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F. With the pads of your thumbs, press gently but firmly at a point about one millimeter from the outer edge of the eye orbit. Keep eyes closed.

6. Eye Stretch. This exercise develops freedom of movement in the connective tissues around your eyes.

A.Stand in a relaxed posture, look straight ahead with both eyes open.

B.Place the sides of your index fingers against the skin to the right of each eye. Look to the left as you stretch the skin and connective tissues around your eyes to the right. Inhale as you look to the left, and exhale as you look back to the center.

C.Repeat with your index fingers to the left of each eye, looking to the right as you stretch the skin to the right.

D.Now stretch the skin downward with your fingers while looking upward.

E.Now stretch the skin below your eyebrows upward with the sides of your index fingers.

F.Repeat the sequence six times, taking a longer, deeper breath each time. Sustain each stretch through one or more breath cycles, working your way up to six breath cycles in each of the four stretch directions.

Can you feel the release of tension around your eyes? Which eye has more stress stored in the surrounding tissues? In which direction do you get more release of stress and tension? What happens if you sustain a stretch in each direction while breathing in and out? Can you visualize the oxygen from each breath circulating into the area you are stretching?

Ask yourself these questions after each exercise session. What was hard, easy or different than before, and what did you learn about your eyes?

Spinal Adjustment

In our practice, we have found that patients with vision problems greatly improve when spinal adjustment is added to the therapy. Whether it be chiropractic, osteopathy, cranial-sacral or spinal manipulation, the therapy ensures that

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the spinal cord is free from muscular contraction, tension and mechanical nerve pressure, perhaps from a dislocated vertebrae. Any of these problems can interfere with tissue nourishment and adequate nerve flow which the eyes need to function and especially to heal.

It is especially important to pay attention to the upper cervical and mid-thoracic vertebrae, which supply the eyes with the nerve flow needed for vision and eye function. We have found that adding spinal readjustment therapy often helps enhance the healing process.

Emotional Health

Most holistic physicians these days believe in an emotional basis for illness. Emotions can cause the release of chemicals in our brains that have receptors throughout our bodies. These emotion-causing chemicals latch onto organs and tissues throughout our bodies and can affect them in myriad ways.

How are emotions related to the eyes? Research into why we cry is beginning to suggest that crying isn't just an emotional release, but that it also promotes physical health. One series of studies has focused on the biochemical composition of tears. At the Dry Eye and Tear Research Center at the St. Paul-Ramsey Medical Center in Minnesota, researcher William Frey showed subjects a "tearjerker" movie and collected their tears in a small test tube. A few days later, the same subjects returned and were again prompted to cry, this time by being exposed to the aroma of a cut onion. Frey discovered that the emotional tears contained more protein than the tears released as a result of the onion. He also discovered that both kinds contained chemicals released by the body under stress, specifically adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) released by the pituitary gland, and leucine enkephalin, a morphine-like stress compound that is believed to help mediate pain.

Another stress chemical in tears called prolactin may help explain why women cry four times more easily than men. Prolactin is a hormone that helps stimulate the production of milk. Might women cry more often because they have naturally higher levels of this hormone?

This research suggests that one reason we cry might be to decrease the level of stress chemicals that can eventually affect our health. According to this theory,

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the willingness to cry when under emotional pressure may help prevent stress-related disease. See chapters on specific eye conditions for more information on how emotions affect eye health.

Eye disease, like heart disease or arthritis, can also benefit from nontraditional treatments. In the following chapters, we will outline a program of treatment for individual eye diseases that will include all of the holistic modalities we've discussed so far: nutrition, Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupressure, herbs, physical exercise, eye exercises, spinal adjustments and homeopathy. As you will see, expensive drugs and invasive treatments aren't the only way to treat your vision problems.