Step 10: Vision and Body
The health of the eyes is intertwined completely with the overall health of the entire body. Blood flow in particular has everything to do with muscular health, cardiovascular health, and relaxation. The following exercises will help you to maintain the health of your entire body while you continue to work on improving your eyes.
Walking Correctly
Walking is a wonderful exercise for staying fit and active. It is a low-impact way of exercising that gets your blood flowing. But it is important to pay attention to how you are walking.
Make sure that you are walking heel to toe, with correct posture: spine straight, chin up, and shoulders back. Do not slouch. Do not let your head droop. Look where you are walking so that your neck is not stiff. Now relax. Do not tense your shoulders; just make sure they are not drooping forward or down. Remember not to strain. Being tense while walking is never good. Relax and enjoy the fresh air and exercise.
It is also good to sometimes walk backward and even sideways.
Rest Your Eyes
We must rest our eyes completely. For 1,500 years, Tibetan Yogis have made it a point to spend extended periods of time sitting in dark caves and meditating on the color black. When they exit the caves, their vision is incredibly good. Just think how much they stretch their pupils!
In the Jewish culture, we meditate on the color blue since we believe, for some reason, that black is the color of sadness, a funeral color. But it isn’t sad. In fact, it’s a wonderful color, one of total rest for your optic nerve.
Today, because of city lights, we strain by not having fully stretched pupils. When you stretch your muscles, you can then contract them much better also. For example, if you stretch your hamstrings, you will feel much lighter when you walk. The same thing happens to your pupils; it’s just that the response is not as quick, so we don’t feel it.
The pupil has two round muscles. One muscle widens the pupil, and its collaborator contracts the pupil. To properly stretch both muscles, you need to sun and to night walk; unless your pupil can expand all the way, it will never be able to contract all the way. The more you can constrict your pupil, the clearer your vision will be. Whether your vision is only 20/400 (about 10 percent of normal vision) or 20/40 (85 percent of normal vision), you will end up improving your capacity to see better with constricted pupils.
Quite often, after having a long nighttime walk in an area that doesn’t have much light, people who see 20/40 will improve their vision to 20/20. After this, city lights may suddenly start to be a bother. We are learning that city lights disturb the pupils by not allowing them to expand all the way. Of course, city lights aren’t completely bad because they can help us find our way. We go to coffee shops as a result of having city lights. We can travel with ease as a result of having city lights. But we never experience the papillary expansion that is so necessary for better vision. The muscle that expands the pupils simply does not work all the way.
After fifty minutes of night walking in the park, the muscle expands all the way, and the whole face and neck relax. The next day, it’s much easier to contract these muscles. You will respond much better to the sunning exercise if there is also expansion from looking in the dark.
One way to help your pupils is to do many exercises in a very dark room. To make a room completely dark, close your curtains at night; then play in there with a glow-in-the-dark ball. Relax as you do it. When your eyes open wide in the dark, you will experience relaxation all over your body. Try the Melissa exercise, described in the section “Stretch Your Eye Muscles.” Cut a long piece of opaque paper, about two inches wide and the length of your face, and tape it to your forehead and to your chin. Throw the glowing ball from one hand to the other in a tall arc. Throwing the ball can also help your eyes to stretch. You will find that your eyes rotate much easier in the dark.
If your eyelids are fatigued or your eyes hurt, and it is a hot day, lie down and put a cold towel over your eyes for about three or four minutes periodically throughout the day. If it’s a cold day, then put a hot towel over your eyes. I always found this a great vacation from life. I also found that whenever I worked with patients in San Francisco, where we often have cold air and fog near the ocean, they relaxed themselves and improved their progress if we put hot towels over their faces for awhile. Sometimes, lying down and closing your eyes for four or five minutes can make a very big difference.
Deep relaxation of the eyes, and proper contraction of the pupils in the dark, will lead to more relaxation in normal life and can help us to maintain good vision for life.
The Power of Breath
When you practice blinking, one of the automatic reflexes is slow, deep breathing. The slower your breathing is, the more relaxed you are.
The best way to breathe is slowly in and out through the nose. When you breathe, you want to feel your abdomen expanding when you inhale and shrinking when you exhale. You want to feel your ribs and chest expanding when you breathe in and shrinking when you breathe out. Proper breathing encourages a sense of calmness and relaxation in which blinking and looking at details become easy and natural from moment to moment.
When you breathe, you feel warmth in your hands and feet. You also feel balanced throughout your whole body. When you breathe deeply, light becomes easy for you to absorb.
So let your abdomen and your ribs expand, but also feel your back expanding with each inhalation and shrinking with each exhalation. When we look with ease from detail to detail while blinking with ease, breathing slowly and deeply, and when we become adjusted to strong light, our vision comes alive.
Loosen Your Neck
You can loosen your neck in many different ways. One is simply to look into the distance while you stand erect. Do not let your head move forward. When you’re standing erect, there is a ligament that holds your neck straight, just like there is a ligament that holds your lens flat when you look far into a distance. This is a wonderful position for the body.
Since the normal tendency for most people is to bend forward, the neck usually becomes tight. From time to time, stand erect and look far into the distance, and you will maintain a soft neck that will not need any treatment; this will also bring more and more blood flow into your head. Using this technique, you will prevent many problems that relate to poor blood flow to the head.
Now, sit in your room on the floor with your back against the wall, with a small pillow that creates an arch in the middle of your back. Put your head against the wall and rotate your head from side to side. As you do this, stretch your neck. Breathe deeply and slowly. Tap with your fingertips on your neck, all the way from the base of your skull to your shoulder, back and forth.
Figure 2.22. Tap with your fingertips on your neck, all the way from the base of your skull to your shoulder, back and forth.
Now, for a brief moment, put your hand on the side of your chin and stretch your neck even farther to the left side; then stretch farther to the right side, while tapping up and down your neck to loosen the muscles. Do not continuously push your head. You will then find that the neck is stretching, and when you move the head from side to side, you’ll find that it moves slightly better.
You do not need to do this exercise for more than ten minutes per day. Even so, it will be very valuable in preparing your body for other exercises in this book, because more blood to your head means less pressure in your eyes. And the pressure in your eyes, if abnormal, can cause problems. More blood to your head also means that you have refreshed eyes, and refreshed eyes tend to respond much better to these eye exercises.
More blood to the head has all the benefits I’ve mentioned and a great many more. It has absolutely no side effects, will make you feel refreshed, and will help you to be alert. It will help you to do what you want, while seeing at ease and seeing well. You will find that moving your eyes from side to side becomes much easier for you when more blood flows to your head, all that can only happen with a loose neck.
Another wonderful relaxation exercise is to lie on your back with your knees bent and your hands to your sides. Now roll from side to side. Your hand will push you to roll to the opposite side. Push with your left hand, and you roll to the right. Push with your right hand, and you roll to the left. Do this about a hundred times every day before meals, for several months, and it will help your neck while increasing the blood flow to your head.
Another wonderful exercise is to sit up, interlace your fingers, stretch your arms out in front of you, and rotate them in a complete circle, in their entire range of motion, whatever that is for you. Visualize that your fingertips are leading the motion. The full movement of the arms loosens up your shoulders. Also, rotate your wrists. The looser your wrists are, the looser your shoulders become.
For the past 150 years, we’ve had the tendency to not lift our arms all the way. Nowadays, many men and women wear jackets that restrict the movements of their arms. That stiff look of immobile shoulders has been around for too long!
Figure 2.23. Interlace your fingers, stretch your arms out In front of you, and rotate them in a complete circle in both directions.
Our ancestors used to climb trees and lifted their arms upward on a regular basis. We don’t, and we’re paying a very dear price for it, because not lifting our arms restricts blood flow to the hands, head, and eyes. These days, our fingers are very stiff. We write, we type, we drive, and we constantly contract our fingers. Musicians, sign language interpreters, and massage therapists like me tend to contract their fingers even more. We don’t balance this movement with enough extension. Many workplace injuries and arthritic conditions happen because of stiffness in the wrist and fingers.
Interlace your fingers and point your palms outward while moving your arms in a rotating motion in both directions. This position helps you to stretch your hands and prevents lots of other problems. If you feel a nice stretch in your forearm, you have done your job. I remember a woman who took my class and had such poor circulation in her hands that they looked green. When she practiced stretching her hands and wrists, and moving her shoulders in a rotating motion, however, they became pink.
Figure 2.24. Now point your palms outward while moving your shoulders in a rotating motion in both directions. Circle your arms up.
Stretch Your Eye Muscles
Here’s a wonderful way to stretch your external eye muscles and relax your neck: tape a long strip of nose-width paper from your forehead to your chin and throw a ball from hand to hand, back and forth.
A student of mine named Melissa was in a terrible accident in which a pick-up truck ran over her body and head and broke many of her skull bones. Consequently, she was subjected to more than twenty surgeries on her face. One of the surgeries was on her deep orbit, and the recovery from it was very difficult. She developed extreme double vision and neck pain. When we put the small, medium, and large pieces of paper between her eyes, she saw well peripherally but saw double below and above those papers; her neck kept hurting as well. When we placed the big piece of paper from her forehead to her chin and she threw the balls from hand to hand, her neck stopped hurting, at first temporarily, then long-term.
This practice of putting a long piece of paper from forehead to chin has become known as the Melissa exercise. You simply tape a piece of paper to your forehead, then tape the bottom of the paper to your chin, and do exercises while wearing this paper. It may not immediately feel as much of a neck relief to you as it did to Melissa, because your eyes may not see double and you may not experience that extreme difference. Nevertheless, it may feel like a great relief for you from the strain of one eye that controls the other; this relief immediately leads to better vision for more than 60 percent of the people who do this exercise.
With the paper on your face, throw a ball from hand to hand for five to ten minutes. You will see the ball in your right hand with your right eye, and when the ball crosses in front of your face, you will see it with your left eye as you catch it with your left hand. Only one eye can see the ball at one time. Throw the ball from hand to hand, allowing each eye to work separately as you try to catch the ball. If you have access to a trampoline, it is wonderful to do this exercise on it while you bounce.
Many other variations of the Melissa exercise are covered elsewhere in this book, but this is the basic starting point: throwing a ball from hand to hand while the paper is taped to your forehead and chin.
You may find that this eye-hand coordination, with a clear divider between your two eyes, can make a big difference and can help you to relax your eyes. Keep doing the shifting exercise, which will also stimulate the macula. When you are refreshed, the macula works better, and all other parts of the eye work better as well.
Figure 2.25. The Melissa exercise.
Figure 2.26. Throw a ball from hand to hand while the paper is taped from your forehead to your chin.
Enjoy the View
Often, pleasant scenery appears in front of us—faraway places with beautiful views. But even people on vacation are entrenched in the habit of not looking. They will only spend a few minutes, here and there, actually looking at the view. Then they will go on to deal with their vacation plans and work-related issues involving computers. A reason for this is that they are not used to looking at the beauty that attracts one’s vision on a daily basis.
Some people do not have anything beautiful to look at in their workplace. Nor do they have anything beautiful to look at in their residence. But most people in the world do have access to beautiful places to look at, somewhere in their lives: a nice garden, beautiful plants, lovely pictures, and even changing clouds.
Develop the daily habit of looking at something pleasant. We should devote twenty minutes a day, divided into four-minute increments, to looking at something beautiful. It could be combined with the looking into the distance exercise, or it could be apart from it. Spend a few minutes every single day looking at beautiful scenery, and it will slowly instill in you the desire to look at details. Then, when you go for a vacation, instead of spending twenty minutes looking at nice details in nature, you may end up spending two or three hours doing just that, and still enjoying yourself.
Figure 2.27. Looking at the distance relaxes the eyes if you don’t strain to see.
We are creatures of habit. Whatever we do now will perpetuate what we will do later. Create new habits of looking at details: first with your lenses, then without your lenses, then with reduced lenses, then again without your lenses, then maybe with pinhole glasses (discussed in the next chapter) that help the pupillary contraction, and finally without lenses or glasses again. If we enjoy looking at details, we will develop a skill that is lost by modern life, and that skill is the ultimate fortress of strength for our visual systems.
If you have vibrant, healthy, and mobile eyes, as you look at objects, you will also relax your whole body, which will feel vibrant and thus looser and more mobile. Because the eyes lead the body, the body’s posture arranges itself around the way the eyes see. Therefore, making your eyes more alive can trigger your whole body to come alive.
If you focus on your breathing and visualize expansion and contraction, you mimic the movement of the whole universe, which is in constant motion, expanding and shrinking. When you begin to sense this, and move in that direction, it can give you a pleasurable relaxing sensation that you may never have had before. If you combine the visualization of blackness with the expansion and contraction of your body, you start to have a sense of an inner rhythm that you never had before.
Repetition of these exercises gives you a pleasant sense of relaxation that augments your sleep, but the benefits go much deeper. When your conscious brain learns to relax, not only will it relax when you palm, it will relax anytime you look. And that is exactly what you want to do: consciously relax so that your subconscious will start to work in a whole new way.
Don’t Squint
Your tendency to squint is one of the highest hurdles on the path to vision improvement
. Squinting is a manifestation of physical and mental resistance toward improvement and change. If you do not squint your eyes much in the light, your brain demands that the pupils contract; when they do, your vision becomes much clearer. If you do not squint when you read, you will start to look with a soft eye at the print on the page.
Ready to Move On
I would like to congratulate you if you have earnestly worked on yourself using all the principles and exercises we’ve discussed so far, because it means you are devoted to your health and to your life. And who is going to help you if not yourself?
There is an old Jewish proverb: if not now, when? If I am not going to take care of myself, then who will? It is an illusion to think that others can do better for you than you yourself. So continue to practice with my suggestions, and you will feel the difference. Your vision will improve, and you will maintain your vision for life.
Chapter 3
Computer Use and Relieving Built-Up Fatigue
When working at a computer terminal, it’s critical to be aware of your position, the lighting, and your overall surroundings. First of all, you should sit at a distance from which you can comfortably read the screen. There should be adequate lighting (natural light is best), but it should not be shining directly into your eyes; nor should it be reflecting off the screen, creating a glare. Finally, the computer itself should be positioned where you can easily gaze into the distance: next to a window or a long hallway would be a good location.
You can use the features of a computer to your benefit by following data as it appears on the screen or by visually keeping track of the movement of your fingers across the keyboard. Look at the actual shapes of the letters you are typing and be aware of the spaces between them.
Vision for Life Page 8
