Lessons I've learned through vision therapy

What have I learned through vision therapy?  I thought of this question because I was planning on, at some point, maybe writing a book or ebook on the topic, and thought it might not be a bad idea to consolidate and think about what I've learned, as in most recent days progress seems to have been going well.

• Meditation can be a powerful tool to help with vision therapy. In fact, I think meditation can be a powerful tool for learning any new skill. Because that's precisely what proper stereoscopic vision is: a skill.  Just one that is normally learned automatically during one's development. 
  
  Meditation is concentrated mind training: paying special, concerted attention to the mind in order to hone it; to sharpen it.  Reminds me about a story I had heard about a Jew in a concentration camp who was a concert pianist.  Obviously, he couldn't practice with a real piano in the concentration camp, but he practiced playing in his mind.  And here's the weird thing.  When he was set free years later, he could still play the piano just as well as he could before.
  
  A big part of success with vision therapy is practicing binocular posture, continually, and integrating it into your daily routine.  Meditation is particularly useful for this.  The mindfulness one develops with meditation is helpful with this integration as well as focus.
    
• Get a good, qualified vision therapist.  I had a vision therapist a long time ago, but she wasn't particularly helpful.  She wasn't very experienced.  And the impression that I got from interacting with others on various Internet groups is that this is a common experience and that switching to an experienced and qualified vision therapist is paramount. 
  
  One woman I know, Heather, in particular, had this experience.  She had a vision therapist, wasn't making good progress with him/her, got the impression that the vision therapist wasn't good, and then made the switch.  Once she made the switch, it was a matter of weeks or so until she achieved her goals.
  
  I don't have a vision therapist because I'm a bit jaded from my prior experience, and a little skeptical about some of the claims made by some of the vision therapists I've talked to in the recent past.  Plus, I think I may achieve my goals on my own pretty soon.
• Physical health.  Take good care of yourself.  Sleep a lot, eat well, exercise.  Effective vision training requires a lot of mental energy.  You can optimize your mental energy by optimizing health generally.
• Ketogenic diets are interesting, in my experience.  I've noticed that, generally, in my third day of doing keto, I will literally feel my body switch to using ketones instead of glucose.  It usually happens in the afternoon.  The way I would describe it is as a cool, calmness washing over me.  I notice that I find concentration, reading, and working significantly easier when in ketosis.  I also notice that performance improves quite a bit during vision therapy exercises.  It seems like mental energy and visual energy are interchangeable.  A ketogenic diet can provide one with more mental, as well as visual energy.  At least that's been my experience.  I'd be curious to know what other people have experienced.
  
  One of the things that a lot of people report when doing vision training is that it is mentally exhausting.  I would recommend that everyone, regardless of whether they're doing vision therapy, to experiment with ketogenic diets.  There's a lot of useful aspects to them, like weight management, they can help you manage appetite (you don't really experience hunger in the same way when you're keto-adapted), and of course, the cognitive/mood benefits associated with ketosis. 
  
  Keto is not everyone, and I think it's important to use caution when experimenting with it.  Particularly in my case, you want to make sure you don't stay in ketosis for too long.  I've heard that some people can stay in ketosis indefinitely, but for some reason, I can get really sick.  So when I do ketosis, I try to cycle every two to three days (cycling with carbohydrate). 
   
• Getting a grip on what you're doing can be very hard.  Gaining stereopsis and eye teaming is sort of like gaining control of an organ that you didn't even know you had.  I'm not sure why, but I find it useful to think of the visual system as a single organ.  It's the stereoscopic vision organ.  The two eyes, the muscles, the brain.  All of it is one thing, and you need to slowly develop mental representations for how to get all of the components working together as one and so that they do so automatically.
  
  So you have to develop that set of mental representations, but before you do that, you have to claim all of your equipment.  If you have strabismus/amblyopia, you probably don't have any independent control over one of your eyes.  So obviously, you have to develop control of both of your eyes independently, and then incorporate them into the larger system, build a sense of what binocular vision feels like so that it can become your default.
  
  At first, you won't have any mental representations for good binocular posture.  You have to develop it slowly from a small grain of rice into something much larger.  Then you just keep building, practicing, focusing on building the binocular muscle.  It's really a weird and trippy thing to so deliberately build your own brain in this way.  That is essentially what you're doing.