CANE ENABLED | Audio Interview
Editor’s Note
Today we bring you the second part of a two-part interview with our guest, Meir Schneider. The conversation is a continuation of the ‘sunning’ technique in addition to more advanced eye exercises. In case you missed it, here is the link to Part 1. Below the audio is the interview transcription. Enjoy!
Interview Transcript:
Nasreen Bhutta:
Practitioners would disagree with you. They tell you to wear sunglasses and avoid the sun. And here you’re saying, try this exercise. What do you say to those practitioners?
Meir Schneider:
I will never be able to convince the medical establishment that I’m right. But truth of the matter is that if you have an RP (retinitis pigmentosa), you need the sun more than you think. They don’t only tell you to wear sunglasses for RP, they tell you to wear sunglasses period. Because they’re afraid of the UV light. The UV light comes also with infrared, it’s not isolated. If you isolate UV light, like in LED light, that’s really bad for the eyes. And many people are looking through LED light. But the sunlight is really helpful. Some of the UV lights are very harmful. I’m not saying that we don’t have harmful UV lights. I won’t tell you to avoid the sun. The opposite is the case. I want your pupillary muscles to adjust to it. I want your retina to adjust to the sun. If you don’t adjust to the sun, I think that your macula withers because the macula needs bright light.
And if you don’t adjust to the sun, you also do not adjust as much to the dark of the night. So actually the opposition of sun and darkness is important. But am I a lonely wolf in the dark? There are these days a group of natural vision improvement teachers that agree with me, including several bold and courageous ophthalmologists that belong to our group. But I definitely assume that the sun is fantastic. Could you have too much of it? Yes.
I think that the advice of the ophthalmologists, while goodly intent, leads to bad consequences. And the more you hide from the light, the harder the light is for you. And the worse you’ll do.
Now, the next thing that I’ve done was looking at details. For me, the whole world was one big smudge. I would look at the whole world as one detail. And that detail was pretty fuzzy. What I learned was to look from detail to detail, to look from one point to another point. And I did not really see them well. But I could easily see that there’s a window versus a wall. And you know what happened is? I built up enough vision to drive. So, that was my next thing that I started to build up a macula.
Next part is, I had to work on periphery. And then I worked on balancing the use of my eyes because my right is so much stronger than my left. So I worked on working with my left. So I would put an obstructive lens over my right eye. And then I worked on balance use within each eye. I learned to do it with people who are blind in one eye. I learned how to use both parts of that. But then I worked on creating balance use of the two sides of the other eye.
And then I learned to work on body and eye coordination. And then I learned the importance of bringing more blood flow to the visual system. So on those principles I worked. And story about body-eye coordination, I had somebody who came to me in Brazil, and he had a stroke of his optic nerve because of elective heart surgery. He came all the way to San Francisco and I had him bounce on the trampoline. And he ended up with many other eye exercises to improve his tunnel vision from 15% to 85% field of vision. So body and eye do work together.
Nasreen Bhutta:
One question that comes to my mind is from things that you’ve described so far, people either have some sight or are legally blind. What about people who are totally blind, do you work on those folks as well?
Meir Schneider:
The answer is no. I don’t know how to work on them. I’m not saying nothing can be done for them. But I don’t know how to do it. It’s not like we don’t have cases. I have sometimes exciting cases. But I will not ever say that I can help a person who’s totally blind to see. Because even the cases where we got people to see, it was more that I discovered that they can see.
One of the best case that happens in my book, Movement for Self-Healing, she came with the complaint that because of thyroid problem that she had that stopped the pituitary from developing from birth, her left eye was able to see 20% of normal vision. We call it 20/200. Her right eye is blind except for color perception. So first of all, I sat down and chatted with her, just the way I’m chatting with you. And she was relaxed with me. And in front of me and her mom, she was able to see the 20/100 line, which already takes her out of the legally blind category.
She said, “We went to all the top practitioners in Canada.” They came to me from Alberta to San Francisco. But nobody, she couldn’t see 20/100 with any of them. I said, “Was she relaxed with any of them?” So the next thing that we did is we went to a dark room. I patched with two patches her right eye, and even put masking tape around it. Asked her to put her two hands, sorry, over her left eye, the seeing eye, the two hands over the left eye, and the two eye patches. And we had light that blinks on and off. You know what happened? She was able to see the light that I expected. But then she was able to see the lamp. And in five minutes she was able to see my features.
And then we discovered that actually there was vision 20/400, 5% vision in that eye, that the mother, the father, the ophthalmologist, and the girl, totally blind. So obviously it was an eye that the brain did not use, which we call lazy eye. Now I got her to patch her eyes and jump on a trampoline. She was so uncomfortable. She was athletic, but she was athletic with the eye that sees. And we walked up and saw signs.
And then they came a year later to work with us on eye teaming. And that made a huge difference. She had a wonderful father. I never would say to somebody who called me and says, “I’m completely blind,” “You’ll see better.” A case of somebody legally blind, I know that most cases we can get people to see better.
Nasreen Bhutta:
I appreciate you explaining that because I know a lot of our listeners might have that same question. What baffles me is the ophthalmologist to miss that cue.
Meir Schneider:
The reason is, they would patch her eye for a minute or two, and would see that she’s not seeing. But it takes the brain of a lazy eye about three to five minutes to catch up. And they never waited that long. They don’t know it. You see that’s why I’m so proud of the ophthalmologists who go to my conferences and to my classes, are learning from me because that means they’re very open-minded people and they want to learn something that doesn’t exist in ophthalmology, physical therapy for the eye.
Nasreen Bhutta:
I think this is a really great ecosystem that you’ve developed. I know you developed it around the Bates Therapy. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is?
Meir Schneider:
Ophthalmologists have all the good intention to improve one’s vision. There’s no question about it. But they have a Band-Aid approach. You have pressure, now we put drops. Drops don’t work, now we do laser. Laser doesn’t work, now we’ll drill in. Before you know, there’s this effect and that effect and more effects and everything. Every time you do any procedure, it makes the eye weaker.
But that is true … but they too quickly remove knees and put a knee instead. They too quickly remove hip joints and put a hip joint instead. All those things are happening all over medicine. When I think, there’s too much aggression, too many times they’ll give you a surgery when actually exercise could make a very big difference. It’s actually throughout medicine in general.
Now, what happened with Bates. He was an ophthalmologist himself. In that time they had eye, ear, nose and ophthalmology, an eye doctor. It was in the end of the 1800, beginning of 1900. And he discovered that actually with some eye exercises, with the principle I was talking about, if you look at details and you relax your eyes, you can actually see better. It was a time when ophthalmology already was dead set over the fact that there’s no way for you to see better, ever. Not on your own. Not with exercises.
And he really upset many people. He lost licenses in one state, got license in another state. And there was two reasons why his method did not spread as much as it could. He had a theory that the external eye muscles do the same work that the lens can do. And of course, the lens has ciliary muscles and it’s supposed to do what it’s supposed to do. The theory was not complete and it didn’t stand the scrutiny of what he was talking about. So he was completely rejected for his theory.
But truth of the matter is, theory or not, the practice was good. And ophthalmologists kept persecuting people who practiced eye exercises. The most known one was Margaret Corbett, who was taken to trial in Los Angeles. She won and the jurists came to her classes.
I think that one of the worst things that we are thinking about is how ophthalmologists persecute people that they don’t agree with. Not the individual ophthalmologists, but associations tend to do it. And they’re pretty vicious about it. I think that what’s important for us to know that when people say science, especially these days when people say scientifically this is proven or not. The only science that really works is the one that was able to stand challenge. And I’m challenging now the medical profession to prove that eyes can not improve.
I don’t think they can do that. If they went to my classes, they would see that almost everybody’s vision improved. And they know it. So when we called four different universities to come and investigate our work in what we call the six-day eye class. We spend six days, I probably will make it even seven one of these days, of working on our eyes. Nobody wanted to come to research what we’re doing.
You know why? They would have to rewrite the books. And they should. Physiotherapy for the eye is available to people. And I’m not saying it helps everyone. Physiotherapy never helps everyone. But by the way, I think physiotherapy should also change. It’s not working enough with the brain and not working enough in a general way. But physiotherapy for the eye is something that is non-existent and we want to bring it to the world. And I hope to do that.
I think eventually it’s not going to come from the medical profession, but it’s going to come from people like you asking me those wonderful questions. We need more education. We need more research. We need more funds for research. So we can prove to everyone that it works. And we’ll have new practitioners coming from the medical profession that can change things. Because how things are going now is that more and more people make their eyes worse because of overuse of computers and over reading. And more problems that happened in the past to few are happening in the present to many. And that is true worldwide.
One example, in Tibet, where there used to be illiteracy, 3% of the children had near-sightedness. In Hong Kong where there was a lot of illiteracy, 62% with near-sightedness. That was in the nineties. Right now, Hong Kong, 90% are near-sighted. In South Korea, 94% are near-sighted. In the Amazon, 1% are near-sighted. So what we do with our eyes make a difference. And I truly believe that function affects structure. And thought affects function. And if we get discouraged from ever working on ourselves, we can never improve.
Nasreen Bhutta:
Thank you so much for sharing of yourself this morning, Meir Schneider, really appreciate that. How can we reach you?
Meir Schneider:
By the way, it’s an honor to be on your show. It really is. And I’m so grateful to your openness. It warms my heart.
There’s two ways to reach me. One is to write to office manager at self-healing.org. Self-healing.org. The other one is to call us, which is (415) 665-9574. Please look at our YouTube or listen to our YouTube. Much of our program is actually auditory. Read my books, now they’re all on Audible. We even have them on CDs. Either watch or listen to my audios, or we have some nice audio CDs of eye exercise. So work with everything we have. And come and help us change the world.
Nasreen Bhutta:
Thank you so much. Meir Schneider, it’s been a pleasure having you here this morning. To find this feature and many other great articles, visit the Cain EnAble page in the Beyond Sight online community, at boldlinebeauty.com. Thanks for listening.
Bio:
Meir was born with congenital cataracts to deaf parents. After five unsuccessful surgeries, leaving him with massive scar tissue, he was declared legally blind. At 16, he discovered eye exercises that helped him develop his vision from 1% to 70%. He now reads, writes and drives. The practices he used and developed became the basis for the Meir Schneider Method of Self-Healing combining breathing, massage, movement, bodywork and visualization techniques. Meir founded the School for Self-Healing in San Francisco in 1980, where he teaches and works with thousands of people with a wide range of degenerative conditions such as polio, muscular dystrophy, and multiple sclerosis. Meir is a world-renowned therapist, lecturer, and author of several books, translated into 16 languages.
Image Description:
- Meir Palming: Palming is an ancient practice going way back to Tibetan Yogis in caves. Palming is deep relaxation for the eyes. Meir is passionate about palming, he once palmed for 11 hours and then got his driver’s license! Here, Meir is putting the palm or cup of his hands over his eye orbits while putting no pressure, repeat, no pressure on the cheekbones (as that would inhibit some of the needed blood flow to the eyes). His elbows are on a special palming stick that is available for purchase through the School for Self-Healing. A tabletop with a pillow on it works well also!
- The Beyond Sight Magazine cover features this above image of Meir Palming. “Beyond Sight Magazine” masthead is teal with black text. The dot on the ‘i’ in ‘sight’ is the eye used for our 2020 Year of Vision Campaign (described HERE). There are lines of text that say “Vision Improvement Through Self-Healing | Palming, The ancient Tibetan practice.” In the bottom right corner is a teal circle with an illustration of Abby Bold Blind Beauty’s fashion icon who is walking with her white cane in one hand and handbag in the other. She is wearing heels and a stylish dress made of panels resembling overlapping banana leaves. The dress panels gently curve from her nipped-in waist to just above the knee. She’s also sporting her signature explosive hairstyle and yellow text Cane EnAbled” is under the circle.
CREDITS:
- Cover by Daniel Lubiner
- Interviewer Nasreen Bhutta