Rony, 3 cheers for you! Your daughter is a lucky girl. If I even think of putting on glasses now, I can feel my face tighten up. My visual system doesn’t like them, and I’m listening. Keep up the good work! 🙂

So true! Thanks.

Thank you very much, Darrel, for your encouragement!

That’s great to hear Alvina. The Bates Method is very psychotherapeutic when done properly. It does so much more than improve vision. Glasses, contacts and lasers can never do this amazing mental effect and that I think is a major reason why the Method still keeps on going today. I wish you well.

Sheila, may I also add that in the very same Bates book, he says (p.105): “…glasses should be discarded at the beginning of the treatment. When this cannot be done without too great discomfort, or when the patient has to continue his work during the treatment and cannot do so without glasses,their use may be permitted for a time; but this always delays the cure”.

Also in a medical publication, namely “Cure of Errors of Refraction” ((1915) Bates wrote:

“As a general rule it is best fora patient to discard glasses. In some cases of extreme myopia, where going without glasses entails too great a hardship, good results have been obtained by gradually reducing the strength of the glasses as the vision improves, but the treatment is then prolonged.”

I personally think that Bates was describing two approaches to vision improvement, the “cold turkey” approach for those who are able to take their glasses off permanently, and the more gradual approach for those who can’t straightaway.

Hope this helps and don’t be discouraged 🙂

Right, other eye conditions and health conditions in general can be improved. Here I’m mainly making the point that refractive errors are not diseases… which is what some people seem to think.

Ok, I’ll look into it!

Sheila, I suspect you’re referring to this quote from Bates’s book, because a couple other people brought this up in the past: “Persons who are unable to do without glasses for all purposes are not likely to be able to cure themselves.”
If you look at that chapter 24 again and read that part in context, you’ll see he’s not suggesting that people with strong glasses can’t improve their vision to normal. What he’s saying is you have to go without your glasses. Even so, in later years he mentioned in his magazines that this wasn’t the case either, because some of his patients who kept wearing their glasses also saw improvement.

David- Google The Work by Byron Katie. Her focus is on using a very accessible method to identify and then undo our stories. Her website is excellent and you can download her guide sheets for free and start trying out her work without any expense. Her book The Work is a good way to start finding out about her method. Also Ernest Holm Svendson has a new book about applying her work and he also has helpful podcasts on Stitcher. (Get the Stitcher app and search either Byron Katie or Ernest Holm Svendson.)

So the cause in within, not without.

Also eye diseases are susceptible to improvement and even cure according to Bates and others who came after him. It would be unwise to limit what the mind can do given the right conditions.

Definitely, the effect can go both ways. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks! Like most good things, I stole another version of that from another source!

Gwen, good example! Sometimes it’s not very obvious what the story is. When I’m having a problem, vision related or otherwise, I find that if I sit to meditate and carefully feel through the issue I can sometimes find out what is going on.
I’m not familiar with Byron Katie. Does she do something like this?