Author: Rosemary Gaddum Gordon

Crossing Your Eyes

Originally appeared in
Earth Star Magazine February/March 2007
Rosemary Gaddum Gordon, D.B.O., M.A.

When I was little, I was standing in a crowd waiting for a parade and overheard a parent saying “Don’t cross your eyes, Tommy, the wind may change and they’ll get stuck that way.”  It sounded horrifying.  It wasn’t until I was studying at Moorfields Eye Hospital that I discovered how important it is to be able to cross or converge the eyes when looking at something up close. 

As our vision develops, our eyes need to learn to work together as a team so that we can aim each eye onto the same target.  This is a learned skill called fusion.  It develops naturally between eight to twelve months of age, as we interact with what is going on around us.  Since we have two eyes the brain receives two images.  Over time we learn to coordinate our eyes so that we can fuse these images and instead of seeing two mommys approaching us, we see one.  If the anatomy or physiology of the brain or eyes is not normal, or if there is trauma during this developmental stage the ability to coordinate the eyes may be compromised, resulting in strabismus.

Different activities in our lives can strengthen or weaken our fusion.  Playing sports like tennis, ping pong and baseball develop fusion, as do near activities like embroidery and blocks.  However, activities that require us to use just one eye, like monocular microscopes, or covering one eye with bangs, can disrupt our fusional abilities.

As we grow up our ability to fuse may become weakened through tiredness, bumps to the head or other stressors.  There are, however, simple ways to strengthen and maintain this ability.  One of them is to practice crossing our eyes – just the opposite of what many of us heard as children.

If you’d like to explore your convergence in the near range, hold a pencil at arms length and look at the tip.  Do you have a single image?  If you do, bring the pencil towards your nose as you blink and breathe.  You are asking your eyes to cross.  Stop if you see two pencils or if you experience any discomfort.  Now bring the pencil away from you as you continue to blink and breathe, noticing when it becomes single again.  Follow it out to arms length and then look at something as far in the distance as possible.

If the pencil never went double and looking at it on your nose was perfectly comfortable, then you need not practice.  If you experienced doubling or discomfort, practice this little exercise a few times a day for short periods.  Be gentle with your eyes so you don’t further weaken them by trying to go too fast.  Over time the muscles will strengthen, the eyes become better coordinated and you will have greater stamina for reading, sewing and working at the computer.

More Vision Tips

Visual Illusions: How they help us to see

Originally appeared in
Earth Star magazine
October/ November 2006
By Rosemary Gaddum Gordon, D.B.O., M.A.

Have you ever noticed how large the moon looks when it rises and how it seems to shrink as it climbs higher into the sky?  As the moon passes through the heavens, it seems to start off close to us, go further away and then come back to being close to us again.  In fact, the moon’s distance away from the earth during one diurnal cycle is almost constant.  It is the eye-brain connection that causes us to think that it changes size, which in turn leads us to think it moves further away from us when it is at it’s zenith.

Our understanding of what we see is learned.  As we begin to crawl around, we learn how far away things are and how they appear to get larger as we approach.  We use this knowledge all the time.  It helps us know the distance and speed of an approaching vehicle, so we know when it’s safe to cross the road.  When we see the moon, which is actually too far away and too large for our experience to fathom, our eyes are deceived and we are confused. 

If you did the exercise I suggested last month and held your finger up in front of something in the distance, you may have been confused to notice some doubling of objects.  When our eyes are working well together and we look at an object, we see two of any object that is in front of or behind the one we’re looking at.  Surprisingly, seeing double sometimes shows us we have normal vision.  It shows that both the eyes are switched on at the same time and that we have some awareness of the peripheral field.  (We’ll explore the peripheral field in the next issue.)

If you hold your finger up in front of a distant object, look at the finger and move it towards you, you will notice that the two objects in the distance will appear to move.  The same is true if you look at the distant object and move your finger back and forth.  This is another clue that helps the brain know how fast something is moving.

A good use of the doubling illusion is if you practice archery.  Instead of closing one eye to aim, look at the target and move the arrow so you see the bull’s eye centered between the two illusory arrowheads.  You’ll be right on target.

If you have trouble seeing double in this way, it usually means that one of your eyes is switched off.  You can explore which eye it is by covering and uncovering each one and noticing what happens.  To help switch that eye back on, rest your eyes first with palming. (Cover your closed eyes with your hands, without touching them, and relax your mind.)  Next cover the stronger eye for thirty seconds while you look at your finger and see the background, then, when you remove the cover see if you can see the doubling.

Because seeing these illusions can be confusing, we usually ignore them.  If, however, you practice them consciously they can help strengthen the way your eyes work together and how your brain calculates speed, size, distance and location of things in the world.

More Vision Tips

Healthy Vision Habits

by Elizabeth Abraham

‘There are as many hours in the day to use the eyes well as to use them badly.’  W. H. Bates MD

Our eyes, like every other part of our body, function better or worse depending on how we use them. But what are we taught about how to use our eyes?

Virtually nothing. All we know is that when we complain of blurry vision – whether we are 8 or 80 – we are given glasses. When we can no longer see as clearly through those glasses, we are given a stronger pair. Glasses compensate for the fact that our vision is blurry, but do nothing to change the reason why we stopped seeing clearly in the first place. We need to learn how to use our eyes well so that they can function well.

What do our eyes need? Our eyes function better when Continue reading “Healthy Vision Habits”

Seeing from the Core

When we don’t see well, we try harder; we squint and strain.  If you know this experience, you know your eyes feel like they “bug” out, as if you are squeezing your entire head to grab onto what you are seeing.  The effect is that instead of seeing from the center of our head, we are seeing from out in front.  This puts us energetically out of balance.

Qigong, Tai Chi, dance, yoga and many other disciplines Continue reading “Seeing from the Core”