This week’s blog was inspired by an email from one of our audience members who has Retinitis Pigmentosa and is working hard to improve his eyesight. However, he was unsure on some of the finer details in relation to the main eye exercise to help improve RP, which is the peripheral vision eye exercise.
Those of you who have not seen my blog The Eye Exercise That’s Saving My Eyesight and do not know the peripheral vision eye exercise, it is when you individually place three different sized papers between the eyes and wave an object or your hands in the periphery.
This allows the central vision to rest and prevents it from dominating your vision. Your brain then starts picking up the information from the periphery rather than your central vision. Over time, this strengthens the brain’s response to the periphery and the 120 million rods cells found in each eye.
It is common for people to want to know how to position their hands when performing the peripheral vision eye exercise and whether they should be seeing the hands or not.
For those of you who do not know, Retinitis Pigmentosa is where the rods cells found in the periphery start to lose their strength and in return, the periphery becomes more difficult to access.
Somebody without RP can typically wave their hands next to their ears and still see them, whereas many people with Retinitis Pigmentosa could be waving their hands next to their eyes and not notice. This is why the question of whether or not someone with RP should wave their hands where they can see them or not is such a good question.
The answer is… we want to work both places. In self healing, we always want to maintain and rest what is strong, but strengthen what is weak. This can be very difficult at times, especially as few of us like to work with what is weak within us. It can be very frustrating at times, but the benefits can be very rewarding.
Waving the hands where you can still see them is important as it maintains the strength of those cells and keeps them active. By working the areas that you cannot see, or as I like say not as clear as other areas, you are strengthening those weaker cells and helping to wake up those cells already dormant. This may seem pointless at first, as you wave your hands in the periphery without noticing much, however, over time you will start to notice an increased awareness of movement in the periphery.
You may also find waving colored paper in the periphery instead of just your hands may also help. In fact, anything that you may think would be easier for you to see can be used. We recommend people using flashing lights in the dark so that the weaker cells can pick up the light more easily and be strengthened more from there.
It would be an interesting self experiment to wave your hands in a particular area where you have difficulty seeing and then go to a dark room and flash a light in the same area to see if you notice it. Some places you may not notice it, which is where you have more work to do, but other places that you otherwise thought did not exist are in fact still active and waiting to be used. You can find out more about flashing lights in the periphery in my blog post A Free Festival Eye Exercise Tool.
Do not forget that when we say ‘exercise the periphery’, we also mean both upper and lower periphery. This may mean playing with some of the sizes of the paper so that you can wave around the areas that are not seeing as well as others.
As always, I would love to hear your feedback on this post or any of my posts. Please leave a comment below or send me an email and let me know how your eye exercise are coming on!
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Happy Healing π
That is a really great helpful article to make the things about the peripheral eye exercise very clear..
Hi Turk, It is our pleasure to help you.
Hi, this is very helpful indeed. I have RP myself and I would like to start taking some steps to prevent it from becoming worse and eventually even reversing it altogether. I believe that the exercises presented here can help me. One thing is however not clear to me: I have been told since day 1 when I have been diagnosed this that it is very important for me to wear good, quality sunglasses preferably most of the time while on sunlight. This is the first time I’m hearing (or reading) that sunglasses are actually not good because they suppress the stimulation of the rods. Is this true even for people with RP ? My RP is fortunately not as bad and it is not really impacting my daily activities, with the exception of night blindness. I however find that bright sunlight hurts my eyes… Hence, I’m wondering here if sunglasses are really good or bad for me..
Hi Marketa,
It is our belief that performing such exercises as the “sunning eye exercise” strengthens the photoreceptor cells of the eye. Furthermore, the average person spends little time with natural light exposure to the sun which we believe also weakens the eye. However, just like lifting weights it’s not recommended to start of with heavy weights the same is true for sun exposure. An individual needs to take the time to strengthen their eyes making it comfortable to see in sunlight. There are also situations sunglasses help if the sun is particularly bright or high exposure. Its less about “don’t wear sunglasses” and more about “gradually strengthen your eyes so they can see in sunlight without strain”. I hope this helps! π