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Hi [s2Get user_field=”first_name” /] ,

When we first “met” I gave you a small set of very specific causes of your myopia.  It’s the whole basis of fixing a problem, to understand it first.

Find exactly what’s wrong and then find the exact things that will fix it.  Reduce problem and solution to it’s simplest form.  The reductionist thinking.

I succeeded at this where most others failed.  That’s why you’re here.  That’s why you sent me money and are taking time out of your day to do this session.  To honor our agreement and give you helpful tools, today we’ll talk about the centimeter – one of the “exact things” – and how you will integrate it into your life for better eyesight.

But first, let me tell you about a mistake I made with the reductionist thinking.

Many years ago when I was still trying to boil down everything about myopia, I found myself traveling a lot.  I’d be in India for a week, then I’d be in Bangkok, then in Munich.  I was looking up anybody and everybody I could find who dealt with eyesight.  It was happenstance that I had exposure to an eastern philosophy one week and a western one the next.

It put the two different philosophies into stark contrast.

I’d talk to the old Chinese guy because Western optometrists all told me there was no answer.  The old Chinese guy would say sure, you don’t need glasses.  He, of an indeterminate age (though I’d say close to triple digits), wasn’t wearing glasses.  His wife wasn’t wearing glasses.  So I figured I might as well listen to that guy; take all his weird herbs and teas, and the needles poked into my forehead.

But nothing he said to explain his methods made any sense to me.  Whenever I’d ask “why”, I’d get a shrug.  It was driving me seriously nuts.

Same again with the Indian guys.  Some would have these hand drawn charts of points on the body that would affect things.  But my fact and science oriented mind kept running into dead ends.  To keep this from being a very long session today, let’s just leave it at that… it was all nonsense.

Or so it seemed at the time.

I ended up finding the answers that fixed my own eyes in the West.  Close-up strain, mismanaged by wearing minus lenses.  That was the reductionist answer which then led me to find solutions.  Solutions that worked.  The Indian guru types and the Chinese mysterious medicine men, they faded into the background for many of the next years.

Turns out though, they aren’t strictly nonsense.

But let’s put that aside for a moment.  Let’s first talk about your centimeter results.

There is no moving forward without centimeters.  If you haven’t done it yet, don’t worry.  Just go back and do it now.  Don’t dig yourself into a “reading mode only” hole.  If you have your centimeters results, read on.

Let’s use an example to illustrate the importance of the centimeter.

It’s Sunday morning.  You left work early on the Friday before and spent the evening with friends (not much close-up).  Saturday you went for a hike, to a barbecue and later did some projects around the house (very little close-up).  Sunday morning you wake up after a very good night’s sleep, the sun is streaming through the windows and you are having a great morning.

You take your centimeter.

It’s (in this example) 26.

Let’s call this one your happy centimeter.  Happy 26.

Your ciliary muscle – the focusing muscle which gets all tense when you look up-close – hasn’t been pushed for a few days.  Great!

Now, let’s look at another scenario.

It’s Friday afternoon (and the same you), you’ve been working 12 hour days at the office since Monday.  Every night you’d tried to relax by watching TV but you were also on your tablet checking e-mails and browsing the Web (tons and tons of close-up).

At lunch you were checking Facebook on your phone.  Basically, you’ve spent most of your waking moments looking at close-up.

Friday afternoon, it’s just gotten dark and the lights in the office are all fluorescents.  You take your centimeter.  It’s 22.

Let’s call this your sad centimeter.  Sad 22.

It’s important that you assign an emotional word to the number.  Trust me on this. Despite all the “guru-Jake” hyperbole, there really is a reason behind everything I’m suggesting you do in these sessions.

We’ll also get back to the reductionist mistake here momentarily.

Happy 26, sad 22.  You’ve got your baseline.

Now you start to explore how your day impact your eyes.  It’s a bit like you just gained another sense.  You can now peak under the hood, and for the first time in your life, actually check on how your eyes are doing.

That’s amazing, right?

You get a 24 on Wednesday.  Could be better, could be worse 24.  Give it a name.  Always name your centimeters.

You want to explore how you’re doing on Wednesday, how you’re doing after a day of fluorescents, and after a hike.  You won’t need centimeter this much later on, but until you reconnect to your internal sense of eyesight wellbeing, this will help you relate to your eyes again.

All this is the short term happiness of your eyes, the 22-26 cm.

Short term is largely a matter of the focusing muscle.  Not just that, but for the sake of baby steps, let’s call it that.

Then there is the long term happiness of your eyes.  This is more of an eyeball length topic. Your eyeball grew longer in response to the stimulus created by your glasses (minus lenses).  We’ll talk about this on and off in the sessions.  For now, suffice to say we want to help the eyeball get back to it’s healthy shape.  The centimeter will give us clues about this as well.

Take it a step further.  Let’s say it’s a few weeks from now.  You’ve learned a lot, been building habits and applying the session teachings.

You wake up on Sunday and your centimeter isn’t 26.

It’s… 28.

28!  Super happy centimeter!  This will be due to several factors such as better focusing muscle health (sometimes there’s an ongoing spasm, where the muscle just never relaxes and even 26 isn’t as happy as you thought).  Also, maybe a tiny bit of reduction in length of the eyeball.

In any case, 28 means you can see farther than you ever did – since you started recording. That’s the first ever glimpse of your vision improving.  Nice work!

See why centimeter is so important?

You track your short term vision health with the centimeter, and long term vision health as well.  Long term is created by short term.

Do me a favor real quick and consider going old school on the long term measurements.  

Put up an actual piece of paper and record your highest centimeters on it.  Somewhere where you can see it; a place of honor in your living space.  These psychological aspects are really, really important.  You might not realize it today but you’ll thank me later.  Just a piece of paper if you don’t feel more motivated today.  Pin it up, record your highest centimeter (no cheating!).

Let the scribbles collect.  Don’t rewrite it all at once or print it.  Write the number and a quick note “Sunday morning, July 26th, didn’t look at a screen all weekend”.

Like your own cave painting of progress, it will collect meaning and importance over time.

Alright, we covered a lot here today.  Almost time to stop!

But there’s still the matter of the reductionist thinking so let me give you a bit more on that here.  I can’t cover it all right now because it’s a big topic.  But let’s get to scratching the surface.

The problem is the close-up that caused myopia.  The optometrist gave you glasses.  Identify problem, find simplest solution.

When I set out to find a better solution, I (at first) didn’t really go far enough.  I applied the same thinking as the optometrist.  Where did I fall short?  I didn’t think of my eyes as a living part of my body.  I was thinking of them as a problem that needed fixing.   I found all the things which I’ll show you here in these brilliant sessions, like the centimeter.

Centimeter is a factual piece of data.  26 good, 22 bad.  Fix the problem to not have 22. Reductionist thinking.

But when we do only that, we miss out on the fact that the body is infinitely more complex, and that our reductionism will always leave us just a little less than fulfilled.  Our eyes aren’t “a problem”.  They are amazing, intricate little miraculous orbs.  Our brain, as biology agrees, is actually looking out at the world through them.  Part of your brain is outside of your skull, literally inside those eyeballs, experiencing your surroundings.

That’s trippy.  We need to take a moment and appreciate this.

When I finally went back and looked at the eastern philosophy again I realized something very key.  As much as they are flawed in many ways, they do some things very well.  You know what?

They celebrate our human-ness.  They fully appreciate the whole thing, without trying to isolate single pieces and turn them into numbers.  Optometrists don’t meditate (or tell you to).  The Indian guru does.  The Indian guru says your eyes need love and light. And meditation.  And more love.  The optometrist says your eyes need glasses.  I used to say your eyes need centimeters.

But it’s really a bit of everything.  You do need the reductionism to deal with the problem but then we also need to take a step back and concede that the eastern ideas have merit too.

You’ll find me integrating eastern philosophy in the program.  It’s how the whole “guru Jake” thing started, as a bit of a joke.  Then it became a way to differentiate me from the optometrist, and then… well then it just stuck.  I’m a bit eccentric, a little weird, and I’ve accumulated the knowledge and insights of many hundreds of eastern and western eyesight health practitioners.  I just need a robe now. And a beard. And a bit of an Indian accent.

Back to serious business.

We’ll stick with lots of science and hard facts but there will also be a bit of celebrating and appreciating the reality of you-ness.  We did it here, maybe you noticed, by assigning an emotion to the number.  And you need the number.  But you also need the emotion.  Your eye is 22, sure.  But you won’t truly improve your eyesight (at least the odds are smaller) if you don’t also emotionally connect meaning to that 22.  Sad eyes.  Sad 22.

And with all those many things said, I’ll leave you with this for today.

No homework.  In the spirit of this session.  Read through it again if need be and figure out what you would like to do with your growing centimeter knowledge.

Om Shanti, as they say.  😉

– Jake

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Session:  Audio Track

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Session:  Video Stream

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