I constantly half-blink and it is hampering my progress with the Bates method. Kind of like how women are supposed to do when they meet a man they like, which I was made fun of in school alot for since I am a guy. I think this all started around the time I was in third grade when my cousin accidently hit me above the left eye with an aluminium baseball bat. I remember crying alot immediately after that and being scared that my vision would be damaged if I opened my eyes. I was really stressed out immediately following that incident and that is when I picked up the trauma of near constant unproductive half blinks.
When I try to practice productive blinking it is hard for me. Most of the times I fail but sometimes I can see flashes of slightly better vision. But practicing like this does not seem to make productive blinking a constant habit for me.
I was almost always practicing blinking by itself which produced a stare, but when I combine it with sketching my blinking is much more productive for flashes of clarity. It is like Quackenbush always repeated in his book Relearning to See: "Sketch, breath, blink". I guess I was approaching the Bates Method with a very inflexible mentality.
It sounds like you may have figured it out! Constant blinking can be misused as a substitute for shifting, to keep the eyes moving, but as you're finding out, when you learn to shift more, you lose the urge to blink so much.
Blinking is a big part of seeing. People with strained eyes tend to either overblink like you describe, or else their blinks are sluggish and forceful. But when you start finding out what simple things can relieve the strain on your eyes, your blinking gets back into the right gear too.
Dave
Site Administrator
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
