Have you sat down for half an hour and worked with the eye chart without much success in seeing better, and then decided to take a break and stand up, only to glance at the chart and see it clearer for a moment?
Have you tried the “thumb movement” that Bates wrote about a few times in the Better Eyesight magazines, with some success?
Do you see better after you concentrate on your breathing for a moment, or even just when you take a good deep breath after you’ve been breathing shallowly for a while?
Do you often see better when you’re not thinking about an unpleasant conversation, a deadline, or something you’re unsure about that’s bothering you? Or do you see better when you’re having a “good day” in terms of things unrelated to your vision?
Do you often have moments of clearer vision when you’re running out of energy when riding your bike, running, or some other exhaustive physical activity?
Do you notice that people with blurry vision are often mainly into intellectual pursuits, and that a relatively small number of people into physical sports have vision problems?
If you have blurry vision, do you remember ideas and procedures better than you remember actual sense impressions (vision, touch, sound, smell, taste)?
You can think up some interesting and different explanations for each point above. But look at how the mind works, and all of the above things are explained in the same way.
Thoughts are things, and your thinking has a real impact. When you are physically “present” and focus only on your body and your physical world that is here, right in front of you, you are that much less “in your mind”, and your mind can actually stop for as long as you stay physically present. The simplest way to be physically present that you can do at any time is to focus on your breath. The sound, the feeling of the air, the movement of your abdomen and the rhythm of the whole act of breathing. You don’t have to even try to silence your mind when focusing on your breath. Your mind just stops when you stop participating in your mind and direct your attention elsewhere. You spend all your time thinking because you value your mind too much, even though when you take stock of all the things you think about throughout the day very little of what you think about has any value. Most of what you think about is repeated over and over uselessly.
When you are physically present as your breath, you are in control. Being physically present means that you notice your own few thoughts, as language or emotions, as something separate from what you are as a physical presence. You also notice your own physical actions more. So when you work with the eye chart or any other object or scene to work on your vision with, you can better notice what exactly you are doing, and you can catch yourself doing some interesting things that might be detrimental to your process of seeing. You have created your own situation that you find yourself in as a collection of habits that you allow to run your life. They aren’t working for you. So take a moment to notice them and start to change them.
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I founded iblindness.org in 2002 as I began reading books on the Bates Method and became interested in vision improvement. I believe that everyone who is motivated can identify the roots of their vision problems and apply behavioral changes to solve them.