ABOUT ME
It is my mission to show you how you can teach yourself to change your perspective on challenges and problems. How you can train yourself to focus your attention on what you want in life, rather than what you don’t want.
Due to a genetic eye disease, I am slowly losing my sight, but despite the fact that I may have a future in the dark, I have decided to look at it brightly and be grateful for every day of my life.
It is my conscious choice!
I can choose to walk on Hopelessness Street or on Possibility Road. I have decided to walk on Possibility Road, and you are most welcome on the journey. Your first steps start here on this website.
I am a meditation teacher, mindfulness instructor, Keynote Speaker, TEDx Speaker, communicator and storyteller, and my ambition is always to captivate, influence and motivate you to take back control and become the master of your own life. I have been able to do that, and so can you! We can all do that!
My background
For more than 20 years, I have worked as a visual creative in the advertising industry, and developed and presented countless advertising campaigns for major brands in Denmark and abroad. I have spent the last decade as senior art director in the LEGO group, where I have had a leading specialist role.
Today, I am legally blind, have stopped at the LEGO Group and hold presentations, lectures and workshops for companies about how, among other things, mindfulness behavior, meditation and knowledge about mind and body can be a starting point for creating the future you want.
WELCOME to my website!
Here you will find guided meditations, blog posts, podcasts, my book Sentenced to Blindness – Now What?, YouTube films, Services, trailers and inspiration to take your steps towards Possibility Road. If you want help on the journey, you are hereby invited to contact me.
I look forward to hearing from you and helping you, your workplace, organization or company to become a master in your own life.
Best regards
Morten Bonde
Retinitis pigmentosa
Retinitis Pigmentosa is a hereditary eye disease that slowly degenerates the retina. The disease, most often abbreviated to “RP”, can be difficult for outsiders to understand, and therefore living with the disease can be quite lonely.
RP, which manifests in many different ways, has in common the slow degradation of the light-sensitive cells in the eye’s retina. RP affects about 50-100 people in Denmark each year and often results in severe vision loss, which over a span of years can lead to blindness. RP is estimated to occur in one out of every 3,000 Danes, and worldwide, it’s estimated that over 1 million people have RP. RP is typically discovered in childhood or the early years and is one of the most common causes of visual impairment and blindness among young people aged 20-64 years.
In Denmark, there are approximately 2,000 reported cases of RP, and the disease can manifest in many different ways, but typically involves a gradual, persistent decline of the retina, starting with night blindness and an increasing degree of field-of-view narrowing, color vision problems, contrast problems, reduced visual acuity, and in some cases, eventual blindness.
For some, like me, the loss of vision progresses very slowly, and there might be only a slight loss over about 10 years. Others have periods of rapid decline followed by years with no noticeable deterioration. Some may have been aware since childhood that they saw poorly and might have faced challenges in school, playing a specific sport, or moving around in twilight. Others may have never realized their impaired vision, only being diagnosed with RP later in life.
Some will experience a significantly narrowed field of vision but retain almost perfect central vision, as is the case with me, while others will maintain peripheral vision but have very limited or foggy central vision. The latter type will have difficulty reading but can navigate relatively well using peripheral vision.
With so many types of symptoms and variations, it’s not surprising that outsiders find RP a challenging disability to understand. One moment, someone with RP can read or see something from a distance, take in their surroundings, or respond to a smile from a passerby, and the next moment they might walk into a row of bicycles on the sidewalk, creating embarrassing situations for themselves. It can be hard for others to understand how one can seemingly see perfectly fine one moment and behave as if severely visually impaired the next.
A person in the early stages of RP might have almost perfect vision during the day, but at night or in bright sunlight or with rapidly changing lighting, the person with RP might feel almost completely blind. Just as challenging can be understanding the loss of parts of one’s field of vision.
The retina, located at the back of the eye and lining its inner surface, functions by perceiving the light we see and sends signals to the optic nerve and brain. The retina is a thin layer of visual cells that capture light and convert it to electrical signals. These are sent via a network of nerve cells to the visual center in the brain. In humans, there are two types of light-sensitive visual cells (photoreceptors) called rods and cones. Rods enable us to see in twilight or poorly lit rooms. There are approximately 120 million rod cells in a healthy eye, mainly concentrated in the outermost areas of the retina, and these cells only perceive black/white, which is why vision in the dark is always monochromatic.
Cone cells, of which we have about 7 million, are used to perceive colors and provide the sharpness of vision that allows us to read and see things clearly. There are fewer cones than rods, and they are concentrated in the central part of the retina called the “macula” or yellow spot. With RP, the photoreceptors gradually deteriorate and cease to function normally. Typically, the rods (night vision) degrade first, followed by the cones, which is why those with RP initially become night blind. I see very poorly in the dark and never venture out in the darkness without a powerful flashlight.
The decay or degeneration of the retina that occurs with RP is hereditary and is due to changes (mutations) in the genes affecting the retina’s function. After many years of research, over 160 genes are now known where mutations can cause hereditary retinal diseases. RP can be inherited in various ways, e.g., through inheritance patterns called recessive, dominant, and X-linked.
RP can occur as an isolated eye disease, but up to 30% also have involvement in other parts of the body, in the form of so-called syndromes. There are over 30 different syndromes where RP is a component, making this group even more complex and diverse.
To add to the complexity, mutations in the same gene can lead to different variants of the same retinal disease. For instance, mutations in the gene that is defective in me, the so-called Usher 2A gene, can both cause Usher syndrome with both hearing and vision loss, and RP without hearing loss. I don’t experience any hearing loss, but I’ve never been tested for it. Conversely, two people with the exact same type of retinal condition might have mutations in two entirely different genes.
