FROM EAGLE-EYE TO BLUR AND BACK

For years, I practically lived with my camera. Exploring my world with childlike wonder, I captured such visual images as the reflection of the clouds in a dew drop on the petal of a rose. I was an adventurer, an explorer of a macro world of intimacy with the ever-changing kaleidoscope of nature.

One year, many magical moments I thought I had 'frozen on a frame', cam back blurred. Keeping my sense of humor, I made light of it, figuring I was changing my style to a somewhat impressionistic, celestial quality, i.e. soft focus. Over time, I found not only my -- photographic images, but how I saw everything with my eyes, turning blurrier every month. I somehow lost interest in my camera that year.

I had also, not realizing it at the time, lost interest in reading for fun, writing songs and poetry, doing needlework, and making my own clothes, and anything else that I used to love to do within arms length. My arms had become too short! I felt that details were being silently ripped away from me like a 'thief in the night', and I had disappeared into a fog. I was brokenhearted and angry.

However, I chalked it up to "getting older". That it was inevitable, eternal and unfixable. After all, wasn't it written SOMEWHERE that no matter what, one day, my eagle-eye clarity would turn to mush? Never mind the 80-year-old man who still had crystal clear vision, or the article about the woman celebrating her 103rd birthday and boasting of her latest needlepoint and not every needing glasses---obviously these were oddities, right? Right?

After 3 years of denial in my needing any glasses, one day I happened to try on a pair while waiting in line at a carwash. I was hooked. The more I wore them, the more I needed them, and the stronger they got. I was a slave to this machine on my face. Now I HAD to find a solution--I couldn't see anymore at ANY distance. I had tended toward holistic and natural methods after a seeming miraculous turnaround in the health of my husband in 1987. I had followed natural healing nutritional and vitamin remedies for his illness and I was well in only 2 weeks. At that point, 'our minds opened' to healing a natural way from that day forward.

I found The School for Better Eyesight, in Los Angeles, and went to take a weekend workshop. Amazingly, my distance vision snapped back almost immediately, and within a short time my close vision came back to clarity. I was told that if I wanted to see again I would need to stop doing what was causing the mental eyestrain, which in turn caused the blur. I had to learn to RELAX. I was thrilled. Of course this could never be possible from my South Dakota, conservative- upbringing background. This, seeing clearly again, would have been thought to be impossible. Well, seeing IS believing!

I am now teaching these natural seeing skills to others. I am a Certified and classic teacher of the DR. BATES METHOD. That really means I teach others to yawn, relax, and to see again with THEIR own eyes again, too. Without eye exercises, but teaching people to re-learn what they used to do before they blurred, when they used to see clearly. I teach how to re-learn good vision habits that are integrated only 24-hours a day!

I no longer have headaches, have my eyes shut down while reading, forget what I just read, am addicted to my sunglasses, have night-driving pain due to light sensitivity, or am saddled with glasses in every nook and cranny. My world is bright, colorful, 3-D again, and everything is alive and in motion. My students say the same thing and more of us are enjoying the freedom to explore the world with our own eyes again.

I can teach you what to do, and not do, to have Perfect Sight for the rest of your life--and for "exploring the possibility", the first class is free! Relax and see. That is the key!

Jeannie Fitzsimmons CNVI

Dr. Bates Method of Natural Vision Improvement

June 1994, Networking Magazine, Austin, TX