“If you don’t see it in your brain first,

you won’t be able to recognize it externally.”

—Dr. Sam Berne

The medicinal essence I am using today is called Mexican Lime.  This medicinal essence helps unblock stagnant energy channels, dissolves internal obstacles, and helps life our mood.  Mexican Lime helps improve our ability of attend.  Apply two drops to the top of your head, and your confusion will be replaced with a mental clarity and follow through.

Physical therapy for the eye-brain-body connection is an important part of the plan. People begin to develop vision and perception, our dominant senses, at the moment of conception, and any interference during the gestation period, birth, or the bonding-attachment phase can have a negative effect. When the sensory-motor system is out of balance, it affects both systemically and energetically.

I will discuss my use of learning/performance lenses, ergonomic habits, posture, and light therapy as part of my physical therapy approach to improve the eye-brain-body connection.

Learning Lenses

I often use lenses and prisms with children who have a hard time learning. The lenses are different from those prescribed to sharpen the eyesight. Sometimes referred to as developmental or low plus lenses, they can help a child to focus, use peripheral vision, and process visual information. The lenses are prescribed based on a dynamic focusing test – the child reads or focuses on a moving target while the doctor tries different preventive lenses to measure flexibility and responsiveness.

A properly prescribed developmental lens can act as a catalyst, allowing more light into the eyes. This activates a greater number of retinal cells, causing more of the brain to engage in processing visual information. They help retrain the visual system so the child can see more with less effort. Children usually keep these “learning lenses” for six months to a year. During this time, they use them for all concentrated visual activities, including schoolwork and homework, computers and other digital devices, and television.

Developmental lenses and prisms are unique to developmental optometry. Some parents have told me that the lenses are “like Ritalin for the eyes – but without side effects.” They can slow children down, improve their ability to focus and concentrate, and relax their visual-motor systems.

Study habits, posture, and vision

Here are some ideas about ways to enhance your child’s study environment at home, including location, posture, and how long the child spends studying.

• Ideally, the child should study in a quiet room with good ventilation. The desk should face a wall or corner without visual distractions like windows, mirrors, or pictures. In addition to the room’s general lighting, add desk lighting from both sides so there are no shadows on the child’s work surface. Finally, either make or purchase a sloped writing board (also called a posture board) to provide a work surface that is sloped 20 degrees. The child should use this for all near activities.
• To avoid stress on the eye, face, and neck muscles, a child’s reading and writing materials should be a forearm’s length from the eyes. It’s easy to measure the distance: Have the child put one elbow on the table, form a fist with the same hand, and lean on that hand with the cheekbone at the middle knuckle of the hand. The child’s eyes are now the correct distance from a book or other item near the elbow.
• Work requiring focus (reading, writing, drawing) should be limited to 50 minute periods, with a 10-minute break between. If 50 minutes is too long, start with a 25 minute period followed by a 5-minute break, and gradually increase the study time to 50 minutes. While working, the child should look up periodically, focus on a distant object, and blink to release visual stress.
• Children should not use computers, video games or TV for more than 30 minutes at a time, and while at the computer, should look up every few minutes, focus on a distant object, and blink. Here too, it is important to take a 10 minute break between sessions. When children use computers for longer periods, it can inhibit their visual-motor development.
• To enhance attention, the environment should have as few distractions as possible. In school, the child’s desk should be close to the teacher and chalkboard.

Light and Color Therapy

In my first year of optometry school, one of my instructors described how light is refracted (bent) to focus on the retina after it enters the eye. But I wondered what happened after that. How does the light get from the retina to the brain? I later learned that only 75% of the light is transmitted to the brain’s vision centers, while the remaining 25% travels to the hypothalamus.

The hypothalamus is a part of the brain that regulates the autonomic nervous system and endocrine system, having a direct effect on the body’s movement and action, energy balance, emotions, and more. The pineal gland, which is also directly affected by light and color, [does that work?] releases melatonin every night after dark, signaling the body that it is time for sleep. The better our eyes’ ability to transmit light, the better our functioning will be in all of the areas affected by the hypothalamus and the pineal gland.

In color therapy, different colors of light are shined directly into patients’ eyes to improve their visual processing and balance their nervous systems. When I began to use color therapy in my private optometry practice, I discovered that, because of the eyes’ direct connection to the autonomic nervous system, the endocrine system, and the emotional brain, these three systems also benefit.

I checked patient’s brain waves before, during, and after using color therapy. Before the treatment, most people’s brain waves indicated states ranging from alert to anxious. During the color treatments, they started producing alpha (relaxed) and then theta (deeply relaxed) waves. As the color treatments continued, patients became more able to control their brain waves and remain longer in the alpha wave length range.

I have observed that light and color offer a language that the brains of ADD/ASD children understand, and I have seen improvements not only in their visual tracking, visual focusing, and visual coordination, but in their social engagement as well.

The Healing Light of the Sun

The Sun brings us light – energy and warmth, growth and development. We also need darkness– it brings rest, renewal and regeneration, slowing us down, soothing us into sleep. At most latitudes, seasonal cycles give us different amounts of light and dark during the year, with the summer solstice offering the maximum amount of light and winter solstice offering deep, long darkness. We thrive when we are able to experience both natural sunlight and deep darkness in each 24 hour cycle.

• We humans do well with healthy exposure to the sun. Sunlight balances our endocrine systems and gives us the full spectrum of light frequencies we need for health. Without sunlight, many of our systems falter and begin to shut down, from the organs to the microbiome to the structure of the bones.
• Have you heard of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD? In the dark times of the year, many people, including many children with ASD, develop symptoms of depression, anxiety, and insomnia – but people who regularly spend time exposed to the sun’s full spectrum light are less likely to develop this condition.
• Our skin connects the sunlight to the rest of the body, encouraging the release of toxins and cleaning the blood.
• The sun offers us humans our own version of photosynthesis by stimulating our cells to produce energy. It brings us the light that recharges our batteries, the adrenals. The sun, approached in a healthy way, can balance and improve our memory, attention, behavior, and health.

Children who have ASD need the nutrients offered by light and color. I recommend that everyone, and especially people on the ASD spectrum, spend at least one hour a day outside in the sun to help balance the nervous and endocrine systems. We call it heliotherapy, and it is important for health and healing!

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