I will try to answer the question of whether eyesight can respond to EFT in this review of the e-book, “Improve Your Eyesight with EFT,” by Carol Look, LCSW, and EFT Master.
In her 134 page e-book, “Improve Your Eyesight with EFT”, Carol Look has accomplished something unusual. She has provided us with an eight-week self-help program designed to improve eyesight using EFT. This book is an interactive experience; you must work with it to make it work. If you put just a little bit of effort into it, however, the book may well be able to improve your eyesight markedly, perhaps even dramatically.
Before considering the details of the e-book, you may be wondering – Why should EFT work to improve eyesight?
The answer seems apparent to me as a clinical psychologist and researcher long aware of mind-body interactions. I have been curious for some time about the effects of applying EFT to eyesight problems, and feel compelled to ask you the following questions:
Question 1: Do you see your eyesight as influenced by your response to your environment, either physical or emotional, or do you see it as a more or less unchangeable physical condition (i.e. as either black or white ––you either have good vision or you don’t; you either need some sort of lenses or you don’t )?
Question 2: What do you expect from your vision as you get older?
Question 3: How do you see nature’s healing processes as applied to the state of your vision, now or in the future? Are you only hoping to neutralize your eyesight problems in one way or another but never really cure them?
In a book written many years ago, the then Director of the General Electric Company’s Lighting Research Laboratory, Dr. Matthew Luckiesh, asked his readers to imagine what would happen if “crippled” eyes “could be transformed into crippled legs. His comments were: “If this (transformation) happened, what a heartrending parade we would witness on a busy street! Nearly every other person would go limping by. Many would be on crutches and some in wheelchairs.” He was at that time referring to the widespread use of eyeglasses (now we would add to this the even more widespread use of contact lenses) on a PERMANENT basis, as usually being the sole treatment for eyesight problems. Many years later, that is still, regrettably, the case.
If it is legs that are crippled, however, doctors typically refuse to let their patients rely just on crutches. They regard the use of crutches as a necessary temporary strategy, and while paying attention to external conditions, they do their best to improve the internal conditions of the defective limbs, so that nature is allowed to do its work of healing.
If respect for the power of natural healing is applied to crippled legs, why is a similar respect for the recuperative powers of the human body not applied to defective eyesight? This question is not generally asked by the medical establishment which, until now, has simply taken it for granted that defective eyesight is incurable and inevitable with age, and this is inspire of the eye’s demonstrably close relationship with the mind and the emotions. It is not generally assumed that eyesight can return to normalcy through improvement within the mind-body sphere, and you yourself may unwittingly have adopted this point of view, as do most people.
Carol Look therefore presents a radically new approach to defective vision and for this reason using her method requires somewhat of a leap of faith. To change one’s eyesight by behavioral means (i.e. EFT in this case) seems impossible in terms of what we have been told countless times. Yet the fact is that psychological experiments have determined that the act of seeing involves consciousness and that in fact our perception and our emotions are intrinsically linked.
Consider for example the statement, “He/she made me so mad I couldn’t see straight!” This refers to the effects of anger on the focusing and flexibility of the eyes. In fact, studies have shown that anger can actually redden the eyes and swell the minor blood vessels. Rage can also cause the vision to blur and “warp” so that the person actually “can’t see straight” when they are too angry.
In the e-book, you will be introduced to exercises involving many different emotions, including that of anger, and you may be startled when you discover the usefulness of EFT for the latter and the beneficial impact of the book’s anger exercise on your eyesight. Traditional acupuncture probably offers the best explanation for this. In oriental medicine the eye is associated with the Liver/Gallbladder meridian, and the emotion associated with that meridian is, you guessed it, Anger. It is really more a form of deeply held anger, of resentment/rage.
When Carol compiled the statistics for her 8-week study, she found that those people who had stayed with the program (not all had stuck with it by any means, anymore than everyone sticks with anything) nearly 75% reported an improvement in their eyesight that varied from slight to dramatic. She documented a number of emotions that affect eyesight. Sadness, fear, discouragement and similar negative emotions can affect the eyes almost instantly. We know that tension is intensified in the eyes within a split-second if you experience any form of emotional distress and is manifested as tight lids and tight muscles. Tense facial muscles often create a furrow between the eyebrows in an effort to relieve inner discomfort adding a further difficulty, and tense eye muscles then create congestion, which leads to restricted circulation in the region of the eyes and greatly lessened oxygen supply to the eyes, etc.
On the other side of the equation however, you may have noticed how your eyes shine when you are happy or inspired. The eyes of a little child sparkle when an unexpected treat or gift is given and this kind of sparkle should be the natural healthy state of your eyes.
But whether caused by hidden inner tensions or an outer challenge, tension in the eyes dulls the vision and can be the beginning of organic as well as functional problems. Here we have the relationship between our eyesight and the emotions and the reason why a method such as EFT, which has a capacity to deeply influence our emotions and change our entire adjustment to life, can be of immense help in reversing tension- caused defects in eyesight. By using EFT to target emotions that may cause you to withdraw from contact with others or with life around you, EFT can actually reverse the tendency of your eyes to withdraw from contact with the world around you ––a primary cause of defective vision that has been addressed in the mind-body field but generally neglected by mainstream medicine.
A particular strength of this e-book is the manner in which Carol takes us through round after round of EFT using her remarkably effective version of an approach originally created by Gary Craig, during which, for each tapping spot, a different EFT phrase is used. As an extra bonus that comes along with the e-book (I think it is a major plus) you can download a free recording of Carol reading the book out loud from cover to cover in her own voice. This is particularly valuable because you can then tap along with Carol as you do each exercise; she purposely leaves enough pauses and time for you to do this. Doing the exercises along with Carol can greatly increase the impact of the program, and her use of the strategy of using different phrases at different EFT points, which she applies here in her own unique fashion, makes this book a treasure trove of useful EFT phrases for many kinds of problems – not only those associated with eyesight.
When you work with this e-book, my advice is for you to adopt an open minded “let’s see” approach to it. If you are able to go with the flow from exercise to exercise and explore the use of EFT for the emotions and attitudes that are most likely to be causing your faulty vision, you may be greatly surprised by the improvement in your eyesight.
While doing this would seem to require blind faith, in actual fact it only requires that you do the exercises and see what happens. The requirement is that you DO THESE EXERCISES a minimum of 5 minutes a day in order to get the results you want, and this means trying your best to do them even on days when they may be a bit (or sometimes quite) uncomfortable. If you use this e-book you must not let comfort be your criteria but instead allow healing to prevail. The book’s exercises are an adventure. If you plunge in and really work your “emotional muscles” doing the exercises, the payoff can be huge.
Hear my interview with Carol Look on Voice America Health and Wellness
In summary, I highly recommend this e-book for anyone who seriously wants to use EFT to overcome any emotional block that may be affecting their eyesight. Used in the proper spirit, it can be invaluable.
