Dear Subscribers,

For many years I have referred obliquely to my friend, but I rarely mention her by name. She is the harp professor at Texas Tech and is also a gifted composer and international performer. However, some of her students have one or another health challenge so she is also an assiduous researcher of solutions. Credit for this post goes to Gail's tenacity in getting to the bottom of what ails, in this instance, it is dyslexia.

There is a lot to this story. For instance, after taking some seminars, Gail told me some time back, that students could read better if she printed the sheet music on blue paper instead of white paper. However, her latest find is extraordinary.

It turns out that there is relief for something called "sensory processing deficit." There are two stages to the testing. First, the therapist uses overlays to see if reading improves with colored film. Next, she uses tinted lenses, many different shades. When the correct color is found, even people who are severely dyslexic see perfectly right away. Gail wanted me to have my own eyes checked so I called to find out more. The people who might benefit are those whose eyes are tired after 10 minutes of reading, people who are dyslexic, those with migraine headaches, or, she says, people like me whose eyes are painfully light sensitive. Like most people who are experts in their fields, her powers of observation seem to be phenomenal. Not only was she describing squinting but blinking because of fluorescent lights, proximity to a window, or heavy use of sunglasses. She has done her homework and this appears to be a true godsend.

On a more academic note, I might add that in Ayurveda, vision is related to the element fire because eyes perceive light and everything we see is somehow an interpretation of what light does and does not reveal through our senses.

The fire element, agni in this case, resides in the solar plexus chakra and gastrointestinal area of the body: stomach, liver, gall bladder, and even to some extent the pancreas and small intestines. I have written in past about how detoxification of the liver will generally resolve issues like floaters, but for some odd reason, I had failed to connect a few dots. Maybe I am dyslexic and didn't know it? Seriously, we all know about people with night blindness or color blindness, but for some reason, it just never occurred to me that dyslexia was related to the ability to see color correctly. Hats off to some great researchers!

Going deeper with the concept of fire, most of us torment our fire. Society has a dim view of it so we tend to stuff it where it is less annoying to others. I work hard to keep mine focused, viable, and exemplary. It is why I am often dismayed when others use their fires in ways that are distasteful to me. In any event, fire and water are antagonists so one way to measure the balance between these adversaries is to look at myopia as the extreme water end of the spectrum and clairvoyance as the extreme fire end. Most people are somewhere in the middle, sometimes with nearsightedness in one eye and farsightedness in the other. Relatively few people have 20/20 vision without corrective lens and this alone speaks volumes to the toxicity of our civilization. I wonder, for example, how many eagles are myopic?

Vision is a very complicated subject but since we tend to formulate so many of our concepts of reality around what we see, it pays to see correctly. What brought tears to my eyes was realizing how many people have to work ten times harder just to read one page and that this is not a reflection at all on their academic potential but merely their ability to perceive color in what we presume to be a normal way.

According to the information passed along to me, there are two places in the U.S. using the method Gail reported to me, one in Lubbock, Texas, and the other in Ardmore, Oklahoma. If you want further information, please drop me a note.

Blessings,

Ingrid

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2010

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