Spinalroots

Two years ago I started to struggle a little with focusing on reading close up. I had never considered that one day I might have to wear glasses and so this came as quite a shock. Then last year I wasn’t well at all, ending up in hospital for a month, and the quality of my eyes plummeted. On leaving hospital my eyesight improved somewhat, but when picking up a book I still struggled for a couple of pages before my focus adjusted. By the end of last year I really thought I was going to have to bite the bullet and use glasses for reading. Not only did the thought of having to use glasses seem annoying, I actually questioned whether this decline in eyesight is something we should accept as inevitable. I wasn’t going to give up without a fight.

I have come to learn, over the years of ABR Therapy work, that a spinal injury has a dramatic affect on the quality of the head. The spinal cord is the very core of your body. If you imagine a cross section of the body like the rings of a tree then your spinal cord is at the centre of those rings. With an injury to the spine the tension is flushed out of the spinal cord and this extends right up into the head; the spinal cord descending from the brain. Particularly noticeable is the caving in of the occipital region at the back of the head together with a weakness between the temples, but also a general depreciation in quality. For a number of years now I’ve been working on my head to reverse this decline, with dramatic effect at times. Bringing a body back to life from a depleted and even, to some extent, dormant condition does not come without its trials. My head has gone through numerous phases of expansion and consolidation, far too numerous to count, and with the expansion phases have come headaches. The fact that the head expands may sound alarming, but these expansions would not been seen with the eye and could not even be detected by a tape measure around the head. Only touch is sensitive enough to perceive these changes. If you are turning the pages of a book and inadvertently turn two together then your sense of touch will pick this up when to the naked eye there would be no discernible difference in thickness. What is more, only the sense of touch is truly three dimensional. The development of my head has taken years and at its most dramatic was going through expansion and consolidation phases on a daily basis.

I’m pleased to say that the expansion headaches seem to be long in the past and my head has developed a much improved form. Not only has my face filled out, it is visibly broader between the temples. The temples used to be like caves you could push your finger into, but have filled in nicely. There is still work to do and refinements to make, but my head is once again a strong foundation for the body. At the beginning of this year I was re-addressing my work on the head and developing new approaches, with a tapping stick, on the occipital region and on the sides of the skull. For some time now I have been aware of the correlation between the occipital part of the head, at the posterior base of the skull, and the eyes, and with the new approach to working on that region I experienced a substantial improvement in eyesight. All of a sudden I could pick up a book and focus on the print without my eyes taking time to adjust!

This begs the question as to why our eyesight tends to decline, bearing in mind that very few of us experience a spinal injury. I would suggest that there are two factors involved, both ageing and the quality of our bodies. Ageing is the inevitable process we all live with, but the quality of our bodies, at any given time, is dependent upon how well we live. None of us live perfect lives and all of us experience some decline in a certain aspect or aspects of our bodies. It would take enormous self awareness and dedication to bio-mechanical health to go through life maintaining 100% quality. When it comes to the ageing process, as we live we constantly input into our bodily system which leads our bodies to become more and more structured and more mineralised. This results in a hardening of the structure. When we are babies our bones are flexible and as we age they become harder eventually becoming so mineralised, in old age, that they can become brittle. So it makes sense that our eyes too can harden making it more difficult to adjust the focus. With a lapse in quality we have a different scenario. It is not uncommon for people to experience decline in the head / neck junction. This, coupled with weakness at C7 (neck / back junction), leads the position of the head to be shifted forward of the mid line of the body. If you observe enough people from the side view you will see this is typical. The lapse in quality of the occipital region at the back of the head, in connection with the head / neck junction weakness, has to be compensated for, in a structural sense, by the eyeballs. This structural overload of the eyeballs leaves them less able to do their job of focusing for vision, so improving the quality of the occipital region of my head has had a great effect on improving my vision.

For now I remain happily living and reading without glasses, but for how long I do not know. I am constantly working to improve the quality of my body, that has become my lot in life, and whether I can maintain my eyesight, or whether the inevitable process of ageing will rob me of that ability, only time will tell. Luckily, whether dealing with ageing or decline in quality, our technological age provides us with glasses to compensate.