Deconstructing Conventional
Welcome to Deconstructing Conventional, a show fascinated by one simple question: How did we get here? How did what we call “conventional” come to earn that title? Is there a better way, and if so, what would it look like? This show is about deconstructing two things: Our individual biases, and the systems that run (or attempt to run) our everyday lives.
We do this deconstruction with an eye for where we can reconstruct something better that leads to flourishing societies, and robust physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. In short, this show is about questioning our assumptions and practicing systems-level thinking.
I’m your host, Christian Elliot, I’ll do my best to stay curious and humble. You do the same and we’re both bound to learn something. Welcome to the show. Prepare to have your thinking stretched.
Deconstructing Conventional
Carlos Moreno – Improve Your Eyesight Naturally - Challenging Ophthamology with The Bates Method
Imagine freeing yourself from the dependence on glasses and contacts. Unlock the secrets to naturally enhancing your vision with Carlos Moreno, a visionary in natural eyesight improvement.
Together, we navigate the history of ophthalmology, challenging the conventional belief that poor vision is an irreversible sentence. Learn how Carlos achieved better than 20/20 vision and discover how relaxation, rather than strengthening, could be the key to unlocking your eyesight's full potential. Our discussion isn't just about the eyes; it reveals how mental, emotional, and physical states intertwine with our overall health.
Be prepared to have your beliefs about eye health turned on their head. We'll share anecdotes of spontaneous vision recovery, tackling conditions like myopia, cataracts, and glaucoma with the revolutionary insights of Dr. William H. Bates.
The historical journey of corrective eye surgeries and the human body's adaptability are analyzed, shedding light on the dynamic nature of our vision. This episode is an homage to the body's remarkable ability to heal and how traditional medical stances on vision care are ripe for reevaluation.
Lastly, step into the world of the Bates method with us, as practical, simple techniques for vision improvement are brought to light. We confront the skepticism surrounding natural eyesight betterment and the victories over societal misconceptions.
From managing light sensitivity to correcting astigmatism, our conversation is a treasure trove of knowledge for anyone on a quest for holistic health. Join us on this transformative journey as we explore the incredible healing capacity of vision and the empowerment that comes from pursuing alternative wellness paths.
RESOURCES
- An Internet archive of Bate's methods and writings about his techniques.
- More info about Dr. Bates
- Carlos Moreno's website
- FREE Introductory Class: Schedule
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Hello everyone, welcome to episode number 28. Today my guest is a man named Carlos Moreno, and he and I deconstruct the topic of eye health and how conventional thinking, not surprisingly, more or less got it all wrong. So I came across his work several years ago and until then I never really had thought about eye health as something that could be improved naturally and I basically thought of eyes something like ear lobes or hair color. It's just this fixed thing and you got what you got and you do the best you can with it. But my perspective has now shifted. So throughout this interview, carlos really gives us different windows into the hundred plus years of, you know, recent history of ophthalmology and the conventional ways to treat eye health and, not surprisingly, like the rest of Western medicine, that the conventional approach is literally to cover over the symptoms instead of addressing the cause of poor vision. So, for context, carlos had worn glasses and contacts for 22 years and I'll let him tell you the story of the day. He woke up and realized he was done with contacts, but in three months time, after he finally found someone who could help him, he trained himself to not need glasses or contacts and he has never gone back. He actually improved his vision to be better than 2020. So Carlos even told a fascinating story of a man in his 80s who made significant improvements. On my side, and probably what was most fascinating for me as someone with kind of an exercise and physiology background is I was ready for him to teach me the exercises I needed to do to get my eyes in better shape, right and work them out, and really what shifted for me in my thinking was that better vision is actually less about strengthening and more about relaxing. And what I'd come to understand and talking to him is that how much our vision is really just a reflection of our internal mental and emotional landscape and the physical stresses that we carry in our body and, not surprisingly, health is impacted, or eye health is impacted, by stress. And it reminded me in some ways of my previous conversation or the last episode with Mike Merrill, where we talked about how poor gut health usually has its roots in some sort of mental or emotional trauma. So throughout the episode, carlos just weaves in some very practical techniques we can all use to improve our vision and toward the end of the episode I basically just emptied my bag of questions and asked him pretty much about every eye condition I could think of and sure enough, he has helped people heal all of them, so including blindness. So we talked about whether or not to wear our sunglasses or blue blocking glasses. We also talked about some expectation management and really the brass tacks of what are you getting yourself into if you try to start a journey of healing your eyesight.
Speaker 1:Naturally, I really think you'll like the conversation. I hope it gives you a new window into how magnificent your body can be at healing and just arm you with some kindness toward it as you work through a healing journey. This is another fun example for me, because it's so poignant about how we can go deep on one topic or think we're gonna go deep on just one topic and you end up being forced to look at the interconnectedness of the physical and the mental and emotional and even spiritual, relational and logistical aspects of our life, anything that's causing a stress. We have to look at that and really those crossroads are where I spend most of my time as a health coach and I just get the pleasure of helping people see those connections and find the perspective where healing can finally happen. So if you're in the market for a health coach and you need somebody to help you find what the doctor can't figure out, then check out our website, true whole human dot com, because solving complex health issues is what I do all day. In the meantime, just enjoy this fascinating and inspiring conversation with Carlos Moreno.
Speaker 1:Alright, hello everyone. Welcome to today's episode. My guest is Carlos Moreno. He is a Bates method natural vision improvement instructor, so he teaches people how to improve their eyesight without glasses, contacts or surgery, and he works with people via video call really all around the world, but he does it in person at the medical offices of the Center for Wellness in Montabello, california, and he has been helping people improve their eyesight since 1997, so good long run there. He has become an expert in teaching the techniques that get a person to relax into very specific ways to improve a person's eyesight, and he has a free introductory class. He's given it to doctors, groups, to hospitals, chiropractor offices, churches, yoga studios and even community groups throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and in Southern California. He has taught courses and weekend workshops for adults and children throughout California and in the Midwest, and even in online workshops. Although he is not a physician, he works under the direction of a licensed doctor in California. So, carlos, thank you for joining me today. Happy to be here, christian.
Speaker 2:Good to have you, so tell us the story behind Carlos Moreno.
Speaker 1:How in the world did you end up getting into the work?
Speaker 2:How did I end up. Yeah, so I wore glasses and contacts for 22 years and I was always very physically active. I love sports, always hated wearing glasses. For contact lenses I would if I could play basketball or football or I rode crew. And when I was in the University, if I could go without glasses, I just felt better, couldn't see clearly, but it just felt better than wearing glasses that were going to steam up when I was getting sweaty or in the rain or just in different kind of activities. I love going, hiking, being outdoors, and I had never really liked my glasses and contact lenses.
Speaker 2:In the maybe in the late 80s, I had been wearing these contact lenses that were extended wear lenses. They were these lenses that they had come up with that you could sleep with them, so you could leave them in your eyes overnight, so you wake up in the morning, you open your eyes and you could see clearly. You're supposed to be able to wear them for a week and then on the weekends you took them out and you put them into some kind of solution, and for 12 hours, and then you were done through the weekend. Then you could wear them again the next week. Well, one morning I woke up with wearing the lenses and I couldn't open my eyes.
Speaker 2:My eyelids were stuck together so I made my way by touch over to my bathroom, got some saline, started pouring it over my eyes and finally my eyelids separated and the sclera the, the white part on the sides around around the eye. There was no white in my eyes, white. I looked like a monster out of a movie because all of that was completely red. It was just red, red eyes, completely red, no white. And I still couldn't take the contacts off my eyes. They were, they had adhered to my eyes so they were stuck on my eyeballs. I had to put more saline, more saline, more saline. So they had basically dried up inside my eyes as I slept.
Speaker 2:Wow could you?
Speaker 1:still see through them while you were trying to take a matter. Was it blurry?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I could. So I yeah, my vision was not good with them. So normally with contact lenses they're supposed to be floating on a little bit of your tears, some moisture over the surface of your eye, and they're. They're shaped. Part of part of the way that, when you get a prescription for contact lenses, is that they're set up to fit your eyeball and so that they basically stay over your pupil, over and most of your iris, and so that they stay in place, so that sometimes people have problems with a contact moving off of the center of the eye and so you know they'll have to look around for it and they could. It just feels like you have a big blob of something in your eyes. These, these had stuck to my eyeballs and I had to put in more and more saline until they had they've hydrated again and then I was able to remove them. So it took a little bit of time and it was the whole time.
Speaker 2:I was spooked, my vision wasn't good. Obviously, as I'm doing this, my eyes are really red. I'm thinking you know, did I damage my eyes? You know what did I do? And I thought I'm not wearing these things anymore and I became aware. So I had grown up with a sense of just being aware of what you eat, you know what medications you take. Just from my parents that they were, you know. They were attentive to whether we're doing things just out of habit, thoughtlessly, or of whether we're paying attention to what we're doing. And I thought and I was aware that just from classes in sociology and history, history of science and medicine in school that medicine is experiments on us. So even after there's been trials on medication or, in this case, a medical device you know, like contact lenses, it's really only after they're out in being used in public that you have millions of people using something a medicine or something like a device like contact lenses and that that's where they get more and more information. There's usually smaller trials. You have to approves something for use in the general public, then they usually have guidelines on how you could use that.
Speaker 2:But I was aware that here this, these contact lenses that cause problems with me and I only have two eyes. I was, you know, in my, probably in my late 20s when that happened and I thought I want my eyes to last me my whole lifetime. I'm not gonna wear these contact lenses anymore. This was like a wake-up call for me. Yeah, my sister at the time she was wearing contact lenses that were just daily use and little by little through the late 80s and into the early 90s, it started going into more, these soft contact lenses that got developed with new materials that were and they were just daily wear, or even the disposable ones you know you could have daily wear that you cleaned nightly and so there was all kinds of options. Eventually, at some point I started wearing daily wear contacts again because I just hated glasses.
Speaker 2:My sister had asked me during that time what I thought of some of the eye surgeries that you could do to improve the eyesight. So, like PRK, mm-hmm was it was a common surgery there and and the Lasik that we have now is an extension of PRK. But I told her I had seen some magazine articles that said some you know things, like you know you could look at the eraser on a pencil up close to your face and then look far away. And it was with this idea of strengthening the eyes, like doing push-ups to get the eyes stronger. Base method is not that at all, mm-hmm. But so I knew I thought of all the humans on earth in history. Somebody's got to have figured out how to improve the eyesight naturally. It had.
Speaker 2:I was exposed to yoga and had seen. It was very fortunate in my life of coming across some people who were like really real yogis who could do things that seem magical, but they were just and they said if you want to be able to do this, you just got to practice for an extended period of time and you, you can learn how to do all kinds of things. You know he'll heal the emotions, heal the body, heal the mind from trauma physical trauma, emotional trauma. So I had an idea that there was probably somebody who had figured out how to improve the eyesight naturally and I told, I started telling my friends and family. I said keep an eye out for anything that you come across. This you sure enough.
Speaker 2:A friend told me all, carlos. I found this book in the library by a doctor, william H Bates. The name of the book is better eyesight without glasses, and this is an abridged version of his original book. I wouldn't got the book. Read through the book. I know how to read English. I've been in university. Didn't understand what the heck he was talking about. Tell people how old the book is.
Speaker 2:So Dr Bates wrote his perfect eyesight without glasses in 1919, 1919, 20. He published it a couple of times and even because he self-published, it has two titles. There's like a title on the hardcover outside of the book and there's another title on the title page. One is perfect eyesight without glasses and the other title is the cure of imperfect sight by treatment without glasses. He wrote that in 1919, 1920. He did some revisions and he was so.
Speaker 2:He was a physician, he was an eye surgeon. In his original book he goes over the standard theory of how vision works, so he would and, and he writes a whole chapter about everything that he's learned in medical school, everything that he had studied postgraduate to become an ophthalmologist and eye surgeon, and he shows all the problems with the standard theory that there's. There's things so he had been taught that once the vision goes bad, it can't get better. And as he started practicing, kids would come in. They had lost their glasses. Their glasses have been broken, but their vision was now back to 2020 without work, you know. And so he said so this is happening. He talked to another doctor who was seeing this happening also, which was contrary to what they had been taught in medical school that once the vision goes bad, it stays bad and can can only get worse, and so people are stuck on glasses. But he was seeing evidence that this was not the case out in the wild, so to speak, you know, with with real people in a clinic in his office. Sometimes people had these automatic recoveries from myopia, so near-sightedness when a person can't see clearly in the distance. So the other doctor said why don't you go look? Why don't you go check in the medical library and see if any other doctors have noticed this? Are we the only two doctors in the world who have noticed this? So Bates went and started looking in to information that come from doctors out working with patients and there was a lot of anecdotal evidence from doctors that kids vision would improve, even with some adults that their vision would go back to normal if they lost their glasses or for whatever.
Speaker 2:Their glasses were really uncomfortable. People didn't feel good with their glasses there. They had felt a lot of eye string with their glasses. Doctors would typically tell their patients which I was told when I had glasses you know, don't worry, you'll get used to it, the discomfort of wearing glasses, that your eyes will get used to it. It's like putting a pebble in your in your shoe. Yeah, if you keep it in there long enough, you get used to it and but you may be walking around with a limp. Yeah, you know you won't feel the pain, but something's gonna be off. So Bates not only finds cases of my opia clearing up but cases of cataracts and glaucoma clearing up. Without treatment people would be diagnosed with some cataracts. At the beginning of cataracts they'd see their doctor. The doctor says you know, come back in see me in six months or a year from now. And the doctors would say well, you know, this person had the beginnings of cataracts or had cataracts in one eye or the other or both. You know, had these developing cataracts and now they're gone.
Speaker 1:They're not there hmm, what for the listener who doesn't know? Give them to find the terms here. So what is a cataract and what is glaucoma?
Speaker 2:so in general, cataract is the development of A film, you could say it's a substance that covers the pupil of the eyes so that the person can't see out through the pupil of their eye, like cloudy kind of thing, exactly, exactly. And it could cloud up so much so that the person can't see at all. And that's one in typical. In regular ophthalmology they call it a ripe cataract, so it's ripe for surgery. They wait until it's completely clouded up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right to them, not to the person.
Speaker 2:So a person could be suffering with cloudy vision and it may get worse. It may not get worse with most people who develop some kind of cataract that without surgery or without being working with a competent Bates instructor, it can get worse until they can't see out of one eye. And there's a thing called sympathetic cataracts, where a person has it in one eye and their other eye is fine, healthy, there's no other problems with the eye. But as they lose vision in one eye, the cataract begins to. First of all, their vision starts dropping off in the other eye and then they can also get cataract in the other eye. It's not a disease as far as a bacterial or a viral infection or a fungal infection, and in regular medicine they can't tell you what causes it and the typical treatment for it is surgery.
Speaker 2:So I've even had clients who have come to me where, basically, they're removing the lens, so what you call the lens, this membrane on the front part of the eye, just under the cornea, what they call the lens. It's not like an actual contact lens, but it's something like that. The contact lens is actually based on this thing, this membrane that the body has, and they'll remove the cloudy lens, they'll do a surgery, they'll cut out, they'll cut apart the front of the eye and they'll surgically remove that lens so that now the person doesn't have a lens and but now they could see through from the back of their eye, and they're usually they can see things in the distance, but there'll be problems with their vision for close up or depending on what other issues are going on with their eyes. So the typical surgical treatment for it is removal of the cataract by removing the lens. What they'll do is they'll put in a replacement lens, so it's like putting a contact lens inside the front part of your eye.
Speaker 2:I've had clients who have had that done and then they you know, they suture it up and then the person has this lens in their eye but like with, you know, with like glasses, those are lenses. If your visual acuity changes, how do you change that lens? They have to go and do another surgery and you know how many times you want somebody cutting into your eyeball or both eyeballs.
Speaker 2:Bates was the first guy to do a radio keratotomy in 1898. So the radio keratotomy is what eventually becomes, what becomes PRK and then Lasik. So the Lasik that you're doing was started by Dr Bates in 1898, but he stopped doing it a couple of years later because he recognized that, even though he anatomically changed the eyeball, so he was he was making an incision into the eyeball these radial incisions to change the shape of the eyeball, in the front of the eyeball, so that it would be so a person who was nearsighted, who couldn't see in the distance, could see better, and he could correct the vision to 2020 by doing the surgery. But he noticed that people's vision would fall off after the surgery, which is indeed what happens with Lasik. That happens with Lasik too.
Speaker 2:Depends on the doctor that you go see whether they'll actually tell you that that is likely to happen. At the very least, if you ask, they'll say well, when you turn, you know, when you get to your 40s or 50s, your vision might drop off for close up. So you need reading glasses, which is not the case. You don't need reading glasses either. It's not your age. You know your eyeballs don't know what, how many birthdays that you've had.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, we're going to get to a fun story about that in a second because you need to do something, but I guess it's fun listening to you talk, because conventional thinking when it comes to the eyes, for whatever reason, is that we tend to think of them more or less like this fixed aspect of our health, maybe similar to like hair color or attached to your lobes or something, and don't think of them as this, like adaptable aspect of physiology.
Speaker 2:We've lost the idea that we could do Very, very much, yeah, and you know, we know, that if you get into your 40s and 50s and you were an athlete when you were in your high school or in your 20s and then you become a parent, you know you start your nine to five job and you don't have enough time to exercise and get out and play basketball or go swimming or whatever it was that you were doing when you were younger that your body loses some capacity. But you can regain that capacity, right, I see that, if you have trouble going running for a mile.
Speaker 2:If you run for a mile for a week, the mile will become easy and then you could add. You know you can add.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I worked as a trainer for over a decade and just duh like the amount of especially because as a trainer you tend to stick with people. I got to add people with me for years and years and two to three times a week. It's remarkable how much better they can get at things. And I'm thinking, well shoot, what if we applied just some of this discipline toward eye health or reap some of the other benefits that consistency of exercise has?
Speaker 2:There's a good story from Bates about working with a guy who had cataracts. So he had had a younger woman, in her forties maybe, who was a patient who improved her eyesight for myopia. And then she says would this work for my father who has cataracts? Dr Bates says, well, how old is he? She said he's 80 years old. And he says, well, how's the rest of his health? And she says, you know, he's okay, he's 80 years old. And Dr Bates says, if he'll follow my instructions, if he does what I tell him to do, his vision will get better. And Dr Bates, besides treating him for the cataracts and helping him clear up those cataracts, within a few months he had the guy begin to walk five miles a day, drink maybe like eight glasses of water, so increases water intake and just doing some simple things, being attentive to his sleep.
Speaker 2:The article in Dr Bates' magazine is written by the daughter and she says so that my father, when he turned 81, was in much better shape than he had been when he was 80 years old. He ends Dr Bates ends up telling him to walk five miles daily and then, after he's been able to do that for a period of time, he tells him one of those miles you have to run. So you know, 100 years ago he's got an 80-year-old running a mile and walking four other miles. I just read, I heard a an NPR recently. I heard the story about marathons, just the running of marathons, and how 100 years ago doctors were telling people not to run that far because they thought that it would be too much for a body and that it would be too much for the heart and that people would end up dying. And now we have things like, you know, the Boston Marathon, where thousands and thousands of people are running in these big races and people doing things like ultramarathons and all of that kind of stuff, where you're just continually pushing the boundaries of what the body is capable of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, so you know, very early on, Dr Bates, initially, because he saw that kids myopia could clear up, he started paying attention like what is it that makes the vision better or worse? He was. He was working with a child in his office. One day, just you know, a school nurse or a principal or a teacher says you know this child's squinting when they're looking at the blackboard, or the parents notice that the child is squinting at things at home and so they take the child in to get an eye checkup and Dr Bates is testing the vision of a child. So a hold up here, something that's kind of like an eye chart that has letters on it and the child's reading through going down the lines of an eye chart and the child gets to a particular line and their vision is not normal. The child's vision is not normal and the child says you know, that's as far as I could read. Then all of a sudden this is at the beginning of the 20th century, so trucks and cars are new things in New York City.
Speaker 2:There's the backfire of a truck out in the street. A big, loud bang.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So the child gets startled, gets frightened, and then the child says, oh, I can't read that line anymore. That's the smallest line that I could read on the eye chart. Dr Bates says what do you mean? He says, well, I could only read three or four lines above that. Now Dr Bates says, huh, that's so, he's paying attention. And then he continues with the examination, doing other things with the kid, and then the kid at some point says, oh, I could read that line further down the column of letters again. So Bates paying attention, he realizes that when the child got startled, frightened, he goes into sympathetic response fight, flight or freeze. So you could picture yourself coming out of a scary movie in the theater and then your friends hiding behind a bush or a car and they jump out and spook you and you're like, ah, you know what.
Speaker 2:I'm saying, right, so and you jump away. So that's part of our sympathetic response that we're jumping away from this lion that's possibly going to eat us. You know, just like a zebra or a gazelle would out on the African plains. You're jumping away from the danger but your whole body goes into this tense state, part of that tension. If you think of a zebra out on the African plains eating grass with the herd, and also in the here's a branch break in the bushes, it stops chewing the grass, its head goes up, its ears go up, it starts listening for, smelling for and looking for a lion. Okay, other animals in the herd might not have heard the branch break, but if they see one of their number, go on alert. If they're sitting on the grass, they get up. If they're near that animal, that's on alert. Because this is a biological feature of herd animals, like human beings, that if one of our number goes on alert there's some danger. The more eyes, ears, noses we have tuned into possible danger, the safer the whole herd is. More eyes are going to see the lion coming, more ears might hear the lion coming. Noses might smell the lion, nose sounds. So Bates writes specifically that nervousness is contagious. This is why it's contagious, that it's a biological function to protect us from the monster that might eat us the lion, the tiger, the bear, somebody from another tribe that's sneaking up on us. So it's a very ancient kind of thing that, if you think of humans as just another animal species on earth, it clears up a lot of stuff of how we work.
Speaker 2:And so Bates noticed that this child, when he got startled, his vision dropped. When he relaxed, his vision got better. So he started thinking how do I get kids to relax If his vision went back to what was normal? What can I do to make the kid relax more so that the vision will improve? Fortunately, mothers didn't always have a babysitter and their one son had been referred by the school nurse to have their eyes checked, but they had to bring in their other three or four or five kids too with them. So they're all there in Dr Bates's office and so he would.
Speaker 2:He started paying attention with the kids who had normal eyesight. What were the differences in the way they looked at letters compared to their sibling who had imperfect sight? The kids who had better eyesight were much more at ease. They were relaxed, what he calls they were relaxed. He refers to relaxation and rest in the same way, so that when a mind and eyes are relaxed, they easily scan over whatever they're looking at, whereas the kid, the sibling, who had imperfect eyesight, they would stare and their vision would fix on a letter and they would apply effort to try to clear things up. So they would start swinging, they would make a face, so their face wasn't out of these.
Speaker 2:They're in a state of distress, and so one of the first things that he started teaching kids is just close your eyes so that you're not looking at letters If you close your eyes. If you had a child, close your eyes and you started talking to them about a little boy at the beginning of the 20th century. Start talking to them about baseball in New York City, the Yankees and the Dodgers and the Metz.
Speaker 2:I don't know if the Metz existed then. But start talking to kids about baseball a little boy about baseball and they get excited, they start thinking about something pleasant and enjoyable and he could see their face relax. He has them keeping their eyes closed so that they're not distressed by looking at blurred letters and then when they open their eyes they might say, oh, the letters are better, they're clearer. So he started practicing having kids practice this. Besides just closing the eyes, a person could also palm.
Speaker 2:Palming is where you put the palm of your hands over your eyes, your closed eyes, and the palm helps block out any light that's coming through our eyelids. With people who have imperfect eyesight, just the fact of light coming through the closed eyelids can make a person try, apply effort to see even though their eyes are closed. So this is something that your listeners can do right off the bat. Take a look at some letters, take a look at a book cover or a magazine cover where you have different size fonts. Hold it at a place from your face, at a distance from your face, hold it in your hand.
Speaker 2:Just kind of get an idea of where your vision is best. And if you move it closer, if you move it further, where it starts getting worse. You might not be able to read everything that's on there without your glasses or your contact lenses. That's okay. You're just kind of getting an idea of what your vision is like. You're getting your baseline Without my glasses or contacts. This is what my vision is. Then close your eyes and palm and listen to your favorite podcast. Listen to Christian.
Speaker 1:Yes, obviously this would be your favorite.
Speaker 2:This is going to be your favorite podcast. Listen to your favorite music. I'll ask kids, when they're palming, what's your favorite ice cream? So I have them bring to mind something pleasant and enjoyable. I start asking you know, what do you do? How do you like your favorite ice cream? How do you like your chocolate, or your vanilla or strawberry, or your rocky road? Do you like it when it's frozen and very hard and be really cold? Do you like it when it's softer and mushy? Do you eat it on a cone? Do you eat it with a spoon? How do you like it?
Speaker 2:So they start telling me about this wonderful experience of eating ice cream and their addies. They have their eyes closed, they might be palming and they're thinking about something pleasant and enjoyable, and it's a way to walk a person through, having their eyes closed and covered. Where they're talking to me, they're thinking about something pleasant, but they're not concerned about seeing, and so it gets the eyes to rest from seeing the world blurred and it moves the attention over to something pleasant and enjoyable which gets the mind to relax, to be at ease. So if you think of the zebra, coming back to our example of the zebra out on the African plains getting startled because here's a branch breaking the bushes and then all of a sudden a bird jumps out from the bushes that it had landed on something and just kind of moved the branches around and that's what it heard. So if a bird is coming out of those bushes there's probably not a lion in there, and so then the zebra can relax, which is what happened in that first example of the little boy who had been startled by the backfire of the truck and then, after he's chatting with Dr Bates, his mind goes away from this loud bang that has startled him. He just is having a conversation with the doctor, normal stuff. He relaxes and then his vision goes back to what's normal for him. So Bates starts really tuning into this idea that if a person relaxes their mind, if they move away from the staring that they typically do, the application of effort to try to clear things up the vision gets better. So part of that is shifting.
Speaker 2:Movement is really, really important. If you think of a zebra, frozen, still listening to see and looking to see if there's a lion in the bushes, it's frozen still, much like a rabbit would be if it knows all of a sudden there's a hawk in a tree close by it just freezes still, because when you freeze still for many animals that's a way to hide. You know movement predators are checking for movement. You'll see a cat creeping up on a mouse and it's only when the mouse runs that the cat runs after it. You see that happen with many kind of predators, that when the prey animal runs, that triggers the predator to chase after it and kill the prey animal. This is one of the things there's this famous story of Siegfried and Roy, the magicians and animal trainers in Los Vegas.
Speaker 1:The guys that worked with tigers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the tigers and lions, that one of the guys so the guy, I don't remember which of the two got attacked by one of their animals on stage, but it's because he fell and so he moved very abruptly in a way that was like a prey animal on stage. He felt as he was walking on stage and that abrupt movement triggered the attack instinct of one of his tigers. The tiger went and grabbed him by the neck and punctured his face, his neck, so the guy was bleeding. You know, he was in really bad condition for a while, but this is what animals that were his pets basically, yeah, you, him, but the tiger.
Speaker 2:A tiger is a tiger. It has these automatic functions that make it survive out in the wild. A tiger on stage is still a tiger. It doesn't know that it's on stage and that it's being fed all the time, and so it has these automatic instincts. Same thing with a human being that's responding to a loud bang. Something that's startling is something that makes us jump, and so if you think about somebody jumping, all of a sudden, all the muscles tighten up and everything, and it's not just our legs, our arms, our breathing changes, but these tiny little muscles around the eyes also clench up. And when they clench up this is the thing that Dr Bates started discovering in his experiments was that when those muscles tighten up around the eyeballs, the eyeballs are not functioning properly. So right now I'm watching you, christian, and you're holding your breath a little bit.
Speaker 1:Oh great, I busted it. I can't even interview without getting this is a normal thing.
Speaker 2:So we get interested in something, that we become very attentive and we start tensing up, and part of the reason why I highlighted it for you is because it gets you laughing again, and when you're laughing you relax, you're more at ease, you move, your body moves and it gets out of the state of tension.
Speaker 1:You could just watch me all day there and that would really help, and just have you like you're doing it again.
Speaker 2:Stop it, yes, and this is exactly what I teach people.
Speaker 2:I'll tell them to look at small little letters that are blurred and I tell them pay attention to your breath. Tell me what's happening in your breath when you're looking at small little letters close up, If they're in their 40s and 50s and you're using reading glasses, or if they have myopia and they have problems seeing things in the distance. If, when you look at small little letters far away that you can't read or that are blurred or fuzzy or same thing, close up what happens to your breath? We were touching on this thing of kind of getting your baseline, getting looking at a book cover or magazine cover, holding that closer or further from your face. Just get an idea of what's my vision like and you could look at the smaller letters on there and notice what is my breathing like.
Speaker 2:Most people will notice that their breathing is more shallow or that it's gotten rapid, that it's not at ease, that it's tight. People will tell me feels like I'm holding my breath. So that's the say, the sympathetic response. It's like the little boy who got startled by the loud bang of the backfire of the truck.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, let me interlude here, because you, since you already touched- on a lot of things here.
Speaker 1:Well you have, but you've like when we talked last, you read my body language. As you, I do the same thing. I watch people walk and I'm like that hip must hurt, or their back or their knee or their neck. I can spot asymmetries and how people move and I can fix that if you let me. So when we were talking last, you were reading me and you asked how my vision was and I fit the classic. So I'm 47, about to be 48. And the last I've never worn glasses before, but probably the last two or three years I've had to start holding things a little further away from my eyes to be able to read it, and I'm like my arms.
Speaker 1:Only so long.
Speaker 2:Eventually, I'm you know it's sharp plain trombone with the text that you're looking at Right.
Speaker 1:And that. Well, so you, you had me sit, do the same thing. You just said, hold up a piece of paper in front of you, whatever's got text on it. You had me get it to the edge of my vision and then you could kind of you watched me strain when I got too close, and then you took me through that exercise close your eyes. And you told me, cut the distance in half. And so you took me through this kind of imagining that some of the queuing that you did and had me open my eyes and so it wasn't in focus but it kind of like a glitched into focus, like there would be a half second or a second was I could read it and I was like, okay, hang on, wait a minute, like how did I do that yeah?
Speaker 1:What if I actually got consistent at drawing this? So that was fascinating to see it in action, the. So you took me through like picturing vacation and just getting me in that really sympathetic, relaxed state, and sure enough that was amazing, but I guess the parasympathetic.
Speaker 2:so you're getting out of sympathetic response the fight, flight or freeze and you're moving into parasympathetic.
Speaker 1:You're at ease or you can go. That got scared and just falls over. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cool, that's the same. That's the thing that you experienced. There was the same thing. That happened to me. So when I had first read the Bates book, I didn't get anything out of the Bates book. I realized, okay, there's, doctors figured out how to do it. He has chapters about palming. He has a chapter about palming. There's all kinds of instructions in his book about how to improve his eyesight. The version that you can get from a bookstore. Go out and get it from a bookstore, don't get it from Amazon.
Speaker 2:Bates' book Better Eyesight Without Glasses. It's an abridged version. It's an edited, downed version of his original book, easier to read, I imagine. Yeah, and so his wife. 10 years after he died in 1940, she abridged the book, she re-edited it and published it without all of his science, without his experiments, without his explanation of the standard medical theory as to hide the eye's work and his refutation of how there was all these problems with the standard theory he redid. So in science somebody has a theory, a hypothesis. They test it out in the real world. If I drop an apple, I think it's going to hit the floor. So we're going to go out and drop a hundred apples and see what happens.
Speaker 2:He found that there was all kinds of problems with the original theory on how vision worked, that he could not replicate the results that had been done with candlelight in the 1800s. Now he had electric light so he redid the experiments with electric light. Part of the experiments that hadn't done in the 1800s were where they were measuring the length of a candle flame, the reflection of a candle flame in a person's eye. So they were checking to see how big is the candle flame when it's reflected off of different surfaces on the eyeball. But if you think about a candle flame, a candle flame is going to change. It's the length as it flickers as somebody breathes on it or something. The flame changes. So they were trying to get the size of this light source reflected on the surfaces of the eye and that's how the original theory comes from.
Speaker 2:Was developed in Europe and Bates redid the experiments he set up in the lab, took them like two years. He took most of his time off of his regular practice and just redid. The science could not replicate the experiments and he said there's all kinds of problems with the original theory, the conclusions that came from the results of these experiments. There's all kinds of problems with it, including just the fact that we're told that once the vision goes bad, it stays bad or gets worse nothing can be done.
Speaker 2:So you know that's part of what Bates had included in his original book. His wife took all of that out because she said most of the people that are going to be buying the book are just lay people Don't need to hear all this. Yeah, they're not going to be scientists, they're not going to be physicians, it's just people who want to fix their vision on their own. And so she just included the chapters that had to do with Bates' techniques. You don't want to think of them as exercises. You're not strengthening the eyes. You're not doing push-ups to make the eyes stronger. What you're really doing is Bates' writes in one article titled Rest. He says the cure of all errors of refraction. So all problems with the vision, the cure of all errors of refraction, are simply different ways of obtaining rest. Simple sense. If you want to cure something that's wrong with the eyes, let the eyes and the mind rest. So I ask a kid what's your favorite ice cream? The mind goes wow, I've got a kid's mind at rest for sure.
Speaker 2:With an adult, as you mentioned what I did with you the other day, I have an adult close their eyes and cover their eyes with the palms of their hands and I ask him have you ever taken a nice vacation? People say, oh yeah, I must have. They're just saying in general. And then I start walking them through like, well, what's a vacation that you took? Where'd you go? I say you know.
Speaker 2:Some people say you know, I went to a tropical beach. I went to Hawaii or the Caribbean. People who like the beach, Some people don't like sand, Some people don't like water. Somebody might have gone to a beautiful city or a hike in nature. You know, go out into the woods, go to see some beautiful gardens, go to some museums where they see some beautiful art, just hang out with family where they feel welcome and loved and at ease and comfortable. It varies from person to person to person. What puts them at ease, and so that's part of why I'm asking a person when they're palming, what did you bring to mind? And then I start walking them towards something that puts them more at ease and I could watch a person's face relax. They start smiling, their shoulders go down as they're talking, their voice becomes more relaxed. As I'm purposely doing it right now, I'm not purposely slowing down my voice, I'm relaxing, and when I relax, my cadence changes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the way I was thinking about it after we talked and it was to me it was almost like one of my takeaways was it's kind of like this way to inventory your internal emotional landscape.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:It's like a check engine light and you realize, oh shoot, Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like your cue to step back and go hang on. What is making me anxious, or what would it mean to your point? Are you holding your breath, or your shoulder's tense, or you have a pit in your stomach? And I just kind of realized, shoot, there's so many different ways that anxiety whether it's your gut health or your joint pain or insomnia, like emotion and anxiousness, drops us of physiological function and sure enough, it has major influence on the eye. But to hear you say that it's really not as much about strengthening the eye, it's about learning to relax and let go of anxiousness, and it's like better health and just better function, fills the vacuum of that realization. That was kind of my big like wow, okay, then there's something very actionable for me in that.
Speaker 2:And it's if you think about the way people will think of this is like there's something that's causing me anxiety and I have to learn how to be at ease with it. That's not Bates' original exercise, it's not his treatment Instead of trying to relax while they're looking at the letters, so the letters are causing distress because they're blurred. And he says a person who's noticing that letters are blurred is unconsciously trying to fix them. They're looking fixedly, they don't look away. So it's like if you're looking at a monster, I'll tell kids, you know, we're going to change these little monsters into your little friends so that you're comfortable with them. The initial thing is to have the person close their eyes, not even look at letters, and then have the mind go to something pleasant and enjoyable so that the mind is not even thinking about letters the mind. So this would be like if somebody is anxious about a pain in their back, you have them close and cover their eyes. A person can palm and you ask them when you were younger, what were things that you liked to do? Okay, what was a fun thing that you used to do with your friends, your family, that you used to do on your own? Did you like spending time by yourself. You know you check with the person you have them move their mind over to something pleasant and enjoyable, and when the mind moves, its attention is not on the distressful thing anymore. So one of the ways to think about it is our attention is like a flashlight in a cave. Okay, yeah, completely dark cave. And wherever you point the flashlight, that's what's illuminated, that's what our attention is.
Speaker 2:Right now. You're listening to my voice here on Christian's podcast, and instead you could listen to the ambient sounds of the room that you're in. Do you hear other people in the house? Do you have any dogs or cats that are making noise? Is your air conditioning on? Can you hear traffic outside? So your mind starts being attentive to these other things. So it goes away from okay, I'm listening to Carlos, but there's these other things that are going on. Another way to do this is with your sense of touch, your kinesthetic sense. Are you sitting down while you're listening to the podcast right now? Are you sitting in your car? Are you sitting at home? Are you taking a walk and listening to this on your headphones? What do you physically feel If you're sitting down? What parts of your body are touching the chair? Are your feet? Are both feet on the ground? Okay, so you're smiling because you're.
Speaker 1:No, I'm jammed because I'm like what? Yes, stop it. I'm trying to pay attention, carlos.
Speaker 2:So your attention starts going to these other things Instead of. I have problems with my vision when I'm looking at these letters. They're blurred. It's just moving the mind over to something that you could do really easily. This is the flashlight of your attention that you could think of it. So the flashlight is moving away from. Oh, when I take off my glasses or my contact lenses, letters are blurred. We're moving the flashlight over to have you ever had some good pie? Have you ever had a good meal? Have you ever done exercise and you felt really good afterwards? Have you ever woken up in the morning that had a really, really good sleep and you feel invigorated, like, okay, let's get out there and live life. So it moves the mind over away from the distressful thing to something pleasant and enjoyable and that has that's a huge effect.
Speaker 2:Many times when I was in high school and in psychology classes, professors would have you close your eyes. Teachers would have you close your eyes and they'd say I want you to think of some warm bread fresh out of the oven. You could smell the bread. You could imagine putting butter on the bread. They'd walk you through this imaginary scene of this and then they'd ask you is your mouth watering. So you're in a classroom, there's no bread around, there's no scent of bread.
Speaker 2:The mind bringing again this flashlight of our attention over to this remembered experience of something pleasant to eat gets our mouth watering. So our body responds to what we're thinking about. This is an important part of the Bates techniques. Our body responds to what we have in mind. When we are in a state of mental distress, what Bates calls mental strain, our body is responding as if we're in danger anxiety, nervousness. If we're seeing blurred letters, oh, something's wrong. If we close and cover our eyes and move our attention over to something that's pleasant and enjoyable, our body relaxes. Oh, I've done pleasant and enjoyable things in my life. The body relaxes. And then? So if a person does this, if a person poems after they've looked at their magazine or their book, as we've touched on today set your timer on your phone, set an egg timer, whatever kind of timer you have, and palm for five to 10 minutes. The longer you palm the better. So you're just letting your eyes and your mind rest After you palm. If you open and then cover your eyes and hold the sheet again the book, the magazine at the same distance, check to see if things look any different.
Speaker 2:You mentioned, christian, that when you did that it was like this glitch, like oh, sometimes it was better, sometimes it was like coming and going. Many people experience like, oh, I could see some stuff that I couldn't see before. Or things look a lot better. The letters look blacker, there's more contrast, colors look better. People will notice that there's a big difference. They ask them how do you feel now with your eyes open? And they're more at ease? And then they'll start to look notice, and then they'll say like, oh, the letters are getting blurred again because the unconscious habit is to apply effort. They start staring again, they're looking at the letters and they're trying to like I don't want to lose this I don't want to lose this.
Speaker 2:And that's a state of anxiety because, like I'm going to lose this good thing that I found is like squeezing a wet bar of soap and you know it shoots out of your hand Instead of just letting it sit in your hand. If you're on vacation, you just relax. You know. You're just like okay, I'll go eat when I want to.
Speaker 1:Well, I think of it in terms like if you're with friends, family, if you are any number of things you do, creativity doesn't flow when you're in a fearful, anxious S. You have to relax and let your mind wander and dig up other things that are interesting and just let the creative juices flow. It's the. You know, trying to force it by sheer will makes it worse and as a trainer, I'm mixed on your reviews that I can't exercise my eyes and the better health. I have to learn to let them relax and do their thing. But it makes so much sense that when you do that, you're pushing anxiety, You're saying fear, you don't get to rule me right now, yeah, and moment by moment, the reminder that we have the ability to internally regulate that. So give us some, I guess, close the loop on your personal story of how did you end up training your eyes or what's the? So we started with contacts.
Speaker 2:I read that book, the Bates book, and so I thought, okay, there's this Bates book and I don't get it. You know, I didn't know how to apply anything from Bates book, even though he gives specific instructions on how to do palm human, many other techniques. There's many, many Bates techniques. But a few months later, two, three months later, I found a teacher like me. You know, back in the 90s, I found somebody who taught Bates techniques.
Speaker 2:The initial class was this kind of public thing. I think you paid, you know, 25 to 45 bucks or something for a three hour class. I'm going to try this, okay, went to the class they had us do interesting stuff. I didn't notice anything, any big changes in my vision. In that three hour class there's a big group of people. But I thought I'm going to follow up on this and I'm going to take a second class in private. And in my second class we were doing some shifting.
Speaker 2:Shifting is moving your attention, directing where your eyes are looking by moving your head. Okay, so most people will recognize that if they're looking at their computer screen or reading an email, or reading their actual mail or reading a book, that they don't move their head and you don't move your head. Those are the wrong mechanics. Okay, you want to move your head, you want to include these big neck muscles to direct where your eyes are looking. So, even if you're reading, I'll demonstrate here on camera for Christian. Look at some small little texts, people. So I'm looking at some small little text on the sheet in here in my hand, and if I don't move my head, I'm trying to face the camera here. So, christian, if I just move my eyes, notice what that looks like and I didn't even start holding my breath as I do that If I just move my eyes, if instead I move my head as I read, how do I look? What's the difference that you see, christian, when I move my head as I'm reading, compared to just moving my eyes, what do you see?
Speaker 1:I guess it. Maybe I'm being too ethereal, but it sounds like there looks like there's more joy on your face. When I do which, when you move your head, when you're like yeah, yeah, you see, I don't relax, I guess is the word you'd put to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just more at ease. So if and we even have a phrase in English, you know says somebody's shifty eyed, when we say somebody's shifty eyed, it's not a compliment, right, it's not a compliment. A person's holding their head still and they're just moving their eyes. They're trying to look around and see as much as they can without moving. So it's kind of like being a rabbit that has a hawk in a tree watching it.
Speaker 1:The rabbit wants to be very very still Wants to know what's going on.
Speaker 2:It's one, okay, so shifty eyed. What happens? The reason why we say that is because something's going on in that mind that's not all copacetic, okay. That person is not wanting us to see what they're really interested in and they're holding very still so if we could see something wrong?
Speaker 2:Some distress, some anxiety, some nervousness is going on in the mind of somebody who's shifty eyed. They're only moving their eyes, not moving their head, whereas if you move the head, you don't care who sees where you're looking. You're happy to move, you're at ease, you're comfortable with being seen. There's no predator to watch me, I'm okay. The teacher's not going to yell at me. The, you know, my boss isn't going to yell at me. I'm at ease doing what I'm doing, my work, my school work, being with my family. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, in general people can bring to mind something pleasant. You know they might think about being with their family or being at home, because they're more comfortable there, where they feel they could move. They're at ease so that whether they move or they don't move, they're comfortable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're not being judged by the cruel world outside.
Speaker 2:They're being judged. Yeah well, we're being judged. We're in a state of tension.
Speaker 1:So finish your story then. So how did you know? Yeah, yes, sorry.
Speaker 2:Get distracted there. So I found this teacher in the second class. I was doing the shifting, moving my head to direct where my eyes were looking at some letters out in front of me, and I had the experience, like you did, of like oh, these are clear, oh, they're gone. Oh, they're clear. Oh they're gone. Yeah, something's going on. Yeah, you know what am I doing. And it was the shifting. It was moving my body while I was looking instead of staring and holding still and going into that tight, tense state. So, as my vision would clear up, I had two thoughts. I thought holy smoke, or words similar to that, this works. The second thing I thought was Something along the lines of I have to learn how to do this to teach other people, because I was very aware that most people didn't know about the Bates techniques, that it existed, that you could improve your eyesight.
Speaker 2:At some point later, after I had taken some classes, or maybe it was after I had read the book. Initially, when I was getting fitted for my regular prescription for my contact lenses, I asked my optometrist if he had heard of Bates. He said yes. I said what do you think of him? He said he's a quack. However, my optometrist was wearing glasses, okay, so I knew his vision wasn't normal. He had imperfect eyesight.
Speaker 2:Bates ends up writing about this. He has a chapter in his book titled Reason and Authority, and how he had been in medical school and he had been taught these things by the authority of who the professors were in medical school, these physicians that had been teaching and working as physicians for many years. They were just keeping the company line, so to speak, like this is what works, this is what doesn't. What we say is final. What's the name of the guy who did the hand washing?
Speaker 2:You were telling me about him, not Semmelweiss? Yeah, semmelweiss. So the doctor who realized that when people wash their hands, less mothers died in the delivery of their babies? Yeah, this is because doctors were coming into help the laboring mothers right after working on cadavers, right, and so they were coming in with who knows what kind of diseases on their hands and they were working with mothers and their newborn babies and that the death rate of mothers who delivered their babies while doctors were working on them was hugely huge compared to the group of mothers who delivered their babies where it wasn't a doctor, it was just with nurses or midwives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think an infant's went from 30% to 1%. Yeah, it was ridiculous.
Speaker 2:A big, huge, huge, and they started watching their hands. Yeah, and how difficult it was for him to convince other physicians that this is what was going on. He ended up dying in the loony bin, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I read recently, in the last year, that he might have died from some of the staphococcal infection. That was part he ended up dying from what he had been trying to prevent. Yeah, and it was actually from when he got forced in the loony bin. He got forced to go into the mental asylum and they beat him up so they caused him injuries and they think that that's from him getting infections is eventually what killed him. But anyways, the whole idea with some of us is this idea that a new idea could come up in science and medicine and that it gets squashed, repressed, because people not only have a vested interest but because, as humans, we're proud.
Speaker 2:I studied as a physician for 30 years. Everything I know is all there is to know about health.
Speaker 1:Therefore bait is a quack.
Speaker 2:Yeah and bait. So there's this one article where this one other eye surgeon was asked by his patient If she had gone to Dr Bates. She had seen some improvement and she wanted to continue the improvement by the Bates method. And she asked this other eye surgeon are you familiar with the Bates method? Can you help me with this? First thing, the doctor says no, I'm not familiar with that, and whoever is teaching you this should be in jail. That was his off the cuff, that was his humble moment.
Speaker 2:Yes, he had been practicing for 18 years as an eye surgeon, as an ophthalmologist. But at some point he got curious and he thought, well, he knew that there was a book. He wouldn't got to copy the book. He read the book and he thought, okay, this guy makes some good arguments in here. This guy's not a quack from what he's writing about. By the way. Bates is an incredible scientist. He's the guy who discovered adrenaline at the secretion of the super renal gland. He did all kinds of science stuff.
Speaker 2:So this particular doctor at some point ends up going to see Dr Bates, like to investigate what this other doctor is doing. They're both in New York City and at some point, dr Bates. So Bates is demonstrating, showing this guy how he works with patients and everything. The guy's seeing that Bates is helping people improve their eyesight, right in front of his eyes, so to speak. And then Bates asks him how's your eyesight? And the guy says that he started having to use reading glasses and stuff. And Bates treats him, he has him do some Bates techniques and the guy has along the lines of the experience that you had and I had when I first started doing Bates techniques, that, oh, my vision's better.
Speaker 2:How did that happen? Yeah, he starts improving his eyesight. He ends up improving his eyesight so he doesn't need reading glasses anymore. His vision improves. He writes this article is written in his 20th year of being a physician, and he says so two years after he had initially heard about Bates. And he writes that now, for the last two years, instead of putting glasses on people, he's trying to mend his ways and instead help people take their glasses off and regain their normal sight by using the Bates techniques. So a physician who initially was.
Speaker 1:They don't wake up one day with eyes that won't open and blood pressure yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Absolutely they won't have. Yeah, but this doctor realizes so he's. For 18 years he's been putting glasses on people doing surgery. Now, for two years after he's worked with Bates, he says he's mending his ways and helping people get rid of their glasses and improve their eyesight by the Bates techniques. So physicians who went to go see Dr Bates and who had problems with their own vision and who got to see Bates work with patients and who had improvement in their own eyesight had a very, very different experience. I think how did you say that the other day that once your body knows, once you've had the experience, nobody can tell you that it didn't.
Speaker 2:You can't unring that bell. You can't unring the bell. That's the way you said it the other day. So this happened with physicians, and there's multiple physicians that write articles for Dr Bates's magazine with that experience. Yeah, it just takes if anybody's listening to this.
Speaker 1:It just takes a little bit of humility on your part once in a while to entertain some other plausible theory about whatever it is. It just try to do your best to set your ego aside and evaluate something on the merits and see what logical ways they hold it together. And it sounds like enough people did that that that generationally eventually found you and now you're helping so many other people.
Speaker 2:So I was very fortunate in that. So Dr Bates he had an assistant, emily Learman, who had been a patient and she was so good at helping people relax. She ends up becoming his assistant and for over 15 years works with him in New York City. At some point she came out to California and had an office. In the Better Eye Sight magazine. They document this. They write how Emily Learman is in Los Angeles and she's at this office in downtown LA teaching people how to improve their eyesight.
Speaker 2:So she's out here on the West Coast because there's been a request for her to come out and teach on the West Coast or for somebody to come out and teach people the Bates techniques. So she's out here for a period of time. One of the people that she teaches and that ends up going back to New York City and learning directly from Dr Bates also was, I think, margaret Corbett, and so Margaret Corbett ends up being the person who becomes the de facto Bates expert here in California. She ends up teaching somebody who ended up teaching my mentor. So it was a direct line of people learning directly from Bates.
Speaker 2:So I learned from somebody who really knew Bates techniques really, really well and I was very fortunate in that there's some Bates teachers now who don't like using some Bates techniques because they're scared of them. Yeah, so there's a lot of different things with sunlight and just having your eyes closed and facing the sun, and the eyeglass and sunglass industry has really made us frightened of the sun that we have to have where sunglasses when we're outdoors, right, because of the UVA and B, the different rays that come from the sun, that they're going to cause damage and we're told that that's actually what causes cataracts. I'm here to tell you from Bates techniques that's not what causes cataracts, right, I'm right there with you More I study the sunlight.
Speaker 1:It's just our friend on every other place, it's so so important.
Speaker 2:for thousands and thousands of years, human beings have been outdoors in sunlight. Yeah it's healing, it's not just lighting. It does so many positive things, so many things. You know people will go out and feel like you know, they relax in the sun when we're exposed to nature, to exposed to green. There's all these studies that are done with city kids when they're taken out into a park and how their blood pressure goes down, their anxiety levels go down. You know, when we're out in nature. All these things that are good for a human body.
Speaker 1:So tell us what your vision is like today.
Speaker 2:So I stopped using glasses completely about three months into my vision improvement. My vision was normal, but I knew that wearing glasses was not helping me improve my eyesight. Bates actually has a chapter in his book titled what Glasses Do To Us and the Problems With Wearing Glasses. You don't put on glasses, wear them for a week and then take them off and say, oh okay, my vision's cleared up. They don't fix the problem. They allow you to function with the disability and they actually make the disability worse. I took off my glasses three months after and that was. I probably wore them two times, like two occasions. I put them on, had to see something, took them off After that.
Speaker 2:This is over. This is back in the 1990s was just improving my eyesight line by line on an eye chart, practicing improving my eyesight, and then at some point I moved here to the Los Angeles area and then was working directly out of the doctor's office when I work, and we have an eye chart at the end of a hallway, you know, in the doctor's office where the nurses, you know, and staff can test people's eyesight when they come in. And when I moved down here 10 years ago I realized that I could read the 10 foot line at 20 feet, which meant that my eyesight was twice as good as normal. I don't know when my eyesight went to 2020, which is thought of as normal eyesight, but it went to that and passed that my eyesight. I used to practice a lot with smaller texts close up when I was improving my eyesight with my mentor. Not only did I have the myopia, I couldn't see well in the distance, I had a stigmatism, but I discovered I was still pretty young and it was something off with my vision for close-up. I wasn't at the place where I would have even thought to wear reading glasses. I was still pretty young then, but my vision was not normal for close-up and it was easy for me to improve my eyesight close up practicing the Bates techniques.
Speaker 2:So I got to the point where I could read microfilm with. Yeah, it was really funny. I had a client at one point who had worked at an auto parts store after computers came into use and before computers. You would look up auto parts for a particular car, you know your Ford from 1970 or something. You'd pull up the microfish and the film and you'd look on the screen and there was this microprint that you would look at. So he had a bunch of these films, a bunch of these slides in microfilm and he brought one over and he said, how small of stuff can you read? And I looked and and I had already been reading really, really small stuff and I was surprised that, you know, the light wasn't that great in the room that we were in at the time and I thought, oh, I could make out the numbers and letter sequences on these part numbers, looking at the film just held in my hand.
Speaker 2:At that time I used to practice a lot more and I was very, you know, I was really gun hoe about improving my vision for close-up and the distance. It took longer for me to improve my vision for the distance because that was where I had the bigger problem. When I started without glasses I could not read the big letter E on an eye chart at 20 feet without my glasses I had. I remember getting a physical exam when I was in my 20s and the nurse asking me to take off my glasses, look down at the hallway at an eye chart up on a door, and I couldn't read the big letter that was on there. I wasn't sure what it was.
Speaker 1:And then later you could read the bottom line from the same distance.
Speaker 2:So yeah. So the bottom line typically on an eye chart that you'll see in a doctor's office is the 10th foot line. So yeah, so I went from the biggest letters on there down to the smallest letters. That fluctuates. My vision is not always twice as good as normal because I, like every other human being, can get stressed, Live on a stressful work. You know, but that's normal. You know, there's lions in the world, so to speak. There's things that spook us.
Speaker 2:There's news headlines that there's so many things that can cause us tension. You know our relationships with our families, our relationships with the people that we work with, are physical. You know Bates writes explicitly how if we're sick, if we're tired, if we're hungry, if we haven't gotten enough sleep, our vision will be off. But it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with your eyes. If you get the rest you need, if you put yourself at ease, your vision comes back.
Speaker 1:And, I imagine, get some training and some techniques that help you.
Speaker 2:You know I give off the free intro class. You mentioned it in the introduction today. I give a free introductory class at the beginning of every month. People can find it on my website. I'm sure you'll put that up on your details of thecenteredvisioncom. People can go on there and see what I'm giving classes and I give a free introductory class every month. I tell people if you want to take free classes with me, you could do that every month. You could join in on the free class at the beginning every month, every month. It doesn't matter what your budget is. If you have a computer, you can watch me Zoom and you could have a free class and you just practice the stuff that I show you how to do it. If you do it over and over and over you'll get better at it and as you get better you're learning how to put yourself at ease.
Speaker 1:Well, let me ask you some tactical questions. I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of a listener and maybe imagine some questions they might have. So I want to talk expectation management in a second. But let's get some simple things. Have you ever seen somebody with a wandering eye be able to fix or?
Speaker 2:call it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a typical thing that I help people with strabismus, where people have cross-ties. On my website, on the testimonial page, there's photographs of a little girl that I've worked with when she was three years old. One of her eyes is turned in a lot towards her nose and within two or three sessions her eyes straightened out and her mom ended up writing a testimonial and her vision has improved dramatically.
Speaker 1:Okay, what about diabetic retinopathy or floaters or something like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so floaters. Many people can experience floaters, even somebody with normal eyesight. If they look at a blank wall after being out in the sunshine or something, or if they're straining, if they're in some kind of mental distress or if they're trying to see something, if they look at a blank wall they might see things kind of floating around. Bates has a chapter in his book about that. The general kind of floaters are very easy to treat with Bates techniques and if you go to an ophthalmologist, some particular kind of floater, some kind of blacked out areas, areas in your visual field where you can't see, might be indicative of other kinds of issues, but those issues also can be treated very successfully with Bates techniques. So it ends up treating people for cataract, glaucoma, macular degeneration, detached retina all of which I've helped people with.
Speaker 1:What about colorblindness? Have you ever seen that improve?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so when I was first working with my mentor, we'd practice outside in her backyard and after doing some Bates techniques I'd open my eyes and it seemed like the world had been turned on into technicolor. The colors all seemed much more vibrant and everything. And I have worked with a couple of people not a lot, it's been under 10 people who have come to me who had other issues and happened to have colorblindness also and that that improved so that they started distinguishing the reds and the greens and that kind of thing. Yeah, so that that that can be touched on too. There's.
Speaker 2:You know, people come to me usually from myopia, for they can't see in the distance. They've been wearing glasses and contact lenses since they were teenagers or something in junior high. Or when they're into the 40s and 50s, like you were mentioning, that you know, you start noticing that you're having a whole paperwork further and further away from your face, or indeed, when people have started using reading glasses and they don't like them. It mostly come to me for that. Okay, but I can help people with a lot more than that. You know the stigmatism, the strabismus there's. Call, you know, send me an email or call me if you have an issue and we could probably work with it. At the very least, You're going to learn to put yourself at ease, and when you do learn to direct your mind and your body to be at ease, then you start noticing oh, my vision is better.
Speaker 1:Well, you probably get rid of gut inflammation and headaches and joint pain and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, they come to you for one thing and you introduce this whole host of other benefits that was just the waypoint into distressing them.
Speaker 2:You know getting people moving. You mentioned about all the things that cause us anxiety, all the emotional things that you help people with too. Yeah, the Bates techniques are really really good for applying to that, and when you're putting yourself at ease, you have these ancillary benefits that your vision actually gets better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay, so tell us your thoughts on you know, glasses that are sold to reduce eye strain or block out blue light. What are your thoughts on those?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I don't know if I put it on the resources page of my website. I have to get it on there. Even just within a regular medicine, there's been some studies done out of the University of Texas that where they show that it doesn't help. So the original studies or things like blue blockers had to do with people who were up late at night and who couldn't go to sleep after looking at their phone or their laptop, watching Netflix at 11 o'clock at night They'd close up their laptop or their phone and they couldn't go to sleep. And they discovered that if the people wore so there was a blue, some of the spectrum of light, the blue light in white light coming from their computer is actually keeping the person up because the person's body is interpreting the white light as if the sun is still up, so it's missing what the person's circadian rhythms. So if you put on the blue blockers it blocks out that blue spectrum of the light, your body doesn't think it's daylight and when it's actually 11 o'clock at night, so your body's able to go into its system of shutting down for the day so that you get sleepy and you go to sleep. So that for that function blue blockers did work.
Speaker 2:Okay. But then, as salespeople will do, they want to sell more blue blockers and they start expanding this idea of that it helps with the blue light. When you're watching your laptop late at night, they start saying, oh, it's because of the laptop, there's something wrong with that light, so you should use them through the day, which that doesn't make any sense. You don't want your body to be shutting down from daylight during the daytime and that there's no benefit to that for your vision. So this is what comes out of that study from University of Texas and actually they've found some big problems with increase in depression, increase of suicidal thinking, if you use the blue blockers. So there's a lot of problems with this. We all have the internet.
Speaker 1:When you don't. When you say blue blockers, you're not just picturing the orange colored lenses, it's anything that's not. It's anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's any kind of lens that's blocking out the normal spectrum of light, which also includes sunglasses.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is hard.
Speaker 2:What do you?
Speaker 1:for me personally, so I am super sensitive to bright light Like I can barely yeah eyes open.
Speaker 2:So you just squinted there demonstrating, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Appreciate my pain, Carlos.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:So help me, help me know, okay, well, where is that's so.
Speaker 2:so light sensitivity, photophobia Well, I'm that's.
Speaker 1:I like the sun, but it's yeah.
Speaker 2:So light sensitivity is easier, right yeah.
Speaker 2:We think of phobia as like it's a. It's a fault of character. Whenever we have phobia, it's just think of it as light sensitivity. When I'm out in normal sunlight without my sunglasses, I'm squinting and I'm struggling with the sunlight. That's also, that's a symptom of imperfect eyesight, and so I that's a common thing that I touch on with people on how to get comfortable again with normal sunlight. So then you're out in normal sunlight and you're not squinting, your vision is better and you feel really, really comfortable. I could walk. I'd be happy to walk you through doing that, okay.
Speaker 2:So after we get off after we get off here today or another time actually, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm thinking, even like sun reflecting off the snow or the ocean or white sand. Is that your? You're still talking, we can.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's feasible, well then, it's it's.
Speaker 2:Bates writes about how it was very common, for you know, the guy who's up in the crow's nest on a ship had really really good eyesight, you know, back when ships were the primary mode of moving around in the world. Okay, and how they were. They weren't wearing sunglasses and they were out looking at sunlight reflected off of this ocean all day long. But they could have, you know, they would have the best eyesight. Bates writes about what they call primitive peoples weren't in a Western culture, had typically the best eyesight in the world because they were outdoors and they were used to looking at things really really far away. They were doing you know, they were at ease, they didn't have the stressors of modern day life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Wow, like some of these, I think we're, as Westerners are the people who are a little more regressed than some of the people that came before us. But okay, so let's talk expectation management. So if somebody's here in you and they're getting some hope and they're thinking, shoot this, there may be something here, help them, I guess. Cultivate a healthy mindset for the process of healing, because yet people's vision doesn't get better because they paid you for a few sessions. There's work to do, so you give them. That's an important thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So in general I tell people you know, depending on how long you've worn lenses, contacts or glasses, or even if you've had a surgery different kinds of surgery for cataracts or glaucoma or a lasik and you have problems after those surgeries I've helped many people with those issues too it depends on how, how strong your prescription is, how long you've been using glasses. That can affect how long it takes. Okay, but it's not going to be that like if you wore glasses for 20 years, it's going to take you 20 years to fix your vision.
Speaker 2:So, I wore glasses and contact lenses for 22 years and within three months, was not using any glasses. My vision wasn't normal, but I was comfortable going through my day without my glasses Functional and it just improved from there.
Speaker 2:With many people it's a matter of weaning them off of their their current prescription. But if you practice, I always tell people you know, the teenager who has access to a car every day when they're learning how to drive is going to learn more quickly how to drive. And the teenager who only drives for an hour on the weekends. So the more you practice, the better you'll get at whatever you do. Okay, looking on your nutrition, and so this does take practice. You got to sit with letters, but what you're seeing and doing with letters and looking at them, whether close up or far away, is you're learning to relax when you're doing that. So I tell people you're, you're practicing, relaxing. You're going on a little vacation every time we practice, yeah, which that's what you're learning to do.
Speaker 2:That's tough for people when they're into their 40s and 50s who have the family life, their work, their career, all the things that we're juggling as adults. And so, as an adult, you get to choose. You know I'm going to. Am I going to exercise because it's better for my health, you know? Am I going to get out and eat good, better food, or am I going to be in a rush and just eat my Cheetos and Coke at lunch to get by, so that have some kind of snack and then work through the afternoon.
Speaker 2:At some point you want to change things little by little, so managing expectations is the thing of this is going to take time. It's not like putting on glasses. All of a sudden your vision is clear. Very few people that I've worked with. I work with them one session and the vision goes to normal and it stays at normal. That has happened, but that's rare. Bates writes about how rare that is. Don't expect that to happen, but if you come to classes regularly, you're going to learn what to do, what not to do, and you're going to feel more comfortable. You're going to, as you noted, you start catching yourself. You don't need me to be watching you all day to notice. Am I holding my breath? Your visual acuity is actually a sign of whether there's tension inside or not. If your vision is not normal, your body is telling you you have tension, you have some strain going on, something's off. When your vision is off, your body is telling you that something's wrong. So your body is telling you all day long, if you care to pay attention to it, what your state is, and so it's practicing that over and over and over. So usually Bates does a general guideline. He says whether it takes three months, six months, a year, usually within a year a person is going to see substantial improvement.
Speaker 2:When I work with people, I'm typically working on an eight pack of eight one hour classes over eight weeks. They'll see substantial improvement during that time. And then I tell them I've taught you how to fish, I've taught you how to catch fish. We've gone fishing. Going fishing is practicing. Catching fish is you notice you're relaxed and your vision gets better. So now you go fishing on your own, without me. This next week you practice on your own. You go fishing. When we get together next week you tell me if you caught fish. If you didn't catch fish, we have to make some adjustments and we go from there. But at some point you're going to start catching fish. You're going to have like the experience that you had of like oh, it's like what did you say?
Speaker 2:Glitches into these glitches of yeah, where your vision gets better and it gets worse, and gets better and gets worse. So that's when a person's relaxing and then they're not relaxing. That's what's happening there. And so as a person learns to go fishing and starts catching fish, then I tell people I want you to at one point say, carlos, I don't have to take classes with you anymore, I don't have to catch fish, thank you, and that's it's doable.
Speaker 1:But you got to go fishing. Yeah, when the person you become in the process, I imagine it's a better version of yourself.
Speaker 2:Because you're more at ease. So when you get, healthier.
Speaker 1:Same thing with all your other health habits, right?
Speaker 2:Everything. Yeah, you show up for the world. I heard Gabby Reese in the last week. The professional she was a division one athlete and professional volleyball player back in the 90s. She's a big health coach now with her husband, laird Hamilton, a famous giant wave writer from Hawaii.
Speaker 2:She said performance. She was talking about performance. And she says performance is not just athletic performance or mental performance or work performance. She says it's showing up in life and being the best human being that you can be for yourself or your family, for the people that you touch in your life. You know we may not be somebody who millions and millions of people are listening to, as you know how we're influencing people, but are we doing well for ourselves? Are we improving our own health? Are we taking a step in the right direction just from day to day? So there's going to be days when we don't eat everything that we should, when we don't get enough sleep, when we don't get enough rest, when we snap at our kids or our spouse, and we learn from that. You know it's like OK, let me try to do a little bit better the next time. And that's what you're learning to do with everything that you do in life Show up and be a better human being for yourself and for those around you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just call that the gift of giving people your presence, and there's a kindness to the way that you described it. There's grace that fills and helps cover some of the less than your best moments, and it doesn't have to be this reason to beat yourself up. It's a reason to go. You know what I can do better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we all want to do better for you know, especially for our families and for the people that we love and who love us Right, there's going to be times when we're short fused, when we're hungry, when we're tired, when we've been sick and we're like why did you bring me this soup? I wanted chicken soup, and chicken soup is what makes me feel better when I'm sick. The person brought us the best soup that they thought was. You know, this is the soup that I was taught to bring to somebody when they're ill. It's like, oh, you want a chicken soup. I could do that for you.
Speaker 2:It's just communicating and, you know, showing them better for ourselves, being kind and forgiving. What ourselves teaches us to be kind and forgiving with other people too, and then be, and then learning to be, like you said, showing up as your authentic self. You know, be the special, unique gift that you are for the world. The thing that you're doing here with your podcast, christian. You know all the benefits that you're bringing for people by having this interest. You know, one thing starts you going down this path of like hey, maybe there's some alternatives. Yeah, there's different ways to tell them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what's fun about it is there's once you kind of it clicks that conventional isn't always best or accurate or looking out for you. You can say well, let me what other things are out there and play. Once that curtains pulled back, it's there's a smorgasbord of things and yeah, what this? I love this practical, tactical way into vision because you know, unless you're blind, we all have that and you probably tell me you blind people recover too.
Speaker 2:Work with blind beats. Work with people who are blind. I work with people who are blind who start seeing stuff after an hour.
Speaker 1:I'm not about it anymore. It's so underestimated in its capacity to heal. So I don't know. Carlos has been super enlightening and fun and I'm thrilled to know you, so tell people where they can find you and follow your work.
Speaker 2:So they could go to centered visioncom. That's C E N T E R E D, centered visionV I S I O N dot com. I have, you know, some videos on there. You could learn a little bit about bait techniques on there. You can contact me, you could see class schedules and get a lot of information. There's a resources page so you know if you're thinking about lasik, get informed, you know, before you do something like that.
Speaker 2:If you want to end up doing lasik, you're an adult. You get to choose how to walk forward in your life. If you want to wear glasses, contact lenses, which most people do, that's an easy route to be able to see clearly. It's easier to go to our physician and have them give us a medicine or a surgery, you know which they're happy to do. So when you, when you go off off the beaten path, it can be very gratifying and bring you greater health and and you find people like like yourself that that are willing to support you and help you in trying these alternatives, these, these different modalities that are sometimes very, very, very beneficial for us. Yeah, so, yeah, they can go onto my website there and contact me there and get more information about that. How do people so people are listening to this on the podcast people go to find out more about Christian Elliot Well thank you for asking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have true whole humancom is kind of the hub where you can find a lot of what we do.
Speaker 1:I also have the website deconstructing conventionalcom, where started as a blog and it's turned into a blog slash podcast and who knows where it's going. But yeah, it's been a fun journey of you know I've been at this for almost 20 years of helping people with their health and you solve one problem, then you realize there's another one and you just it just keeps expanding to really try to address the whole human and eyes are part of it and you know there's so many different ways to heal and it's funny. I was talking to a client this week and one of the things she realizes, you know, when the students finally ready, the teacher shows up and somebody that's ready for, finally ready to address their eyesight definitively you were the teacher they were looking for. That just didn't know it yet and that happens to me a lot, is they're finally ready to approach their health from a nafti responsibility and yeah, these are hard past these, these last five years, 10 years that I've been trying stuff.
Speaker 2:That stuff hasn't worked and it forces you to look outside of the normal path. You know the normal solutions that people are going to. Yeah, that's a good thing.
Speaker 1:You know it's for the world. Yeah Well, thank you for the time today, carlos. It's been a lot of fun. Very happy to do this, christian, very very happy to do this.
Speaker 2:Hope to hear more from you and hear good things coming from your podcast and from your website. Well, stay tuned, you will. Thanks again. All right, great, you're welcome.
