Rewilding your eyesight means retraining your mind how to ride the wild willful ponies we call your “eyes”.

You, like me, probably learned as a child in school, and as an adult in the workplace, to tug at the reigns of your eyes, demanding (through squinting and staring) that they just see what you want them to see. Much like school and work demanded of you to ’snap to’ and do what they commanded you to do.

Learning to see, to ride those frisky, untame-able, przewalski’s ponies, really comes down to three things you’ll ask your eyes to do, and a whole lot of letting them do what they want to do.

These three things, in the beginning, you will practice separately, over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over…

I want to state first that I have myopia (nearsightedness), so that my descriptions will provide instructions specific to that kind of eyesight issue. You can apply this to presbyopia (farsightedness), but you’ll need to figure out how by yourself, for now. Now, the “things”:

Thing #1: Identify something that you do over and over anyway, that involves either sitting, standing or walking, with a view into the distance (i.e, not in a windowless room, but walking down a street, driving, working at a desk in front of a window, etc.).[aka the WAYK “Same Conversation”, for you smarty pants out there].

Thing #2: Broaden your vision to “wide-angle vision”.

[See the vision section of the sensory tune-up]

Thing #3: Look for the smallest detail in the distance, even if blurry and “impossible” to see.

Simple! It will never get any harder than this. It just takes time, and some other details and tiny wrinkles can accelerate the process, if you know about them, but you don’t need to. Wide-angle vision, and hunting for the smallest detail, in a consistently recurring familiar setting with a view of the distance, will do it all.

Of course, if you can learn it all just from this, you’ll impress me.

Next, in Part III, I’ll explain the step by step nature of the process.

We first learned how to see as babies. Then we learned how to not see, in school and in work, as we became adults. How do we rewild our eyesight?

Allow me to first retell my personal story of rewilding my eyesight.

As a child, I had normal, everyday, fantastic eyesight, no problem. I had a rich inner life, and a rich outer one too. Both of these lives felt in balance.

Then, at the age of 11, I moved from small-town Oregon to the big city, and started attending an inner-city middle-school in Portland, Oregon. Within a year my vision began markedly blurring. Within a couple years I couldn’t watch movies without glasses, and my inner life swelled out of all proportion, as my outer life shrunk to the size of a pea (or thereabouts).

Every year, my vision worsened, prescriptions strengthened. Immediately I distrusted the whole experience; the willingness of optometrists to write stronger and stronger prescriptions, the apparent helplessness of anyone to explain or remedy my worsening vision. My only role: to find eyeglass frames that didn’t look too ridiculous. A role which I failed at for years, I might add.

During high school I stumbled across Dr. William Bates’ “Bates Method” of vision therapy; though I couldn’t get it to “work” (and I struggled with doing the exercises consistently), I never forgot the hope of regaining my once fantastic, naturally perfect vision, that the “Bates’ Method’ offered.

I’ve spent a few hundred dollars on books, pinhole glasses, vision therapy kits, and so on, since. But the most useful money I ever spent, I spent at Tom Brown’s Tracker School, on a standard class, where he said:

“Folks, practicing wide-angle vision will not only increase your awareness remarkably, but some of my students have used it to regain their eyesight and throw away their glasses.”

Pretty much everything else I have to say stems from this simple, throwaway claim. If you don’t know what I mean by wide-angle (or “peripheral”) vision, I’ll explain more of this later. For now, know that it means just “seeing things out of the corner of your eye” - all the time!

“But, I’m specially broken…”

I thought this for years, that my loss of eyesight would resist any attempts to regain it, that I had special problems somehow not addressed by the various programs. Let me go through some objections you may have.

Objection #1: What if my vision “is specially broken”?

I don’t know. I thought this too. Mine recovered. Why not yours?

Objection #2: But I’ve had glasses since the age of two. I don’t have any great vision to regain!

Maybe. Maybe you never had the chance to really learn how to see in the first place, due to the vagaries of modern diet and family life.

Objection #3: I don’t do well at following regimens and self-help stuff. What if it doesn’t work, and I lose patience?

Yeah, me neither. Yes, I worried about that too. And yet, now in my thirties (two decades after the problem began), I have begun to regain my formerly amazing vision.

You don’t want to “fix” your eyesight. You want to relearn how to see, and to rewild your vision.

More than anything else about how I’ve gone about regaining my vision, I love the fact that it has improved my visual awareness too. Not just acuity; but awareness!  Since it has involved retraining my ability to use my eyes, it has made me wonder if I will ever have to worry about presbyopia (old-age vision, the need for reading glasses, etc.) either. In fact, if vision really operates as a skill relating the mind to the eyes, for the rest of my life, my eyesight may just get better, and better, and better. Until I’m seeing stars with my naked eyes that would require a modern person to use a telescope. You’ve heard those stories of ancient astronomers (not astronauts! I mean native, indigenous star watchers), haven’t you? How did they see those stars?

I really think I’ve discovered how.

For only $99.95…

No, sorry. You won’t get it that easy. Or rather, you only get it by doing it the truly easy way. But you probably won’t like it. If I’ve learned anything, as I’ve begun working with a mentoring language that has shot my ability to learn and teach through the roof (and resulted in things like my eyesight improving at last), I’ve learned not to pretend that explaining something teaches it.

You’ll only learn to rewild and retrain your vision, by doing small easy things, one piece at a time.

My perfect vision hasn’t fully returned.

I describe my current vision level, as flashes of 20/20 vision that last from split seconds to several minutes, perhaps for a total of 30 minutes a day. In the dark, bad lighting, and unfamiliar situations, this total can nosedive. Keep in mind though, that (as I write this) winter currently reigns in Portland. Every summer, with full sunny, bright days, my vision takes the biggest leaps and bounds of improvements.

If I had to predict, I would guess that my vision, at the current rate, will fully improve by the end of this next summer, or the one after it, since good sunlight seems to play such a strong role. But I never stop training my vision, even in winter.

Okay, where do I start?

Start with a good “set-up”. Eat a rounded paleodiet (with fish oils, fermented foods, and so on), or close to it, or another nourishing tradition in accord with your body’s needs, not an ideology. Get to know your body’s needs. Get an allergy test, and avoid your food intolerances and allergies completely. Start exercising. Get your body healthy. Then the eyesight part will come much easier. My improved vision correlates overwhelmingly with my improved health.

I’ll speak more about the actual nitty-gritty of eyesight improvement practices in Part II.

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I’ve recently become consumed with the possibilities opened up by the mentoring language and “fluency game” called “Where Are Your Keys?”, as developed by Evan Gardner.

Join me in San Francisco, on Jan 23rd and 24th 2010, exploring the “fluency revolution”, and take advantage of this opportunity to come and play with us. The hosts of the workshop have generously set the workshop tuition at $50 for both days.

For more information, check out the event page hosted by Quality Software at the Agilistry Studio.

I hope now that some of you have tried asking that question, “which creates more of a sense of ‘at home’ in me: this, or that? Which can I more “come home” to?”.

For me, this question tends to have the most power to reveal the next step, the next decision or action, that  creates the most “wholeness” in me and everyone around me.

But I don’t see this question as an infallible one; it works for me, but quite possibly, another one will work better for you.

You could also ask, “What mirrors my true self more: this or that?”. Or, “what creates more wholeness in me?”. Try different questions; ask two of this about the same options, and see if you get different responses.

I encourage you to ask this question, in order to surprise yourself, by discovering that what you like, what fits your personal taste, does not necessarily indicate what creates more life in you and those around you. Compare those two questions, ask them in the same context, “what creates more of a ‘coming home’ in me” vs. “which do I like more?”. I think the answers will shock you.

You will find, that this sense of “wholeness” and “vitality” stays relatively consistent from person to person; that by far, most people (to their own surprise) will agree on what creates wholeness. They may need different questions to reveal this innate sense, but they will agree overall.

For example, though Christopher Alexander has had great success with it, I know for me the idea of “a mirror of my true self” does not call up the same sensitivity as “a feeling of coming home”. The “mirror of the self” sensation tends to get me thinking about personal likes and dislikes, whereas “coming home” sensitizes me to the raw, yet aesthetic animalness of myself…to the simpleness of what pleases a child, but yet the child-sense of an adult. What pleases my animal self. This may call up bearskin rugs, scratching posts, and abundant feasts, if you have a conventional sense of “animal” nature. But if you spend anytime observing, tracking, or relating to animals, truly relating, you know the extreme sensitivity and aesthetic sense that animals have - a delicacy of experiencing. We can train an animal to put up with terrible or domestic conditions, we can remove habitat and force them to adapt, but given the option they too choose that which creates the most wholeness in them and the life around them.

Once I realized which of two beautiful carpets in my home contained vastly more wholeness (surprisingly so!), I then began to notice that my cat would sit on that carpet almost exclusively, though it didn’t necessarily lie in a comfortable or convenient place. And seeing my cat on the carpet tended to make my cat more healthy seeming, more alive, more relaxed.

If you put all the puzzle pieces together, and remember that no indigenous people discriminate between art and function, no intact native people see ornament as “extra” or as not-innate to the function of what they make (bows, spoons, canoes, baskets, what-have-you), you’ll understand how this all pertains to the animalness of our true aesthetic selves, our ability to truly sense wholeness in the world.

So start asking questions. Start with one, right now. Ask it of the two  objects sitting next to you: “which one has more life? which one do I feel more “at home” with? which one do I like?”.

Don’t wait. Ask this now. Discoveries like this happen in no other moment than this one, right here.