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Through hundreds of eye exercises, I have learned and continue to learn to use my eyes together after 32 years of suppressing my lazy eye.
Cook Circles is a fantastic eye exercise that I learned from a developmental optometrist, David Cook. You can purchase his book at https://www.oep.org/product/shape-sky
If you found this eye exercise intriguing and want to look into starting vision therapy, head over to https://strabismussolutions.com/findvt/
Fill out the form and I will send you information about offices close to you that can help, no strings attached!
Great things will come, you'll see!
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Hi my name is Melissa Daniels and I have strabismus strabismus is when your eyes
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don't point in the same direction like this and I have been working really hard
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for several years teaching my brain to use both eyes so that they can be
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straight and most of this work has been done through vision therapy I did also
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have an eye surgery which definitely made a difference but vision therapy is
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where I did all the eye exercises that really taught my brain to use both eyes
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at the same time and I want to share one of my favorite exercises with you I call
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it the cook circle and it comes from an optometrist named David cook who is
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phenomenal he has an amazing book I highly recommend called the shape of the
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sky I'll put the link in the description and he understands your business so well
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and has some really great ideas that could help you so I want to share this
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exercise with you and I want to be clear I do not think trying to do vision
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therapy on your own is a good idea I tried for like six months I started
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getting weird double vision I really didn't make a lot of progress and I just
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kind of was a mess and then I started working with an optometrist and they he
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knew the order to do things and way more exercises and the building the
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foundation correctly so a hundred percent work with an optometrist I'm sharing this because I think it interesting and as people are wondering if maybe vision therapy might be a good idea it kind of fun to see some of the different exercises that we do in vision therapy So you can really get a feel for what it is you would be doing
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So this is just a very simple eye exercise that you can totally try at home on your own
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I actually learned it from David Cook himself in a lecture that he was giving
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So all you need is a piece of paper with a circle on it
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About that big. It's probably an inch and a half in diameter
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you can just as it can be as simple as taking a marker and drawing a circle on a little piece of
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paper and what you're trying to do in this exercise is you're trying to get both eyes
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working at the same time so you're kind of it's a little bit of fusion right you're getting
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what each eye has seen to kind of overlap into one image but you don't have to have your eyes
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perfectly aligned for this and so this is why it's so great is this is one of the first ways
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that I was actually able to get both eyes on at the same time in the same place because it it's a
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little bit easier than some of the other stereograms and like things like the brock string
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where you have to have more perfect alignment so take your paper and what you're going to do is
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you're going to actually hold it in front of your eye like this so sorry not that close like this
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close and you're going to be looking with one eye at the circle and that's kind of all that that eye
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is going to see and the other eye is going to be looking straight forward and so what's going to
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happen is each eye has a totally different view one eye is seeing a circle one eye is seeing the
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room you in and this is much easier if you find like a target that you can be looking at the first time I ever did this it was with a pumpkin I had a pumpkin sitting on my counter and that what I was looking at through this eye I was looking at a pumpkin and then the circle with my left eye so find something
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that you can actually look at a target to point your eye towards it'll look like
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there's that black circle is actually around so right now I'm looking at my camera and when I hold this over the top I see the camera with a black circle
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around it so you kind of get those images to fuse so you've got a black
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circle around a pumpkin or a black circle around the magnet on the refrigerator so those images
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start to overlap and you can trombone this out and in to see if you can make it harder and more
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difficult um if sorry easier or harder you can also switch eyes for me it's easier if i put the
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circle over my strong eye and then I look straight forward with my lazy eye or my amblyopic eye the
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eye that struggles the straggler that's not always straight so I usually will put the circle over my
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strong eye and that makes it a little bit easier but as I want to challenge myself I'll switch to
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the other side and a tip that you can do to make it a little easier if you're not getting it first
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give it time, right? It's not going to happen automatically. It's not going to just, I don't
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put it right up and just automatically see like circle, object, done. Even like people with really
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great vision that don't have any vision issues, it still takes a minute, right? It might take
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30 seconds or a minute. So give it some time. Don't rush it. Just deep breaths, kind of explore it
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Allow what you seeing If you seeing some double or switching from eye to eye just kind of relax And then you can also shake this And if you shake it that definitely helps
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For me, if I move it over even further, that kind of helps
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And then it's like, okay, now I can move it out and keep it centered. So there's different things with shaking, with moving it in and out
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So kind of experiment, but don't move too quickly. It's all about moving slow and exploring
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So this is just a fun exercise. hopefully you're able to get a little bit of that fusion and just kind of see and feel what that's
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like um definitely if you haven't done these types of exercises before you this might make you a
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little nauseous so definitely check with your optometrist before you try these exercises and
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like i said in the beginning don't try to do it on your own just can you learn from me i promise
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it's just not gonna work and it's gonna leave you very frustrated so find an optometrist if you want
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help, I will help you find an optometrist for free. That is how much I care about you. And I
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want you to have success. And I know doing it on your own isn't going to be the way. And so I
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decided to start offering this service where you fill out a form at strabismusolutions.com
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slash findvt. And then I will email you hopefully a couple options of vision therapy offices that
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are close to you and if there's nothing close there's a couple options that will do virtual
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vision therapy like there are so many options so go to that website fill out the form i will help
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you figure that out i want you to be successful so let me know in the comments if you were able
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to get it and if not keep giving it more time we'll see you in the next video
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