Dr. Samuel A. Berne presents Creating Your Personal Vision

Creating Your Personal Vision: A Mind-Body Guide For Better Eyesight by Dr. Samuel A Berne (217 pp.)

Dr. Berne teaches that every cell in your body can "see" --not only your eyes. Although his techniques are drawn from the traditional "Bates" method of vision corrective exercises, they go into many more areas of healing, namely nutrition, psychology, and habit patterns. The result is a book that connects inner with outer vision. Berne describes and illustrates the common mechanical vision defects and explains the interaction between the eyes and the entire nervous system. To eliminate corrective lenses and attune the entire body to "visual restoration, Berne presents a four week plan of well illustrated exercises and techniques. Finally, he discusses the relationship of vision with learning disabilities and educational or occupational difficulties (in children and adults) ordinarily associated with vision dysfunction. A glossary, resources for obtaining the tools and nutrients described, and a suggested reading list conclude an interesting book.

What follows is an edited version of Dr. Samuel A. Berne’s Bodhi Tree presentation.

Dr. Samuel A.Berne: I'd like to welcome you all here today. We're going to have a discussion about vision and my intention is for everybody to have some kind of a shift in awareness or maybe even physical change in their eyesight through our conversation.

When I was about eight years old I was having difficulty learning and reading and my parents took me to an eye doctor. He said to me, "You're going to need a pair of glasses and over time, your prescription is only going to get stronger and you're going to wear the glasses for the rest of your life."

That statement affected me profoundly because I got the glasses but they didn't do anything to help my learning. When I was about twenty-eight, and in my fourth year of optometry school, I started to do some of the Bates Method exercises, which has to do with relaxation and movement, palming and sunning and so on, and I wore a reduced prescription. I actually began to see better.

When I got out of school, I opened a practice in behavioral optometry and vision therapy and I continued to reduce my prescription and as I began to reduce my prescription, I found many things opened up in my awareness. I started to connect with my emotional and psychological awareness. Now, it's been about six years since I've worn glasses and I've passed my driver's tests, I see 20/20.

What I want to do is to share ways to work with your vision in a way that may be different than the conventional approach. I want to pose a few questions. The first question is: Why do you want to improve your eyesight and vision? What is it about your seeing or that you're not seeing that you would like to change? You want to be as specific as possible. The second question is: What is your relationship with your glasses and your vision? Why do you need your glasses?

Recently I was doing some vision therapy with a lady and she told me that when she removes her glasses it puts her into a very deep blur and it scares her. She went on to say that she was sexually abused at ten years old by her father and that was the time when she first started with glasses. What the eye doctor did then was freeze her vision and she kept getting a stronger and stronger prescription. What we were doing in the vision work was giving her a reduced prescription and then working on many different levels which brought out this psychological awareness.

So, another question that you can ask yourself is when you began wearing your glasses or contacts, what was happening around you or to you? People sometimes report is they had a hard teacher at school or had difficulty with a parent. These are some of the deeper aspects of what's behind wearing glasses. When you wear your glasses, you've frozen your vision and your awareness somewhere in the past.

There are three major eyesight conditions: near-sightedness, far-sightedness and astigmatism. Near-sightedness means that you can only see up close but the distance is a blur. In North America there are about 160 million people that wear glasses and about 100 million are near-sighted.

Near-sightedness also has to do with a focusing in, a tightening up, or pulling in of the visual world. On the psycho-emotional level, it has to do with seeing through a fear filter and with being caught in a past perception.

Far-sightedness has to do with seeing well at the distance but also having trouble focusing at the near. In terms of visual-spatial, where near-sightedness is pulling in the world, far-sightedness is pushing away the world.

The third major condition is astigmatism where the shape of the eyeball becomes egg-shaped instead of being round. It's an asymmetry in the eyeball which can mirror an asymmetry in the body, since the eyes are connected to the whole body and we're an integrated system. Often there can be a postural problem, perhaps in the lower spine, in the pelvis, or in the shoulders. So, we need to be aware of our posture and maybe even work with a body worker. I have seen major changes in the astigmatism correction in the eye with changes in the integration of the body.

Besides the physical, there are emotional aspects to our seeing. There are psychological aspects and even spiritual aspects. The Chinese say, "When you work with vision, you're working with the spiritual energy of the body." As we begin to open up our spiritual energy, many times our physical vision will clear.

You need to take personal responsibility for your eyesight and find an eye doctor who knows about behavioral optometry and vision therapy and with whom you can talk and work. You may want to use a reduced prescription. As you begin to wear the reduced prescription, what tends to happen is that your body, your awareness, your vision, your focus and so on begin to relax into that way of seeing.

So, right now, let's answer some questions.

Question: I have never had glasses or contacts, but recently I have noticed a blurring when I’m focusing on something and then look up. What’s happening?

Dr. Berne: When you begin to have a focusing problem, which is what you're having -- sustaining it at near or shifting from near to far -- perhaps it has to do with how well your eyes are working together as a team. Blurry vision when you look up may also be due to some sluggishness in your ability to shift from near to far. Focusing has to do with how well we sustain our focus here and how well we shift our focus from near to far. In terms of what we do, it's very important. We need to have movement but we also need to have relaxation with our eyes and our eye muscles.

The first thing that I would recommend is a wonderful eye relaxation exercise, and it's in my book. It's called "palming”. Palming is an exercise which opens up the energy around the eyes and the eye muscles in the face and it's very simple to do. All that is needed is your hands. You rub your hands together for about fifteen seconds so you can feel the warmth in your hands and then you place them or cup them over your eyes, with your eyes closed. Take about ten deep, diaphragmatic breaths. Don't push on your eyes -- just cup them. You can even visualize black or dark. Pay attention to your breathing, just feel the breathing. We want to contain the energy, close our eyes and rest them. When you start having trouble with your focusing, this is a good first thing to do.

The second very simple exercise to do -- again it's in my book -- is called Figure 8's. Relaxation is one part of the eyes we want to work with -- movement is another part. This is also a very easy exercise to do and you just use your thumbs. You hold your right thumb out in front of you and look at your thumbnail in a soft focus, but you also want to be aware of what's behind you and what's around you. You move your thumb in a vertical Figure 8 pattern, like an infinity sign. Feel your eyes moving. If you wear glasses, take your glasses off. Now, as you do it, be aware of your blinking and breathing. It's very important that you're aware of those two things because they bring you back to yourself as you work with relaxation. The third way that you can move your thumb is along the depth axis; you're moving it away from you and towards you. What happens to many people is their eye muscles get frozen at one place and they disconnect from their eyes. Just doing these few simple things will open up the energy.

Question: Far-sightedness occurs mostly after age 45. Does this mean that after 45, lots of us push the world away?

Dr. Berne: That's kind of a general statement. At 40 you start to wear reading glasses, at 50 you start to wear bifocals, at sixty, you have cataracts. We're programmed. What I have found is that by about 25 or 30, because of our inefficient visual system, we begin to make adaptations. It just so happens that at about age 40 is when the physical signs begin to show up and that is when you start wearing reading glasses. But all they do is to keep you in or support the adaptation and you just get more and more dependent on them.

Question: Are you saying not to use glasses?

Dr. Berne: No, I'm not suggesting that. The glasses keep you in one perspective, one point of view. The idea is to do many different things with your eyes and your eye muscles. It's like yoga for the eyes. It helps to develop flexibility.

Question: When I take off my glasses, everything is a blur.

Dr. Berne: The fastest way to heal your vision is to go into your blur and not away from it. When we put our glasses on, we go away from our blur. Now, it’s scary to go into your blur because that's the unknown. It requires a trust from a different level, from your intuition. When my vision started to improve, I got these psychic things that started to happen. I started to see energy and those kinds of things. It really scared me, but that blur is your peripheral vision and that's the feeling, intuitive part of your seeing that is blocked when you wear your glasses.

Question: I’m near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other and I’m wondering what you can do to help it? The left eye is near-sighted.

Dr. Berne: In the Chinese medicine model, the right eye has to do with the perceptual consciousness of the father or the masculine and the left eye has to do with the feminine mother consciousness. So we may see things in our vision that may be from a young age where the right eye has to do with how we see our father and the left eye may be how we see our mother. It may be the masculine-feminine energies.

One of the things we do is working with an eye-patch. For now we won't work with an eye patch but with your glasses off, take your hand and cup your left eye and just look out there. We’ll do an exercise called "eye dialogue" where we actually talk to the eye by itself.

So, let's ask, "Right eye, how old do you feel right now?

“Ten years old.” Okay.

"Right eye, do you know that you're supposed to be married to the left eye?"

“No”.

Well, who does the work in the relationship?

“The right eye”.

The right eye does the work, doesn't it? So, "Right eye, how do you feel about the left eye?"

“It’s lazy.”

It's lazy. Okay. So, "Right eye, what happened at ten years old when you took over?”

“That’s when I got my glasses.”

That's when you got your glasses. “Well, what was happening when you were getting your glasses?”

“Not too may people were paying attention to me at home.”

Okay, perhaps as a way to attention, you got your glasses. So, let's go to the other eye for a moment. “What's different in the left eye?”

“I can’t see very well with it.”

So you can't see very well with it. "Left eye, how old do you feel?"

“About three”.

Three. Part of your vision is caught at ten and the other at three. What we're doing is beginning to dissolve our unconscious filters. I have a few more questions. "Left eye, do you know you're supposed to be married to the right eye?"

“No.”

“So, what's going on in your relationship? Are you scared, left eye?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you say there's more fear in your left eye than the right eye?”

“Yes.”

You bet there is. It's as though the left eye is holding a lot of fear and contraction whereas the right eye tends to see out a little more. What might be good for you is to get an eye-patch and begin to wear it for a minimum of fifteen minutes on each eye every day. Then begin to do some journal writing with each eye. If you eat with the patch, observe your thoughts and your feelings as you're eating. You can take a walk with the patch or do some self-expression with the patch. You can ask some of the questions that we ask, write about the masculine, write about the feminine. You may get dreams from using it. Working on an inner-vision level may unravel some of the core issues why your eyes are so different.

Light and color are a very important to vision work. Light is a food that affects our endocrine system, our nervous system and our vision. It's very important to get some full spectrum or natural light every day. In our office, we use full spectrum light and individual colors to work with vision. We find out what colors they don't like. Then we have them stay with it because that's the one that gives them a deeper balance. Color is a vibration and so are we. When we're unresolved in taking about vibrations, guess what? -- we keep attracting them. If we can be present with that a color, what tends to happen is that there's an opening in our inner vision. Just working with the color and light, without even doing any physical exercises, will cause a change in our physical vision.

What I'm talking about here is your outer seeing, the physical vision, and then I'm talking about the inner vision, how we see inside of ourselves and to what depths.

Getting rid of the glasses is kind of like a seduction. But we're talking about much more than just eyesight as this vision work is about observing yourself in the moment. As you do that, getting rid of your glasses is the by-product. Wearing glasses is a signal that there's maybe an imbalance or some adaptation that you're making. One of my teachers taught me that, as my eyes work together as a team, the big thing that happens is that I have inner peace. And I think that's what we're all looking for is a sense of peace.

Question: Where do you have your practice?

Dr. Berne: I practice in New Mexico. If you are interested in my retreats and workshops or you would like to be on my mailing list, you may write me there.

Dr. Samuel A. Berne, Santa Fe, New Mexico.