Daily Routine

In this post, I will try to outline a bit more my daily routine. One of my goals of following this daily routine is to avoid losing interest. As my vision fluctuates a lot, without my routine, I feel that a day without it could temporarily cool down my perseverance. So I try to feel comfortable with my "academic scheme".

Early hours: - Before taking off to work, I do some simple yoga excercises to losen up my neck muscles. When I leave home it´s still very dark (6h30 AM), so - for the moment - I can not take off my glasses during this 5 minutes walk to the railway station. Entering the railway station, there is enough (unnatural) light so I can take off my glasses, practise blinking and shifting, catch my train and change to the subway. Leaving the underground I have another 5 minute walk till the entrance door of my work, but as it is still dark (7h15 AM), I put on my glasses till I am safely in front of my desk.

Work: - Eight hours watching a computer screen in a room without natural light. How to cope with that? Apart from trying to remember to Blink, Breath, Shift, looking far away, etc., I try to take each hour a 5 minute break to palm. I use the Bates Quotes application from the Central Fixation homepage (see links). Bates Quotes is an application that sits in the system tray of your PC, and at user specified intervals (each hour in my case), pops up quotes from Dr. William Bates. It reminds me to take a break and reinforces the thought that I am on the right track. In the middle of my working day I try to escape from my underground office, cross the street to a park, and do a 10 minute sunning session followed by 5 minutes of palming. Being back in front of my computer screen after these relaxation exercises, I have the feeling - at least during some moments - that my vision is much better and I am even able to push my computer screen further away... untill my eyes got strained again and I am ready for another palming session.

Home: - After work I go home and this time I refuse to put my glasses on. The bright light of the Spanish sun guides me during the walking parts of my journey, apart from the train and subway part. I still remember the first day I took off my glasses going home: I was scared I would fall on the railtracks or would disappear in a big hole in the road. But ... everything went really fine. I was very surprised how good I actually managed it, and the following days started even enjoying it: the vivid colours, the fresh air relaxing the eyes, I blink more often and for sure I shift more often (with the glasses on, I just rushed home looking straightforward, without blinking and shifting. I can say now that I really enjoy walking without glasses. At home I still do some formal Bates exercises related with central fixation, long swinging, and at the end I try out the Snellen Chart. I am not that focussed on the maths part (It´s very hard without glasses to measure the difference between 20/1400 and 20/1300...) but use the Snellen Chart to practise central fixation and swaying.

Do I actually do ALL this stuff every day? Well, like the vision fluctuates daily, also the human mind has its "better" moments. But when I have a bad moment, I just browse the Internet and read all these blogs of people putting all their effort in improving their vision naturally... and actually also seeing the results of their efforts. And that brings my mental energy up to the level where I am able to pick up my routine again. Thanks for sharing.

Myopia: The Early Years

Otis asked me in a comment on my first post: How did you get down to -20 D? Well, the only reasonable answer I can think of after all these years is: ignorance.


If I remember well, I started wearing minus lenses at the age of 4 or 5 in pre-school. The aim of the pre-school stage in Belgium is to develop, in a playful way, children's cognitive skills, their capacity to express themselves and communicate, their creativity and independence. The teachers for sure noticed some blocking behaviour in these skills, asked my parents to visit an oftalmologist, and there I was: 5 years old and if I remember well, with the heavy weight of already -3 D on my young shoulders (and eyes). I always had my glasses on, even for playing in the garden. And from that moment on it went downhill very fast. In primary school my eyes were that bad that they put my desk next to the teachers one just to be able to see the blackboard. In those days, going down one diopter a year was a nice average. My parents say somebody told them about the possibility of doing "some exercises" but they were very confident in our oftalmologist who was "completely against these "horrendous tecniques".

At the age of 16 I started wearing lenses. I reached downhill at the age of 18-19, with almost - 18 D. The last two diopters I gained during the last 20 years. Two years ago, I switched back to glasses because my eyes started rejecting the lenses.

So that´s the short background story. It can help me to put things in perspective. The past is the past, let´s focus on this moment right now ... and start blinking, breathing and shifting.

Very high myopia: Let the Bates experiment start.

Here we are at the first day of my one year natural vision improvement experiment using the Bates method. During the next year, I will try to update once a week this blog with progression reports and an overview of my vision improvement strategy. Why one year? Just a motivation target.

One of my big goals for publishing this blog is to motivate myself during this long period of time and to share tips and tricks on the Bates method with people having the same goal: improving our vision in a natural way. During the last couple of weeks I searched the Internet on valuable information and I was excited finding heaps of it in personal blogs and vision community pages. Especially the personal insight of a lot of bloggers (see my motivation links) gave me a lot of hope for a possible improvement of my vision.

The naked facts:

Belgian male living in Spain, 38 years old (maybe MiddleAgedBlueEyes should have been a better nickname;-). Watching a computer screen for almost 8 hours a day without having natural light in the room (I am working ... in the underground, literally).

My last optometrist prescription is:

At the moment, I wear glasses with the following prescription:

Yesterday I made a first Snellen Chart test (after a session of sunning, palming, central fixation and long swinging):

With glasses: R: 20/40 ; L: 20/60
Without glasses: I could read the 24m line at a distance of 30cm with both eyes, which should be more or less 20/1400 ...

So, a lot of progress is possible here;-)

I am aware that these raw data could have been a shock to you, so take a deep breath, and please do read on.

Two facts in my life "opened my eyes" and showed me the "alternative (natural) path":
- my oftalmologist told me that the only thing left for me to do was praying. Lucky me, I am too nearsighted so that he could not practise surgery on me, at least one mental strain less I have to cope with.
- visiting India some time ago I passed by the "School for Perfect Eyesight" in Pondicherry. The school is part of the Aurobindo ashram and the late Dr. R.S. Agarwal introduced the Bates' method for correct usage of the eye and supplemented it with other yoga techniques. Seeing all these children adopting natural vision improvement techniques really made me angry about some of our Western medical practises.

I didn´t find much information (blogs, communities) on the Web of people with very high myopia experimenting with the Bates method (although I admit that for some people having -10 diopters is already very high myopia, but as in my case I am doubling these figures, I don´t want to talk about "very very high myopia"). ¿Somebody has some experience with it?

I am in the process of searching a way to measure my vision progress with the Snellen Chart, but as you can see in the above figures, without glasses I have to be as close as up to 30 cm to see the 24m line. ¿Is it ok to measure the progress with and without glasses? ¿Or is there a better way to keep using the Snellen Chart without glasses?

As I am feeling my eyes getting strained writng these, I will go and do some palming. The experiment has started. Thanks for joining my journey.