A Tale of Two Eyes
One thing that I have always tried to teach fellow archers is that a person should always shoot with the dominant eye, not the dominant hand. More often than not this is the same side. Right handed people tend to be right-eyed left handed people tend to be left eyed. When this is not the case most archers default to shooting their hand, which can lead several problems. However, that is not what I wish to discuss in this article.
When I was born, I was graced with the interesting feature of not having a dominate side, period. Early in life this wasn’t much of an issue, I was just naturally guided towards using my right hand and right foot. At times I experimented doing things left handed, such as eating (which I was quickly reprimanded by my mother because I would collide with others at the table), writing (what a terrible idea, I really feel for left handers having to write from left to right), brushing my teeth (I still do this), golfing (I was actually a better golfer left-handed, but finding equipment was hard, though I still do putt left-handed), etc. After learning the lesson that left-handed sports equipment is much harder to come by, I have stuck with right-handed equipment.
Everything was fine and dandy, until I realized as a young budding archer and shotgunner that having no dominant eye was a severe disadvantage. When hunting flocking birds, I found out quickly that because I had to close one eye to aim and shoot accurately, it was harder to pick up on a second bird to shoot. I compensated for this by learning to keep both eyes open until the last moment and re-opening the eye the second the shot was fired. Otherwise my sight picture would be confusing and full of double images. Archery was much the same, I have been closing my left eye for years in order to see a clear picture of the sight and target.
I tried everything that I could think of; everything that was written on paper and on the internet to attempt to train dominance in one eye, all to no avail. I’ve tried patches, one-lensed sunglasses, staring through pipes, a strip of scotch tape across the eye and everything in between with no success…until last week.
Many years ago I attended a hypnotist show at the university I was attending. The show was intriguing and I ended up learning more about hypnotism and in particular, self-hypnotism. My grandfather was a doctor and he had often used hypnotism to help with weight loss, stopping smoking and drug-free childbirth. Through his advice and reading several books, I became adept at self-hypnotism which helped to greatly lessen the effects of allergies, sleep better at night, study more effectively, and several ‘fun’ issues such as learning to lucid dream.
For some reason I had never thought to use this skill with my eye dominance problem. I had used hypnotism to teach myself to better focus on the “X” and to relax during the shot, but had not gone beyond that in archery. Suddenly it dawned on me that it might be possible to block out part of the vision in my left eye using similar techniques. I dedicated myself to nightly sessions of training my left eye to fade out and not to fight with my right eye. Last week all the hard work paid off and I shot an entire NFAA round with both eyes open! It was a small victory as it was shot indoors while using a scope; the next big step will be shooting outdoors in full sun with a multi-pin sight. All the same, I’m ecstatic with the success so far and look forward to future progress.
For those that have struggled with similar eye dominance issues, there is hope if you are willing to put in the effort!
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