better vision habits (split from: Need Help going cold ...)

[spydermann]

I'm reading the Art of Seeing right now and I think Huxley says it well that much of the mental side to seeing is attention...and if a person has a healthy shifting attention (less dwelling on worry), then the eyes will follow the mind's lead and will then naturally move in a healthy clear seeing way. Like you said: you TREAT something differently and you see it differently. You can look at a mailbox and see a blur. Or treat it it differently, with interest in its details, and take in it's oak wood-post, designs going up the post, the cylindrical shape of the white-metal box, the lid is a little bent, rusty red flag... and as the mind shifts its attention all over these details, the eyes scan over all of these fine details too, and as a side effect of all that healthy scanning movement, clarity comes-

but when I look at the metal mailbox for example, my eyes can scan over it pretty smoothly, since it's a larger object. But then once I move onto something smaller like the flag, I see the flag in those shattered 3D specks and then my movement starts to hurt and sting the eyes like Scott says. I remind myself to relax and breathe, maybe even look away then back, because just gritting my teeth thru the sting and strain doesnt seem right. Sometimes my eyes will feel like they "stick" and anchor in a stare- its a weird sensation-but I dislodge them and relaxedly scan them on a larger object that feels easer to look at...

I dont know if this analogy is right, but retraining the eyes kind of reminds me of working out. looking at large objects/large areas is like lifting light easy weights, and seeing the small objects/fine details is like lifting the heavier stuff. And you have to start with lifting the light weight (scanning large objects) and then ease into the heavy weight (scanning small details) if you want to get them back to their normal function. Get the eyes off the couch and back in their original healthy shape. No pain no gain- but the natural and effortless kind of pain. And maybe the stinging sensation that the eyes feel when you practice seeing correctly is just like the ache you feel in your legs after you haven't used them in a while.

[David]

If your eyes sting, don't use it as an excuse to stop searching for details.

Hi, I would like to explore the stinging eyes a bit further, as this is exactly what I find happens when I get clear flashes. The fact that my eyes were stinging was something I thought of as a problem, maybe that I was straining them in some way (aside from the fact that it felt so unpleasant that I felt the need to blink asap to get rid of the stinging!). I am interested to hear that it is not a problem at all. Do you have any ideas as to why they might be stinging at those times?

Thanks
Scott

I don't know. But if you treat the stinging as something where you need to react by doing something to fix it, it's reflective that you probably do the same thing with blur, bright light, or anything else. You may not know exactly what it is you do, but it might involve tensing your eyes briefly in some way, maybe while blinking. Anything you do along those lines is harmful. Blinking by itself isn't necessarily, as long as it isn't done in a way that's a reaction like that.

Dave

[Nancy]

David, this thought to not focus so much on moving the gaze to avoid that dreaded stare, and focus instead on looking at smaller and smaller areas, has really given me a new direction. Thank you! I wrote about this on my blog last night -- my experience is much like Spyderman's. I am now less worried that if I look at a small point I am excluding the periphery, which I think was always a reason before that I tried to see a bigger area as soon as I got some clarity on a small one (and of course then lost it). My behavioral optometrist had told me years ago that I was "born to converge" and should practice divergence divergence divergence -- yes I spent my childhood with "my nose in a book" and was only comfortable looking close. So I've been afraid to look at small points too intently, thinking I'm making my condition worse. I guess any good advice can be misinterpreted, but something about the way you phrased this last nugget of wisdom really cleared things up for me. Thanks again --- I'm looking forward to steadier progress now.

[David]

Nancy, that's great that it turned a key for you. I haven't heard that one before about diverging, but that's exactly the kind of point of deception that we program into ourselves that has to do directly with how we use our eyes and that we have to recognize for what it is and reject it. We can even build points of deception while in this process and bury our vision further in the complexity of deception, like the movement thing without actually looking at what your eyes are pointed at.

Dave