Eye Patching Helps Stop Negative Thinking
And Mind Chatter

Your Patched Eye Can Stop Useless Mind Chatter

Eye Patching isn't new, but it's new to me and very useful in stopping negative thinking and all the useless mind chatter that goes on when you're trying to meditate or use your affirmations. This is a priceless tool that may be able to help you with a mulitude of problems.

The patched eye will be your right eye, but you need to read the article below to get the full understanding of how this works. It's a long article, but well worth the time. I've tried this and it works wonders for calming the mind into a really restful state.





Eye Patching to Stop Negative Thinking
By Anita Briggs

Eye patching is a very simple energy intervention to stop negative thinking or obsessive thinking and mind chatter. Most negative thinking, which can have devastating results in a person's life, is the result of habitual left-brain (L-mode) thinking that sees reality through distortions of the past. Yet influencing brain activity, temporarily shutting down L-mode and training the mind towards whole- brain thinking, is quite easily achieved.

Our thinking process arises as a synergy and integration of activity in
the left and right hemispheres of the brain

By contrast, the right hemisphere holds the intuitive, non-rational, non-verbal, present-moment, analogical, metaphoric, spatial, relative thinking that makes the leaps of insight, connects things, sees and encompasses the whole, synthesizes, holds the divergent and can transcend ordinary consciousness.

An interesting view is the left brain as the ego/materialistic 'divide-and-conquer' mind that enables us to dwell in the physical world, and the right brain as the higher/spiritual mind that keeps us connected to a higher reality operating in our lives. Both modes of thinking are equally important to effectively live fully as a human being.

This view agrees with the understanding of the Yin/Yang Stepping Vessels (extraordinary meridians) as corresponding to the Ego principle in human development (these vessels are extraordinary meridians, the deeper energy pathways that correspond to the psyche, that end at the eyes). In healthy whole-brain thinking, a person is able to reconcile both the world of matter and the world of spirit.

Most people today have been subjected to education that greatly favors left-brain or L-mode thinking from very early on in life. L-mode thought processes are primarily habit-based. Ninety percent of what you thought yesterday, you will think today-and the content is largely the result of thought patterns established in childhood.

These childhood thought patterns tend to focus on
what's wrong or potentially threatening...

Not only does negative thinking make you feel terrible, but your internal mental and emotional state sets up an energy vibration in your body, which acts as your broadcast frequency, your call letters to the universe, and inasmuch, it determines what becomes manifested in your reality. Habitual negative thinking serves no good whatsoever.

If you continue to see life as you've always seen it, you will continue to get from life what you've always been getting. Until you change your basic thought processes, life will not change for you. Therefore it is of critical importance to inhibit this destructive, habitual negative thinking.

Putting an eye patch on the right eye at any point during the negative thoughts instantly slows down left-brain activity, making it impossible for the brain to keep the thoughts going and thus releasing the mind from its obsession. People with obsessive negative thinking, particularly those suffering from depression, chronic anxiety, compulsions/obsessions, or excessive mind chatter-benefit particularly from eye patch therapy to help stop negative habits of the mind.

With one eye patched, one brain hemisphere lessens its activities (the one crossed to the patched eye), while the other must compensate by intensifying its activities (the one crossed to the uncovered eye). This imbalance creates a state wherein the person has two completely different concepts of the perceptual world. One concept is that being directly fed from the uncovered eye to the brain.

The other concept is that being shared from the brain hemisphere with the intensified activity to the other brain hemisphere. With the covered eye opened beneath the patch, its associated brain hemisphere is still seeking outside input-this it now gets primarily from the other brain hemisphere.

This latter condition strengthens the communication bridge between brain hemispheres (the corpus callosum), which eventually leads to whole brain thinking. In whole-brain thinking, the mind has quicker access to greater resources (both hemispheres). The overall effect is a reduction in perceptual distortions, the ability to see the essential from the inessential, and a higher emotional threshold.

The effects of regular eye patching can be very significant and far-reaching. Eye patching can provide the brain with a new perspective on life-it can change your mind about a situation on the spot, and over time, it can re-frame your past, improve your health and relationships, enhance the resourcefulness of your thinking, increase your emotional threshold, and reprogram your subconscious mind to focus on what you want in life.

It is interesting to note that the corpus callosum was considered the site of the soul in the 18th century (Maurice Ptito). If we consider that our ego-sense (sense of individuality or I AM), which is unique to human beings, arises out of the union or the merging of the two pictures that are possible by our symmetry, the corpus callosum takes on a more critical role in our evolution. It is my sensing that a larger corpus callosum (or greater communication or merging of the two hemispheres) will enable a person to enter more deeply into the human experience, bringing greater spiritual capacities and insights to all senses and eventually merging heaven and earth within the experience of human individuality.

Important Notes:

• Spacey, disoriented feeling

• Nausea, headache

• Clarity or clouding of thought - usually clouding before clarity

• Lessening of mental clutter after a period of increased mental chatter

• Lessening of overall stress after a period of increased stress

Work your way to patching each eye for 20 minutes, twice daily. You can continue many daily activities while eye patching (including reading).You may also anchor the sense of L-mode or R-mode activity in order to access these more easily as needed. (See Anchoring L-Mode and R-Mode States, below.)

1. Place the eye patch over one eye (either eye will do).

2. Experience the patch for 5 to 20 minutes or until you feel uncomfortable, whichever comes first.

3. Place the patch over the other eye for 5 to 20 minutes or until you feel uncomfortable, whichever comes first.

4. Practice daily until you are comfortable wearing the patch on each eye for about 20 minutes.

5. If you feel distressed, take the patch off and take some deep breaths, making sure to relax the tongue. The distress may be the result of something that is up for deeper healing that may need to be addressed in therapy.

Eye Patching to release negativity

• Place the patch over the eye that is associated with the left brain (usually the right eye).

• Keep the patch on until you feel calmer and less distressed or irritated (usually from 5 to 15 minutes). Notice any difference in your perception of the situation or circumstance.

• Follow with some slow deep breaths, making sure to relax the tongue.

Obsessions
Chronic Intrusive Thoughts
Chronic Pain
Excessive Mind Chatter

Compulsions
Chronic Anxieties
Conflicts
Chronic Depression
Fixations
Chronic Frustrations
Chronic Anger, Rage
Chronic Substance Abuse

Chronic Fatigue
Chronic Grief and Sadness
Chronic Fears (phobias)
Chronic Over/Under Weight

Anchoring L-Mode and R-Mode States

Similarly, a firm pinch to the left shoulder will encourage a larger right-brain contribution to the activity at hand, and vice versa. But the effect of ordinary body stimulus on hemispheric activity is generally subtle. One way to enhance this effect, however, is to anchor the L-mode and R-mode sensations achieved with eye patching. Anchoring is an NLP term, which refers to the setting of body triggers to elicit specific internal states.

You can easily create body anchors to elicit the desired brain mode (L-mode or R-mode) while doing the daily eye patching exercise

Then when you want to create the sensation of right brain hemispheric activity without the eye patch, you can use your anchor of standing on your left leg. You would create an anchor to enhance L-mode similarly, by standing on your right leg for 30 seconds before taking the patch off your left eye (patching the left eye lessens R-mode activity and so enhances L-mode, and L-mode is crossed to the right side of the body).

1- Eye patching therapy was originally devised by Dr. Kaplan (Seeing Beyond 20/20; Beyond Words Publishing, 1987) as a way to improve eyesight through eye exercising. It was later discovered that the exercise had a calming effect on people and changed their perspective. Dr. Ranae Johnson, founder of the Rapid Eye Institute, recognized this benefit as due to the different modes of brain activity being activated, and adopted the technique as a 'life skill' for clients of Rapid Eye Therapy. Eye patches may be purchased from the REI site at http://www.rapideyetechnology.com.

2 - Eyes are crossed to the brain hemispheres. The right eye inputs to the left hemisphere and the left eye inputs to the right hemisphere. For most people, the left brain (accessed through the right eye) is the detailed, verbal, repetitive hemisphere. But some people are switched. A simple exercise to see which brain hemisphere runs in L-mode is to patch each eye and describe a room in your home. Which eye open leaves you feeling more irritable? That is the eye that should be patched to stop the destructive mind chatter.

3 - Handout by Joseph Bennette | 265 37th Ave Salem, OR | (503)-375-0146. Available in pdf format from his website ( new website address not known ) (retrieved in 2005)

4 - Rudolf Steiner speaks of this in many lecture series. The lower the life form, the less the symmetry, and the less the symmetry can converge. For example, reptiles have eyes that diverge; mammals do not merge their symmetry in the limbs (will faculty). It is in the convergence that the higher ego sense of the human being arises.

5 - For suggested activities during eye patching, visit Joseph Bennette's website under therapies. One interesting use is to learn speed-reading. The more you involve R-mode in reading, the less bound you are to internal verbalizing while you read, which creates an artificial speed barrier.

6 - If it is not appropriate to patch (eg. in public or you don't want the other person to know what you're doing) then you would activate the right-side body anchor to enhance R-mode (or slow down L-mode). An alternative that may be available to you if you've practiced daily eye patching is to patch by intention, simply by imagining that you are covering your right eye. This is possible only if you've been doing regular patching, however.

7 - www.cybersayer.com/eyesite/hemsphr.html (retrieved in 2005)