasses take this experience away from you.
The constant over-sharpened, over tightened focal plane you get from full prescriptions keeps you far removed from experiencing your eyesight. If you follow the forum, you probably read all sorts of interesting stories. How mood and sleep affect student’s vision, in a quantifiable, tangible fashion (centimeter measurement!). How winter may have your eyes in a funk, for months at a time. How cutting down on sugar may improve your vision. Depression, and happiness, and how it all correlates with your eyesight.
Since BackTo20/20 is geared towards the quickest, point A to B progress methods, we stick to the script of habit building and all the tangible things that will affect your eyesight positively, consistently.
But what I hope you learn, during this process, is that your own eyes are your own unique experience. Ryan finds intentional defocus to give him clear flashes. I find excessive speeds in rush hour traffic to do it for me. As you start adjusting your lens use to fit your actual required distance vision, I hope that you’re starting to gain a stronger appreciation for your eyesight. Getting out of the cycle of “over medicated” vision, getting to know these parts of your body, and hopefully getting to smile often as you discover what makes your eyes happy.
*disengage hippie mode*
That’s it. You want to start with the tangible bits. Learn about diopters and centimeter and strain and good habits. This is what will keep you grounded in tangible reality, create progress as a measurable quantity. And as you start seeing real results, you might sit back sometimes and muse about how amazing your own biology really is – and your individual ability and various tricks and strategies, to affect it.
Random Sunday-Afternoon Aside: You know what’s making me a bit crazy?
Video. I keep wanting to do video blogs. There are so many of them by now cluttering the drives, none remotely half decent enough to upload. They also don’t seem to belong on Youtube, where random people may find them, which would be even worse than you seeing it (thumbs down!). But you know …
We talk about eyesight. It’s visual. A visual story, being told in words on a page. A bit ironic, perhaps. Seems like the sort of thing I’d rather chat with you about in the park, at least sometimes. Not quite yet being able to get it together, though, and I’d rather do that right than many of the other things that need attention as well. And along those same lines, every single day the blog is at risk of becoming my personal amusement park, and get too strangle for general public consumption. ;-)
Keep it together, man! Right?
Cheers and stuff,
-Jake
