stevethemay

here is a thing i’m going to start offering:

wednesdays 8-11

saturdays 9-12

let me know if you’re interested and we can talk about where to meet or different times or what have you.

$$$: this will be free until sometime in the future when i actually know what i’m doing, at which point you will probably know as much as i do, and we can co-teach suckers on reasonably priced retreats or something.

AND SO:

in the spirit of trusting my body, and just trying shit out to see if anything happens, i present to you this ‘class,’ which is really more of a guided session of experimentation. the point is not to ‘fix’ your vision. it is to expand your perspective and reclaim agency for your own damn eyes. part of me really wants to make claims and suggest that yes, you really can restore your own eyesight. but you know what? i’m not going to do that because i honestly have no idea what i’m doing. i’m just going to take you with me on the east river ferry and ask you if you can see better on the water, which i find to be the case. maybe you won’t see better. maybe you’ll see worse but at least you’re on a dang boat and it’s a nice day outside. we’ll also go to parks and gardens and look at plants near and far, and lie in the grass and let the sun shine down on our closed eyes while we do my own bastardized, unqualified version of restorative yoga, which i am in no way certified to teach. again, maybe nothing at all will happen, maybe your vision will get better, or maybe you’ll just learn to be ok with having less than perfect eyesight and who cares anyway because check out this lavender bush, it smells like winning.

BACK STORY:

a little over a year ago i took off my glasses for the last time. i wore contacts for the last time about six months before that, which was six months after i stumbled upon a magical book in the library called ‘eyerobics’ and started down the path to optometric enlightenment. before you mistakenly consider me a hero or an expert on the subject or something, let me just say that i don’t really know how the eyes work. in fact, i’m probably just off my rocker. for a while, i believed in the bates’ method and its description of how the eye works, but i’m pretty sure that was wrong. i probably told you and everyone else about the muscles around the eye pulling things into weird tension, and if you do your exercises, then everything will be okay. nowadays even optimistic optometrists who think you can improve your eyesight are pretty sure that this analysis of eye mechanics is seriously lacking and/or just totally incorrect. meanwhile evidence based science basically states that by the time you’re 70, you’ll be blind as a bat and there’s nothing you can do about it. this, of course, is also total bullshit. this is the perspective on life that responds to chronic back pain by saying “oh that sucks, here are some painkillers, which will make it hurt less for a while, but basically, you’re just fucked for the rest of your life. you’re also going to get diabetes in 5 years because you can’t exercise ever again due to the fact that, again, your back is just totally fucked. also your husband is cheating on you. i know because he’s sleeping with me RIGHT NOW.”

my personal take on all this is that while the extrinsic (outer) muscles of the eyes do not directly cause the eye to move in and out of focus, a chronic imbalance of these muscles will cause indirect stress on the inner focusing mechanism of the eye, similar to the way having tight muscles in the lower leg totally contributes to back and neck pain, so shut up. also it seems like a lot of the time our eyes are actually fine, but we’re just in the habit of using them in a really shitty way, and then they get used to that. like if you are always sitting in soft chairs and couches and slouching and you never bend your legs more than a few degrees, you’ll probably be just awful at squats. but then you start taking yoga or stretching or doing crossfit or something for a while and eventually you can squat just fine. the bottom line is that I DON’T CARE ABOUT BULLSHIT SCIENCE. particle physics are cool, and so is harnessing geothermal energy to power cities. that’s real science and i’m all about it. setting bones and using painkillers and casts after you just got hit by a bus? cool. neat. got it. just not the bullshit naysaying crybabies who tell you that you’re pretty much dead already and too bad.

so anyhow, in regards to my own eye health, once more i choose to go the way of yoga, qi gong, the alexander technique, acupuncture etc… and say “fuck it, man.” i choose an experiential approach despite having absolutely no evidence that it works. hard evidence is overrated, i think, mostly because we still have almost no idea what we’re doing when we’re looking at bodies with or without a scientific lens. most major medical breakthroughs happen when you stop giving a shit and just do a thing [this is not any kind of a fact, or accurate statement; it is just my attitude]. sometimes my back hurts so i just lie down for a while, get a good night’s sleep, and start doing tai chi a few times a day. and then you know what? i wake up every morning feeling awesome. and then i look back and remember that my back started hurting because i just worked everyday for 10 hours for 3 weeks without a day off. DUH.