When Life Blurs Your Vision

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever.” 

- Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (2011)

Image: Cat’s Eye Nebula, NASA Chandra, Hubble

It was on a business trip to Tokyo that Jeff learned he was at risk of losing one of his eyes. For about a week now, he’d been ignoring the strange dark curtain that had come down over the field of vision in his left eye. It’s a hair or something that has got stuck in my eye, it will eventually come out, he told himself. His teammate Kentaro wasn’t so sanguine when he casually mentioned it to him over lunch “I think you need to go to the ER right now, you may have a retinal tear.”

Two hours later, Jeff would discover that Kentaro was right on the money. As if from far away, he heard the Japanese doctor explain in a polite accent that his retina had partially detached from the back of the eyeball. He needed to be operated on right away to not lose the use of that eye permanently. And as part of the recovery process, he would have to lie face down for two months post-surgery to allow the retina to adhere back to the eyeball. No flying for another four months.

Let’s rewind a few months. A chip designer for a major semiconductor manufacturer, Jeff had just won approval for a new product that his team had proposed. He should have been breaking out the champagne. However, his management had not approved the extra heads he’d requested to fill out his team, and Jeff, a self-described Type A personality, was completely bent out of shape.

As he sat stewing over his computer that evening, he developed a throbbing headache. By midnight, the pain was unbearable and he could feel his heart palpitating under his rib cage. In addition to chronically high BP, Jeff was prone to temporary but extreme spikes in blood pressure. Worried, his wife Nicole dashed him to the ER, where his blood pressure registered at an eye popping 200/140. Jeff was administered metoprolol to bring it down and sent home. He was back in the ER at 3 am, his BP off the charts again.

Science understands the relationship between stress and blood pressure pretty well. The surge of hormones produced by your body when under stress causes your blood vessels to constrict, and your heart to beat faster. Jeff was literally driving himself up the wall.

Two visits to the ER in one night weren’t sufficient to shake Jeff up and he continued to charge hard at work. We can only speculate if his detached retina was caused by these episodes. Hypertension is considered a causative factor of retinal detachment in cats, but not humans. Temporary spikes in pressure are not known to be a factor either. While Jeff’s ayurvedic doctor believes there’s a connection, it’s not acknowledged by mainstream medicine.

Forward to New Year’s Eve, 2013, just a few days before his Tokyo trip. At a party in the exclusive Seattle suburb of Mercer Island, Jeff happened to watch a short talk by Ajahn Brahm, née Peter Betts, a graduate in theoretical physics from Cambridge University turned Theravada Buddhist monk. The Theravada school places emphasis on the practice of mindfulness — of developing mental calm (samatha), insight (vipassana) into the impermanence of all objects of desire, and compassion (metta) for all living beings.

In the world of hi-tech, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, and Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, are committed proponents of vipassana meditation, actively promoting it within their organizations. It was all new to Jeff, but something in the monk’s talk resonated within him.

It was exactly a week later that Jeff found himself in a Tokyo ER with a retinal tear. After a few frantic calls to his primary care physician and an ophthalmologist friend back in the US, he was greenlit for travel. He would fly back home for the surgery and long drawn out post-operative recovery.

Lying flat on his stomach for the next few weeks, Jeff whiled away the hours devouring talks on mindfulness by Ajahn Brahm. Within weeks of resuming a normal schedule, he had enrolled in his first vipassana meditation retreat, at the Dhamma Kunja center in Onalaska, Washington, two hours south of Seattle.

Over the past seven years, Jeff has logged over 5,000 hours of mindfulness meditation, well on his way to the proverbial 10,000 hours required for mastery. His intense, hyper-competitive personality has given way to a unshakably calm and measured demeanor. As Jeff describes it, his health crises were a wake up call. With Ajahn Brahm as his muse, Jeff chose to redesign himself. “I decided not to let any situation at work get under my skin, not to sweat the small stuff”, he says, and then adds, knowing that he sounds clichéd, “it’s all small stuff.”

In that last comment of Jeff’s is perhaps the secret of how mindfulness helps reduce stress. As you sit and watch your breath and your thoughts, you are able to see your thoughts as transient phenomena playing out on the screen of your mind. Instead of being caught up in them, you see them from a little more distance. The endless internal chatter in your mind gets a little quieter. In the space that is created, you are able to more mindfully solve those problems that need solving, and let go of thoughts that don’t serve a useful purpose. Your muscles relax, your breathing becomes calmer, and your body’s “relaxation response” kicks in, activating the parasympathetic nervous system.

Jeff’s blood pressure is now back at a normal 130/80. He’s not had a spike in years. At his recent annual health check up, his PCP, perhaps not fully aware of research on the benefits of mindfulness and stress reduction, remarked “I don’t know what you are doing to keep your BP under control, but whatever it is, don’t stop doing it”.

For the record, the pioneer of scientific research on meditation, Herbert Benson, Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, extolled the benefits of mindfulness on the human body — reduced blood pressure, heart rate, anxiety and depression — as early as 1975. Dr. Gabor Maté, in his best-selling 2011 book When the Body Says No has convincingly shown the connection between stress and diseases like cancer, multiple sclerosis, arthritis and diabetes.

The uncanny timing of his stumbling upon a talk to mindfulness just a week before the events in Tokyo is not lost upon Jeff. At his moment of crisis, a set of ancient teachings from 2,500 years ago came to his rescue, helping him recover his health and recraft his relationship to both life and work. The Buddha, it would seem, had reached out across the centuries to deliver on his promise of both wisdom and compassion just when Jeff needed them most.

Post-Script: To protect confidentiality, names and some other specifics have been changed. The core details of Jeff’s experience, however, are accurate and are retold here as narrated to me by him.