Applying the Bates Method

Part 1: Preparing to See

Revised 1/26/2011

When you're done with the below, proceed to Part Two: How to See

Most eyesight problems are, despite widespread beliefs otherwise, entirely functional disorders. People with clear vision do certain things that people with blurry vision don't, and people with blurry vision do certain things that those with clear vision don't. Learning to see the way that people with clear vision do is the basis for seeing clearly.

For whatever reason, you have gotten stuck in an abnormal way of using your eyes, causing your visual system to go haywire. Further complications and side effects can result from this, giving people the illusion that it is a complex problem or that their eyes themselves are degrading and likely beyond repair, leading them to resort to measures even more drastic than glasses such as surgery. Although it's possible that you have caused long-term problems that may take some time to address, the poor vision that people experience is commonly held in place continuously simply by the dysfunctional process of seeing they have gotten used to, and this process can be adjusted to eliminate the conditions.

Fortunately, the correct way to see is easy. It only needs to be practiced and adjusted to. This article attempts to describe the basic process of adjusting your way of seeing.

These instructions are written with myopia in mind for simplicity's sake. However, it applise to a wide range of refractive errors (myopia, hyperopia, presbyopia and astigmatism) and other visual disorders. The principles of how to see do not change depending on what condition you have, because the condition represents only one way to see wrongly. There is one right way that applies to everyone, and this article describes the right way. For presbyopia or hyperopia (farsightedness), your condition is sort of the reverse of myopia, so instead of a distance chart hung on the wall, use a similar hand-held chart with smaller letters. Astigmatism, as well as other disorders such as various forms of strabimus (convergence insufficiency, exotropia, esotropia, and other specific terms), are only ever present with refractive errors and are strongly related to them.

If possible, get an eye chart, such as Snellen eye chart, and hang it on the wall. It's just a chart that you see at the eye doctor's office with a large letter at the top and smaller letters on down to the bottom. Buy a professional one if you can. It will be clearer and much less affected by glare than something you print out yourself. An eye chart isn't absolutely necessary, but it gives incredibly precise feedback as to how clear you're seeing, and it provides letters of progressively smaller sizes to give you an opportunity to look for smaller and smaller details. It also has an array of separate, distinct objects, which are useful for our purposes as you will see later. So while the eye chart was designed for testing vision, here we mainly use it as a tool to help with improving vision, not as a testing device.

However, if you don't have an eye chart, something else will work for now, and you may in fact find other things preferable sometimes to an eye chart (let's face it, a black and white chart is boring). Use a picture on the wall or a view out the window. It just needs to be well lit, full of lots of details, and you need to be able to view it from a seated position in a place where you won't be disturbed. It should be at a distance where you can see enough to pick out separate things to look at, but not nearly all the detail that is there.

Sit down. This is too involved for you to do standing up, at least at first. You don't want to make yourself dizzy and fall over.

To prepare yourself for Part Two, you need to learn to relax your eyes as much as possible. Every one of you out there with blurry vision not due to injury of the eye has a habit of straining your eyes. This has only a little to do with the task at hand (reading, studying, or doing anything else) and is largely a continuous habit that you do all day long in a variety of situations.

This straining of the eyes is due to any of the following four causes:

1. Misuse of the eyes.
   This is the major underlying cause in most cases. The other causes below are secondary causes that exist on top of this. This is unavoidable as long as the eyes are being used incorrectly. However, there is a sort of feedback loop going on, so any of these causes can feed the others, until you're doing three or all four of them. Part Two deals with stopping this one by learning correct use of the eyes.
2. Reaction to poor vision.
   This may be accompanied by emotions like anxiety, fear or frustration. It happens when you can't see something due to blurry vision or even due to other situations such as dim light or being too far from an object. If you feel any measure of immediate relief when putting on glasses that correct your vision (or pinhole glasses; see below), this cause is applicable to you. The relaxation exercises below should be of help.
3. Chronic tension whenever the eyes are open
   This would happen no matter how well you can see, with or without glasses. There may be emotional components to this, such as armoring (tensing muscles to protect yourself emotionally) due to fear of the environment, fear of seeing too much, fear of being seen, or other things. If you feel any measure of immediate relief when palming (see below), both after wearing glasses and after not wearing glasses (to rule out cause B), this cause is applicable to you. As with 'B', the relaxation exercises below should be of help, as these issues only go so deep and are relatively easy to identify and stop.
4. Other mental strain.
   Although any of the above may legitimately be called 'mental strain', this is a catch-all category that covers everything else. It's chronic tension regardless of whether the eyes are open are closed or whether the vision is clear or not. This can be complex. It may be due to a deep belief that to do anything at all requires pain and effort, and that the process of seeing is tiring just like everything else. This is also where various emotional issues may be causing problems, as suppressed emotions are held in place by patterns of chronic tension and interfere with all kinds of mental and physical processes. Over the years, people have shared all kinds of insights they have had about themselves in regards to these types of things. Some personality traits associated with myopia and other visual disorders fit in here, but that's beyond the scope of this article. There are various ways to deal with these types of problems, but it's very common that while doing the relaxation exercises below, or the procedure in learning correct use of the eyes as in Part Two, people have sudden insights in this area, including repressed memories surfacing. It's all about realizing what you're already doing to yourself and stopping it.

Relaxation exercises can be of great benefit to causes B, C and D. Dr. Bates and others have devised many exercises for this purpose that are specifically aimed at helping you relax the muscles around the eyes by stopping the patterns of strain.

PALMING - Close your eyes, but not tightly. Cup your hands just slightly, and cover your eyes lightly with your hands so as to exclude most or all light, as shown in the picture. Your hands are not to touch your closed eyes. The purpose of this is to create conditions under which to rest your eyes for a moment. There is something about the hands placed over the eyes like this that helps assist you in relaxing various muscles near and around the eyes. This is called palming. Don't be afraid to open your eyes slightly while doing this and even blink if it helps you to avoid squeezing your eyes shut too tightly. You can do this for as long as you want, but you may find it most helpful to do it frequently for a few seconds or a few minutes at a time. Longer is fine, but after a while your eyes become adjusted to the darkness and it just makes things a little harder when you open your eyes to the sudden bright light, so it's easiest to avoid that.

The simplest way to palm effectively is to clear your mind by focusing on your breath. Focus entirely on the sound, feeling and rhythm of your breath. You don't want errant thoughts creeping up. You need to be focused entirely on what you're doing. Breathe fully and comfortably, at a pace you can maintain indefinitely. People in straining their eyes to try to see also tend to stop breathing. Simply the act of focusing on your breath in this way can unseat the pattern of strain. Even once you stop palming, it can be helpful to continue focusing on your breath.

BLINKING - As you perform the instructions in Part Two, remember to blink your eyes. People with blurry vision often have poor habits of blinking, perhaps only blinking once or twice a minute if they're concentrating on something heavily, and then they wonder why their eyes feel so dry and overworked. You should blink every 5 to 10 seconds as a rule of thumb. You'll need to remain conscious of this at first, just as with breathing, and continue to remind yourself, because you likely aren't doing it enough.

You can also try other exercises to help relax your eyes and mind somewhat. For now, see here for descriptions and discussions on various exercises. By "exercises", don't take it to mean that these things give your eyes a workout to build muscle or improve endurance or cardiovascular functioning. These exercises are only to relax the eyes. They are pretty much just tricks that you may find mental and physical relief from and may help prepare you for the real work.

Note that most of these exercises at the above link aren't really about practicing the right way of seeing. They are just to prepare you for it. However, people find that they have flashes, or even longer moments, of clearer vision while doing them. With continued practice, vision may improve a certain amount and pretty much stay that way, not really gaining much more but not going back to the previous level of blur either except occasionally, representing a real improvement that will be encouraging.

Sometimes you may also have moments of much clearer, even perfect vision. It then quickly goes away. This is because your way of using their eyes is incorrect, and clear vision can't be maintained if the eyes are used incorrectly, which Part Two addresses. When clear vision lasts longer than just a moment, the eyes are being used correctly. This can actually happen spontaneously, as it's just the natural functioning of the eyes we're talking about, and you may find yourself falling into doing the right things without totally realizing what you're doing. For most people, perfectly clear vision (or close to it) will only last a moment as a result of these exercises, and they will need to spend a lot of time practicing the procedure in Part Two.

Don't wear your glasses while using this process. The object is to learn to see clearly without them, and as long as you wear them, they will hinder your progress. This may mean you need to get extremely close to the chart.

Contact lenses are also just as bad, if not worse. They're foreign objects in the eyes. Any sensations from your eyes, or changing visual effects, that you likely will feel at some point you may mistakenly attribute to contact lenses slipping out of place, drying out or getting dirt underneath them. Contacts also tend to make it uncomfortable for you to move your eyes.

Some people find that a pair of slightly weaker glasses are helpful. People order these at various online stores or get their eye doctor to prescribe "reading" or "computer" glasses that are necessarily of a weaker prescription, because normal glasses for myopia are prescribed to focus the eyes at a 20ft+ distance, so when the eyes are focused any nearer the glasses are actually overprescribed and tax the eyes unnecessarily. People often find that glasses 1/4 diopter weaker seem to be no different, due to their current glasses already being slightly overprescribed, or due to the effects of sunlight sort of compensating for a slight amount of blur, so it's not uncommon for people to elect to get glasses 1/2 diopter weaker and notice only a small amount of blur. (ie: a -3.00 prescription reduced by 1/2 diopter would be -2.50).

Pinhole glasses are another option. The lenses are just pieces of plastic with dozens of holes drilled in. Due to the "pinhole effect", the way peripheral light rays are blocked, wearing them gives you clearer vision without the negative effects of lens-based glasses.

Continue to Part Two: How to See