One Man's Vision Quest

"Vision - the integration of all sensory modalities a  person possesses."
Dr. Harry Sirota

I had first heard about Dr. Sirota over twenty-five years earlier when a friend raved how her son's new glasses had helped him become a better student and less antisocial.

Personality change? Curious I'd kept the eye doctor in the back of my mind. My new glasses hadn't felt right since I'd gotten them over a year ago from another optometrist. I decided to try a different approach and called Dr. Harry Sirota, who asked what was wrong. I tried to explain I couldn't see as far, and sometimes I felt like a shade had come down over my eyes. He said, "very interesting."

His sessions are long so I set aside an entire morning for our appointment. For the first two hours, Dr. Sirota asked me to walk back and forth in his office while he  asked me questions.

"Why all the questions? Why all the walking?" I asked.

"I want to know everything about you so I will have the understanding I need to help you. When I first began my career, I started out as a traditional optometrist, but took a different approach when people weren't satisfied with their glasses. It worried me but it wasn't until a business woman threw her glasses down and said, "These are the worst glasses I've ever gotten." I got so upset I cried. I asked God; if you want me to do this work, show me the way.

"A few days later, a thirty-eight-year-old man asked me to examine his eyes. Everything went as usual, until my phone rang. I was still focusing my spot retina scope instrument on him, and from an eccentric point of view, the light revealed an irregularity on the side of his eye. Excited I hung up the phone and began examining his eyes differently. I saw his sight was fine, but not his vision. When the sight isn't grounded properly, the person has a visual distortion and doesn't feel centered.

"I reduced the man's prescription. When he tried on the glasses he said,  "I can't see, but I feel good." Six months later he reported that his life had changed since he'd been wearing the new glasses. He felt the glasses had made him happier and more flexible.

"A woman who had been going to a psychologist for twenty-three years was able to stop after she got her glasses from me. I began to keep records of my mistakes and my positive results. If I didn't do the right thing, it would affect the way people see.

"My dysfunctional birth family taught me that everything; anger, fear, frustration all play into how people see. I want to help people 'see' binocularly, two eyes working simultaneously, which helps the person to evaluate from two points of view."

I'd been in Dr. Sirota's office three-and-a-half hours before he put the frame on my nose to try different lenses. He asked me to close my eyes and tell him how I felt.

Mystified I responded with, "Cool, nice, uncomfortable." He wasn't asking how much better I could see, only how I felt. After trying five or ten lenses, he asked me to read the eye chart. When I opened my eyes, everything looked clearer and sharper and I felt calmer. He said, "very interesting." He said that a lot but never explained why.

I left his office happy and thought about all the things he'd asked me to look at in my life; my successes, my fears, my thoughts, my parents. Now I was on a vision quest.

Dr. Harry Sirota can be reached by calling 773.561.8918.