Make no effort when you read with your weaker eye. Any effort that you make will slow down your progress in several ways. It will stop you from adopting the habit of looking with your weaker eye at small areas. If it is strenuous for you to look with your weaker eye, your instincts are going to try to prevent your progress. You only need to make one big effort: the effort to make no effort! This will become easier through relaxation.
You are now waving your hand to the side of your strong eye. Wave quickly. The wrist flips toward your ear, and you make sure that your hand does not move farther than your periphery can see. Your strong eye is truly looking straight at the paper, but the central vision of your strong eye is being put on hold for the moment. The periphery of the stronger eye is being fully used and, in fact, may expand. You will be paying attention to a peripheral view that many people inhibit when they look centrally.
Be sure to relax your face. Your face relaxes when your jaw drops and you have a sense that the cheek is a bit longer. Relax your neck and create a sense that the neck is lengthening a bit. In fact, you can even imagine from time to time that a string lifts your head up and that your neck is lengthening.
Keep waving your hand while reading with your weaker eye. Put the page at a distance where the print can be read with slight effort. Your job is to minimize the effort. The way to do this is to follow each letter as if you are spilling dark ink on it or painting it with a marker, as if you were writing it line by line, point by point. Observe the white of the letter and the black of the letter. When you remove the piece of paper, your two maculae will be working together without one suppressing the other.
Most farsightedness could be reduced and perhaps eliminated with this kind of exercise.
Cheap Sunglasses
Buy yourself some cheap sunglasses and remove the lens from the side of your weak eye. Then cover the other lens with an opaque tape such as dark duct tape. Put the glasses on and look into the distance with your weaker eye.
After you have looked into the distance for a while, take a rubber ball or a tennis ball and play with that ball at a distance. (Have three balls available when you do any exercises requiring a ball so that you will have another on hand when one gets away from you.) For example, you can look at a wall twenty feet away; then take the ball and throw it at the wall ten times and catch it. The ball may not return straight to your hands, but don’t lose your patience; just keep playing with it. This exercise helps to develop the lens and also helps with central vision.
Figure 2.18. The glasses block the central vision of your strong eye while encouraging the peripheral vision to expand.
Figure 2.19. (a) Take a ball and throw it so it hits the large letters. (b) Tennis ball hits eye chart.
After doing this for a while, attach an eye chart to a wall. It is best to have two eye charts available: a ten-foot chart and a twenty-foot chart. The twenty-foot chart is especially good for those people whose vision is poor. The ten-foot chart is for those whose eyes are stronger.
Stand five to ten feet away from the charts to look at the first two or three lines. Stand between ten and twenty feet away to see the top six lines; you should not be able to see the bottom four lines too well. Then take a ball and throw it so it hits the large letters of the twenty-foot chart and one of the large letters of the ten-foot chart. Throw the ball and catch it. Do this fifteen times in a row. You may find that you can see an extra line on the eye chart, maybe even two additional lines. Take your glasses off and use both eyes. With both eyes, you most likely will see one to three lines better, and there will be a very nice feeling of clarity of vision through deep relaxation. You allowed the strong eye to rest and the lens of the weak eye to work fully. The lens became flat when the ball hit the chart and round when the ball returned to your hand. And you let your macula work well from afar because the central vision works well when it looks at small details.
Next, you can work with the eye chart the same way in which you worked with the page in front of you. Put the piece of paper on the bridge of your nose to block the central vision of your strong eye. Wave to the side of your strong eye while looking with your weaker eye at the print that you see clearly. For example, if it’s easy for you to see the first letter or the first line, but it becomes progressively harder for you to see the second or the third line, then look at the first line, point by point and line by line. Do this as if you were spilling black ink on each of the letters and making them sharper by following the different parts of each letter.
Wave to the side, above, and below your strong eye. Make sure that the strong eye does not see any letter on the chart. (If you close your weaker eye, the paper should block the central vision of your strong eye, and your strong eye would not be able to see the chart.) When you wave your hand to the side of your strong eye and you look with your weaker eye, you wake up the macula and strengthen it. This strengthens the nerve impulses and the muscles of the weaker eye, and it feels good!
Just as you did with the larger print, look at the smaller print while imagining that you are drawing the shapes of the letters. Many people then see the small print better. Look at the lowest line that you can see (which could be the third, fourth, or fifth line on the chart) as you wave your hand to the side. Now look three lines below and look at the spaces between the letters. If you cannot see the spaces between the letters three lines below, look two lines below; if you cannot see the space between the letters two lines below, look one line below. Always look below your comfort zone at spaces between the print, even though you cannot read the print. Close your eyes and say to yourself, “The ink is black and the page is white,” while imagining that your hand is waving on the other side. Saying this makes your brain engage with much smaller spaces from the distance that you can comfortably see the eye chart, whether its five, ten, or twenty feet, depending on your vision.
Figure 2.20. Put the piece of paper on the bridge of your nose to block the central vision of your strong eye.
You will then get engaged with that particular distance, and that engagement gets you to see well from that distance. Keep waving your hand on the side of your strong eye while looking at the print that you cannot really see. After looking from point to point in that print, look back at the line that you could see. Fully half of my workshop participants and private clients can see that line clearer, and some of them could even see an extra line, or a few letters of the extra line, clearer.
One particular optometrist, who attended a workshop of mine, told me this was “eye-opening” for him (no pun intended). And indeed it was. When you take the paper off, you experience that with both eyes you can see a couple of lines below the ones that you saw before, for the two maculae are working together without one suppressing the other. The effort of looking is then diminished, the desire to look increases, and the other exercises that you started to do will work better for you. When you look from a distance, you will make no effort to look at details. They will come and go; slowly and gradually, you will see more and more of them, as far as the horizon and as close as forty yards away.
Look at Details One More Time
As I said earlier, the motivation to look at details is so important. It is nice to see adults wanting to look at something trivial, something that isn’t necessary for life, like an animal walking, a beautiful garden, a sunset, or cloud formations. You can’t pay your bills with gorgeous skies, but when you look at them in a meaningful way, you’re engaging in something significant. When we were kids, we didn’t judge anything because we were not capable of earning a living then. We looked at everything out of curiosity—and, indeed, childhood vision is precious and great.
When we lose our curiosity, we lose much of our vision. Through inhibition and the requests of life, we learn to look at letters in order to gain content from them, and sometimes to see a page at a time, without looking at one single dot on that page. We observe other people only in order to understand what their expression means to us for a particular purpo
se or endeavor. By looking at a food shelf without paying attention to all that’s on that shelf, but just looking at the specific item that we need, we soon cut out 90 to 95 percent of the details that the world presents to us. The reason is that we know what we want way too well.
The problem is that we suppress the work of central vision and of the whole eye mechanism. The visual mechanism (the brain) does not pay attention to most details. The eye does the same thing. Many muscles get frozen: the ciliary muscles of the lens get frozen; the iris muscles of the pupils get frozen; and some of the external muscles get frozen as well, since they are not being used. Much of the retina is not working.
I will never forget a time when I saw a father and his daughter looking at some print. She was fifteen and he was in his midforties. She could see print much smaller than he could. He could see down to the fifth-print level, and she could see down to the eighth. I said to him, “At your age, you could see exactly what she sees.” After seeing hundreds of kids and how excellent their vision can be compared to the “normal” vision of adults, I could understand that childhood vision, even if it is less than normal, is much better than most adults’ vision. The father said to me, “What have I done all my life? I’ve missed out on something very important.” He had done very important things in his life: he was a surgeon, he had operated on people and saved lives, and he read books, but he did not pay attention to his own visual system; day by day, second by second, it decayed. It was clear to him and to me that if he could begin to be vigilant about his visual system and work with it, he could learn to improve his sight. Even after decreasing his visual acuity as much as he had, he was able to gain a lot of acuity that day and saw better.
In the cases of people who have lost retinal cells, renewing an interest and appreciation of details can help them gain back much of their lost vision. Your curiosity and need to look at details increases with these exercises, and you will feel more alive. You will feel that you breathe better and meditate clearer as you go along in life.
Our work, therefore, is to wake ourselves up to look at details and to revive the dormant centers in our brain. Much of the potential we possess is latent and asleep. It’s hidden from us because we adopt bad habits that we incorrectly think will work for us.
There is a continuous debate these days about vision. One side believes that simply having normal vision function is sufficient. The other side believes that paying attention to your vision function and working on it constantly is just as important as its functioning. The second group of people is still a minority, but that minority is growing. If you are reading this book and practicing the exercises, you are in the minority that believes we should always work on improving our vision. If you are in the minority, you also believe in vitalizing our vision and giving it life.
These eye exercises and those that follow can help you to see better and to feel better. Make time to do these exercises daily. The most important thing in life is to pay attention to the universe. The universe begins with you and your body. When you pay attention to your eyes, you’ll be in better contact with the whole world. You’ll also bring more circulation to your eyes, and you’ll feel better. Then you can help your own life and will find it is easier for you to help the world.
Sometimes an exercise will work perfectly fine one day, and not the same way the next day. There could be many reasons why this happens. For example, palming will work better if your shoulders are relaxed and worse if they have retained tension. Shifting will work much better if you are refreshed. Blinking (discussed in the next section) will work much better if you have a good night’s sleep and if you are relaxed at the time.
One sign that you’re doing well is if you find yourself looking at details for no special reason: observing and not ever straining to see them, but always having a sense of all the details in the object you’re looking at; you’re enjoying the object or looking at it in total neutrality. If you find yourself breathing deeper and absorbing the world with a greater joy, then all these exercises will carry themselves into your day-to-day life and become natural habits.
Step 9: Blink
In order to improve our awareness of blinking, and to receive all the benefits of blinking, we have to have individual control over each eyelid.
One great exercise is simply to open and close each lid separately. Another is to cover one eye with your palm and then concentrate on opening and closing the other eye by itself. Imagine that the eyelashes are doing all the work of opening and closing the eye.
If your eyelids feel dry or sore, you should either palm them or just close your eyes for a while. A reliable way to rest your eyes is to put a hot towel over them and relax them. This will increase the blood flow to your eyes. If you have inflammation in your eyes, putting a cold towel on them will feel nice. Through relaxation, you will discover a profound difference in your ability to blink.
As you look at details, you will find yourself gently blinking. Your eyelids should feel weightless. For a fraction of a second, the eyelids close and then open; it will happen quickly. It will massage your eyeball and trigger moist and pleasant tearing. It will also trigger the widening and contracting of the pupils as you open and close your eyelids. Blinking should be very gentle and pleasant.
When you blink and your eyes feel refreshed, looking at details becomes easy. It sounds counterintuitive to many people, as the feeling is that blinking interferes with looking. Nevertheless, the rest you receive from closing your eyes for a brief moment helps you to move from detail to detail with greater ease. In fact, without that rest, the mind would have a hard time concentrating on any one point. The rest allows you to keep functioning with greater ease. Blinking massages your eyes and brings you more vitality. The desire and willingness to look gives your whole body more life. Relax your forehead. Relax your jaw. Relax your temple. Experience the wonderful sensation of vitality in all of your face and neck and chest and upper body as you blink.
Figure 2.21. Cover the right eyelid with your fingers right underneath the eyebrows, and blink with the other eye.
If you sleep well and feel refreshed, if you exercise gently, if you feel relaxed and sense that the blood flows better in your body, you will find yourself blinking with greater ease. And if you blink with greater ease, you will find that you are relaxed and that the blood flows better throughout your whole body. Blinking influences, reflexively, the sense of relaxation and movement in the body. If the jaw drops and doesn’t crunch, then the shoulders drop and do not elevate, and the pelvis becomes loose—just from blinking gently, softly, and continuously at a rate of twenty-two to twenty-five blinks per minute. Blinking and looking at fine details is something that most children do automatically. It gives you a sense of youthful energy.
A good blinking exercise is to move your head in a rotating motion in each direction for a total of five minutes, very gently. Performing this motion in medium-sized circles while blinking will bring more blood to the head, which, in turn, will make blinking easier.
Another wonderful exercise is to put one hand underneath the other while gently pressing with your head against your hands and moving your head in a rotating motion in both directions. When you put one hand underneath the other, your hands are steady, and there’s the sense that you are bringing much more blood to your face.
A great way to prepare for blinking is to blink in a dark room, where it’s easier for the eyes to open and close. Blink three or four hundred times in the dark. Then massage your eyelids very gently. With a very light touch, stretch the eyelid from the eyebrows to the eyelashes several times; then you will start to be ready for one of the most difficult exercises in this book.
To do this exercise, first cover the right eyelid with your fingers right underneath the eyebrows, and blink with the other eye. When you blink, remember to think how the eyelashes are doing the work of blinking. Since your hand is covering your right eye, you can feel how much your eyelid moves when you blink your other eye. The goal he
re is to be able to blink the uncovered eye without experiencing any movement at all in the covered eye. This is very difficult and requires much practice. You must massage the covered eyelid as well as the forehead while you try to blink only one eye. Massage your forehead and temples gently with your fingertips. Imagine that the eyelashes of the left eye are moving the eyelid and that the forehead is not working, because it is in the muscles in the middle of the forehead where the two eyes merge and unite and one suppresses the other. On a tissue level, you do not want one to suppress the other. Now repeat the exercise while covering your left eye.
If you contract your face in order to blink, then you teach your brain that the muscle that blinks is too weak to do it for itself, and it needs to borrow the forehead muscle. But if you loosen up the forehead and temples and roll the skin of your scalp from the occipital area to the frontal area, you will find that it’s easier for your eyelids to be independent. It’s so important for us to remind ourselves that light eyelids are eyelids that have healthy circulation. It’s amazing how much your sense of well-being improves when your eyelids are light. There is less fatigue all over the body. It is astonishing how tight your face, neck, chest, and upper body are if your eyelids are heavy.
Stroke your eyelids about six or seven times. Then cover one eyelid with your fingers in such a way that the fingertips are under the eyebrows. Do not put your hand on your forehead, because then you will not feel the eyelid. Just underneath the cushions of your fingers you will feel the eyelid, and you will feel how much it moves when you blink.
Blinking will help you to develop your peripheral vision and will remind you not to strain your eyes.
Vision for Life Page 7
