I was going to head this 'my eyes feel too big for their sockets!' or 'they're morphing inside my head!' or 'can eyes rupture under pressure?', but I know I should cut back on the melodrama a little. Still, recently, after using my Snellen for a while and getting good clear flashes, those sensations last for several minutes and are a little disconcerting. Well, my eyes don't feel painful or like implosion is imminent, but not knowing much about eye anatomy it has occurred to me that if their structure is changing quickly enough for me to be able to feel it, might another part of them not be adapting quickly enough to avoid tissue damage from friction? At the back of the eye of all places? I can ignore the dryness at the front that comes first. I'm wondering if I should use the Snellen more sparingly, to give the rest of my head time to catch up with any changes. ??? What do you think?
And now I'll try to wait until we have blogs before making any more threads about myself...
Dr. Bates recommended that a child read his Snellen each day.
If you judge that reading your Snellen hurts your eyes -- then
please stop reading your Snellen.
Please use other Bates methods like palming and swinging. They
are more relaxing and should help you avoid the pressure
you feel when you reading your Snellen. :o
Thanks Otis, I will try to do more swinging and palming. Perhaps all I need to do is balance the techniques more evenly. I notice the best vision improvements with the Snellen, so tend to use it for hours without a break. By the end of the day my eyes sting even without it.
Edit: Having palmed properly and patiently, it seems that this too causes the sensation of pressure, and even the dryness. I believe the more relaxed my eyes become the greater this feelings gets. It's probably a sign of positive change but I'd rather slow it down a little, just in case it's too much, too fast.
Just keep this in mind. If all myopic people actually felt the strain that they were under many would be in severe pain! One of the problems is that continual strain will eventually fade into the background and no longer be noticed. I obviously can't tell if you're uncovering old strain or creating new strain, but if you are uncovering old strain than it will be uncomfortable until you can relax that tension away.
I personally would not worry about these transient pains. If your vision is clearing than in all likelihood you are progressing well and should keep doing what you have been.
optifog, this is happening because the first time you looked at Snellen without caring about the clear flash, and now you do care and think you have already won to see things clearer and that causes you even more strain. The feeling of tension occurs because you also listen to the sensations in the eyes as physical organs. This is unlike before, when you didn't have any experience with *sensations* and wasn't biased about what to expect, so you just did the right thing to obtain some relaxation, not to obtain some sensations.
In fact this happens to all Bates newbies, and should have been expected.
The feeling of tension around eyes, although it is an indicator of strain, should never be "listened to" or "acted upon". In fact, it's an illusion of strain and eye anatomy has nothing to do with it. Try to distract your attention from it and it will be momentarily gone. Otherwise it will grow and may cause you some unpleasant symptoms. In fact, I have found that thinking about my eyes and listening to sensations in them is the killer way of making my eyesight worse.
When you play with Snellen, remember not to care about clear flashes and the quality of your vision, just shift and swing and remember black.
I would probably think the feelings likely to be strain, if they didn't occur whenever I get a good clear flash, and continue only after the most successful Snellen sessions. When a clear flash vanishes, so do they. That might suggest that the clear flashes are actually coming from strain too, but I've been consciously straining to see for long enough to know what it feels like and how limited the results are. This is undoubtedly different. The optotypes look different with clear flashes, they float gently or pulsate. Sometimes it feels as though I'm looking at them through glass, or glass is gliding over them with my gaze. That doesn't happen with squinting.
Olek, are you sure it's not anatomical? Don't the eyes eventually change shape in myopia? I wonder if they're being forced to change back. Thanks for reminding me to see the Snellen as a relaxation tool, primarily. It's easy to forget.
I'm glad none of you thinks it's anything of medical concern.
Course they change shape, thats how accommodation occurs. Myopia is tension induced accommodation that cannot be relaxed, so in essence when you are improving myopia, the shape of the eyeball is changing.
In my own experience, all physical sensations you can feel come out of strain or are illusions of strain. When your mind is at rest, you don't feel anything, and your eyesight just works normally. When you manage to stop staring, you may feel a kind of relief from strain, that's all. If you keep feeling some weird sensations even though your are having a "clear flash", it means your relaxation just isn't perfect. It's a big mistake (I'm still making from time to time) to pay attention to the sensations and try to do "something" to make them go away.
As Bates said, the ways people strain are countless. You will be surprised to find out that the strain that causes your sensations is NOT the same strain that causes your blur. Some strains are not perceptible at all. And yes, the eye does change its shape, but you can't feel it. This is just a wrong idea that thinking about anatomy etc. will help you with Bates method. The problem is not in anatomy, but entirely in your mind. For the most part, your blur is also a mental illusion (which is proved because you can see multiple sharp images during clear flashes).
My estimation is that you are too much preoccupied with clear flashes. It's natural for a newbie but you must abandon it as soon as possible. The initial clear flashes only serve to demonstrate you the facts about Bates method. Then you need to stop wanting clear flashes and instead remember to shift and swing all the time WITHOUT caring about the quality of sight. In reverse, it's a good practice to DISCARD clear flashes when they come, instead of wanting them. Here's what Rishi wrote about clear flashes (the Italian guy who has cured himself using Bates method):
"Then you have the clear flashes that happen by themselves but we are not interested in clear flashes because we are interested in methodology and practice. The clear flashes must be discarded quickly. Whenever you have a clear flash, let it go away, start to do thing to have it disappear, start the stare, destroy the good vision, because it was not obtained because of your practice but despite your wrong behavior. This is tricky as an argument, I know, but is the truth. It must become a very hard work to have you succeed in destroying the clear flash. it will be more and more difficult to stop it unless you will forget all about it and you then are cured."
Subject: FEAR of using Bates -- as "non-standard" medicine.
Yes -- that is always a concern. It can stop people from doing the
right-thing. I hope your fear of reading the Snellen does not stop
you in doing vision-clearing work from 20/60 to normal.
Quote:I was going to head this 'my eyes feel too big for their sockets!' or 'they're morphing inside my head!' or 'can eyes rupture under pressure?', but I know I should cut back on the melodrama a little.
Just for reference. Your Snellen is about 20/60, and the minus to clear to normal (under REASONABLE circumstances)
would be about -3/4 diopters.
The eye has power of about 60 diopters. Thus a change of from 1 percent to 1.5 percent in terms of
total power would result in your "clearing" two lines on your Snellen.
This is a VERY SMALL CHANGE -- if you are concerned about your eyes exploding.
Quote:Still, recently, after using my Snellen for a while and getting good clear flashes, those sensations last for several minutes and are a little disconcerting.
Quote:Well, my eyes don't feel painful or like implosion is imminent, but not knowing much about eye anatomy it has occurred to me that if their structure is changing quickly enough for me to be able to feel it, might another part of them not be adapting quickly enough to avoid tissue damage from friction?
In order to "clear" your eyes must change.
Quote:At the back of the eye of all places? I can ignore the dryness at the front that comes first. I'm wondering if I should use the Snellen more sparingly, to give the rest of my head time to catch up with any changes. What do you think?
You can not "win" but that you change your Snellen (refractive status). This does take change. I know that
other here can help you reduce this "fear" -- but that is why Dave established imagination-blindness.
optifog Wrote:The optotypes look different with clear flashes, they float gently or pulsate. Sometimes it feels as though I'm looking at them through glass, or glass is gliding over them with my gaze. That doesn't happen with squinting.
Interesting indeed!
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Quote:If you see a letter perfectly, you may note that it appears to pulsate,
Otis has a good point - it really amounts to a very small change in your eye's focus to go from blinding blur to perfect clarity. So there's no such thing as "too much too fast" concerning it.
And what's more, even people with high degrees of refractive error experience temporary relief now and then without knowing it, and the eyes aren't damaged by that. It's tension, and although it may seem fairly constant, tension does subside now and then, until you snap yourself into the habitual mode of "seeing" and tense them again in order to see.
Dave
Site Administrator
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
I seem to remember hearing somewhere that a millimeter of variation in the size and shape of the eyeball would produce 14 diopters of change, so a few diopters should be nothing!
