ABSTRACT
From personal experience and from my participants’ experiences, near-sightedness is difficult to treat by relaxation exercises alone. The onset of myopia alters the eye neurologically as well as physiologically. Natural relaxation drills by themselves (such as learning to go about your day without your glasses, palming your eyes, massaging your eyes, etc.) take a long time to restore the proper neurological message.
To complicate matters, myopia can be due to the lens, the cornea, and the eyeball. It is difficult to reduce the elongation of the eyeball or deal with the astigmatic shape of the cornea by natural relaxation alone. The best it can do in the short term is relax the muscle that controls the shape of the crystalline lens: the ciliary muscle. With certain types of refractive errors involving the eyeball and the cornea as well as the crystalline lens, the treatment would be incomplete. I am not saying that it cannot be done. I reiterate, it takes a long time.
Certain types of relaxation exercises can become an extraneous variable when combined with the drills I am proposing. Palming, for example, entices the lens to adopt an occluded neutral shape when the both eyes are occluded. It is different from the open neutral shape it takes on when both eyes are opened when performing the first part of the Preliminary Drill, for example; and it may also be different from the occluded neutral shape it takes on when just one eye is occluded when performing the first part of the Standard Drill. Palming before or after those drills interferes with the outcome.
However, I still encourage participants to palm frequently at any other time—especially when the eye’s resistance is high due to a direct induction of stress. Any source responsible for the stress should be addressed first to relieve the spasm before applying any ortho C drills. Without isolating 76the source, it can revive the stress again to offset the benefit from the treatment. (The chapter Treating the Loss of Depth Perception elaborates on the topic.)
