The Distance Focal Plane Leap

The third day of this practice tends to be problematic for a number of students.  I call this the “focal plane hangover day”.

If you feel as though your eyeballs are sore, possibly a light headache, take it easy on this (these) day(s).  Wear your normalized prescription if you prefer.  If your outdoor time generally just happens because this program advocates it, skip most of it for today.  Do nothing that resembles any kind of vision related exercise.

Simple, yes?

The next day, consider getting an hour of outdoor time, maybe even before any close-up. If you are not averse to eating liver, have a lunch of chicken livers (grilled can be quite tasty).  Take your differential (close-up!) prescription with you, but don’t wear it.  Spend 20 minutes just bringing distant writing into focus.  If you are still feeling the hangover, cut it short, just enjoy more of no exercise.  But if you feel good, start wearing your differential prescription after the first 20 minutes.  Continue to work on reading distant signs.

You may notice one of two things:

Either a) you will realize that you can read signs just as clearly without glasses, as with your differential prescription.  Or b) you will have an easier time of the practice, using the prescription.

In both cases, using this prescription can be handy at times that you are having trouble getting focus.  Experiment with it’s use, bring it with you when you are outdoors.  For this case, it can be a good idea to have your differential prescription actually be a reading glass frame, merely for convenience.  They tend to be much smaller (in height), therefore fit into smaller, pocketable cases.  Some even fold!

You will still want to use your differential prescription for close-up, but keep in mind the fact that you should do some blur exercise (#61) and make sure to adjust your distance by the several centimeters you should be getting now.

Another consideration is now to reduce your differential prescription to a small extent – in which case you would keep your current differential prescription, but use it as your distance-blur prescription.

I realize that you have a lot of different lenses at this point – probably, as some clients like to joke, we didn’t save any money on prescriptions, but instead of buying them slowly over the course of your lifetime, we just got them all in a much shorter time span.

I will make some additional prescription suggestion in subsequent installments, and discuss this practice for those with higher myopia.

Doing great, hanging in there.  Remember to drop me a line in the forum!  😉

Cheers,

-Jake

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