Vision for Life

Chapter 2

Ten Steps to Better Vision

If you take care of your vision, not only will you see better, but you will also feel better, and you will positively affect your whole body’s health. In addition to the exercises aimed at combating specific disorders and conditions, I have developed ten important steps that are perfect for incorporating into your daily life. These exercises are based on my seven principles of healthy vision:

1. Deep relaxation

2. Adjusting to light frequencies

3. Looking at details

4. Looking into the distance

5. Expanding your periphery

6. Balanced use of the two eyes

7. Body and eye coordination

These are the essential principles of healthy vision, and they can be attained by consistently practicing the eye exercises in this chapter.

Step 1: The Long Swing

I will never forget when I met Alan. He was a young French-Canadian banker who, while driving home after a meeting in his bank, fell asleep at the wheel and found himself in intensive care three days later. By the time he woke up, they had replaced his forehead with platinum. He had lost all his vision. The optic nerve in his left eye was destroyed, in addition to most of the optic nerve in his right eye. But that little bit of nerve tissue remained, so Alan discovered that he still had some visual sensation.

The physicians thought that only 4 percent of his potentially functional nerve was not enough to regain any vision. Alan heard about my book The Handbook of Self Healing. In it, I suggest that people who are legally blind start working with blinking lights in a dark room. Alan experimented with the techniques in the book, and, sure enough, the little bit of remaining optic nerve woke up. He called me in San Francisco and soon came out for a series of therapy sessions. Alan’s girlfriend held his hand to walk him into the office because he couldn’t see most objects. His brain did not yet know how to use that little bit of remaining healthy nerve tissue in his right eye.

During our first session we practiced an exercise called the long swing. As he did this exercise, he said, “I’m noticing twelve objects that I’ve never noticed before in the room.” Within minutes, his sense of orientation built up even more. When the series of sessions finished, he no longer needed to be led around. The long swing is what is called an integrative exercise. It allowed Alan to perceive a sense of space.

The long swing exercise develops a sense of fluidity and flexibility that will allow you to look at details with more ease, to adapt to light easier, and to adapt to new, livelier visual habits.

How to Do the Long Swing

Stand with your legs slightly more than hip-width apart and your knees slightly bent. Hold your index finger about one foot in front of your face, pointing up to the ceiling. Look at your finger with a soft gaze. If you are legally blind, or even with correction have very poor vision, you can look at your index and middle fingers together. While looking at your finger(s), swing your body from side to side. As you swing to the right, twist your body so that your left heel rises slightly off the ground. As you twist your body to the left, your right heel raises slightly off the ground. If your hand becomes tired, you can switch hands. Do this at least twenty times.

You will notice the sensation that everything in the background seems to be moving in the opposite direction of your finger, like scenery passing by you as you look out the window of a train. Allow yourself to feel the sense of relaxation that comes when you don’t need to place a hard focus on any one object. Move to the right, and the world moves to the left. Move to the left, and the world moves to the right.

Figure 2.1. (a) Long swing, front view; keep your eye on your finger. (b) Long swing, right profile. (c) Long swing, left profile view.

Now hold your finger horizontally in front of your face. Move your finger up and down in front of you, moving your head vertically along with your finger. Remember to continue to hold a soft gaze. When you move up, everything in the background seems to be moving down. When you move down, everything seems to be moving up.

Next, hold your finger in front of you and do the long swing, pointing your finger to the ceiling as in the first explanation, but this time as you swing to one side, bend at the waist and sweep down in a half circle—just to knee level. Don’t lower your head below your knees, but continue the swing until your arm is fully extended and you are looking up at your finger. This exercise should relax your eyes further.

The next step is very important. This is where we visualize the long swing. We close our eyes and do the movement with our bodies, and visualize in our mind’s eye that the world is swinging back and forth, passing in front of our eyes. Everything you visualize is moving directly opposite. When you move to the right, the neighborhood moves to the left. When you move to the left, the whole world moves to the right. Remember how you saw objects this way. Now you open your eyes and continue the exercise.

When you look in this way, you stop yourself from freezing. It becomes easier to look at details and much easier to blink. Remind yourself to blink. Blinking will help you to relax.

When I started to work on my own vision, my eyes had a constant nystagmus, which is an involuntary rapid movement of the eyes caused by continuous strain from trying to see the world with a total lack of success. So I practiced the long swing for about forty minutes a day, and it immediately eased the involuntary flutter of my eyes. I had a feeling of more light entering my eyes. Details started to appear in the background, and when I started to look at details like windows and books on shelves, they gradually became clearer and clearer to me. Long swinging prepared my brain for new exercises.

When you practice the rest of the exercises in this book followed by long swinging, you will absorb the exercises better because long swinging alleviates tension and stiffness in the brain, in addition to preparing us to learn and benefit from new visual techniques.

I will never forget the time when I was walking in the streets of Tel Aviv with my eye instructor, Jacob, who was then only sixteen years old. Jacob told me to look at a building full of windows. In the corners of the windows I could see tiny, fuzzy black squares, which I later realized were air conditioners. At Jacob’s instruction, I looked from window to air conditioner, back and forth for a whole summer, not understanding why I was doing this. Slowly, by looking at windows and air conditioners, looking at patterns of squares, a new habit developed in me, a habit of looking and not freezing. Long swinging helped to prepare me for this exercise and alleviated the rigidity that prevented me from looking at details, which allowed the program to sink in.

The reason that long swinging is referred to as an integrative exercise is that it takes you away from the stress you’re used to. When people wear thick glasses that have a very specific focal point, they often strain their eyes so much that it becomes very difficult for them to look with vitality at the world. They look without seeing details, partially from fatigue and partially from the habits they have developed by straining to see. Long swinging breaks that tension. You cannot stare with this exercise, so more light enters your eyes through the movement, and therefore you won’t need to strain to bring the new programming to your brain.

The long swinging exercise will also help you to develop your peripheral vision and to create a better sense of orientation. You don’t have to swing for forty minutes at a time. In fact, even two minutes of twenty swings can help you loosen up. Think of it as warming up before a workout.

Step 2: Looking into the Distance

It is no coincidence that our school is located near the beach. In fact, it took us almost five years to convince San Francisco authorities and neighborhood groups to allow us to operate in this residential area. The reason this location is ideal for us is that we look at the waves on a daily basis and use their sparkling beauty in our work. They shine in sunlight and have different coloration, even in the fog. You can almost always see waves here, even when the weather is gray.

Look at the waves. Look at the sky. Look at the clouds. Look at the hills and valleys.

If you are not near the beach, look out your window at the many other buildings.

When you look near (as when staring at a computer screen), you unknowingly strain your eyes. The ciliary muscles contract, and this changes the shape of your lens from flat to round. When you look into the distance, however, the ciliary muscles relax, and the suspensory ligaments keep the lens flat and more flexible.

Many people in our culture are used to eyestrain from looking at computers, televisions, and books so much of the time. They pay attention to the contents and not to their eyes, which causes them to strain. Looking close makes you strain. Looking with boredom makes you strain. When you push on with the computer project, or the television show, or the book, you strain your eyes—even when you are aware of the strain.

Figure 2.2. The reason this location is ideal for us is that we look at the waves on a daily basis and use their sparkling beauty in our work.

Pay attention so that your face is relaxed and your jaw is not clenched. Release and rest your eyes. If it is possible, give yourself a few hours away from close work. Even if it is a deadline you are struggling to meet, do yourself a favor and take ten minutes to rest your eyes by looking into the distance. Look at the movements of the waves or the clouds. Look into the distance.

Never look closer than forty yards away, because you need to look far enough to rest the eyes from looking near. Know that when you look into the distance, you don’t have to stay focused on one point; you can scan or look at different areas within the point you are looking at. Remember to blink and to avoid straining to see it. If it is fuzzy, let it be fuzzy.

For at least ten minutes every single day, look into the distance. If you wear corrective lenses, be brave: take your contact lenses out, take your glasses off, and allow your eyes to enjoy a breath of fresh air. One student in San Francisco came to me and said that after two and a half weeks of not wearing her lenses, she had started to feel comfortable, because of “the air bouncing on her eyes.” This habit will reduce your dependency on glasses or lenses, and it will gradually strengthen your visual system.

Looking into the Distance Can Help to Prevent Cataracts!

If you can share this simple concept with other people, you will help to create a revolution in the world by helping to prevent the otherwise predictable cataract. Today, most physicians believe that, sooner or later, most people will develop cataracts. Looking into the distance can prevent the onset of cataracts because it gives the lens its full mobility and more life.

I realize that even if you practice this exercise every day, you will probably not look into the distance as much as life requires you to look near. Nevertheless, looking into the distance for eight to ten minutes, three times a day, will at least allow your eyes to rest and will compensate for the strain of looking near.

Step 3: Exploring the Periphery

It is impossible to strain your eyes while looking centrally if you remember to simultaneously focus on your periphery. In our culture, we suppress parts of the eye that help us to see well naturally. It is a subconscious suppression. We suppress the periphery because we make it irrelevant to our lives. As we focus on objects in front of us, we simply don’t pay attention to what’s around us. On the other hand, our ancient fathers and mothers, our predecessors, had to pay attention to their surroundings; in the jungle, you wouldn’t last more than a week without noticing the periphery. In fact, you would be eaten or you would starve to death if you didn’t notice what was around you.

Discovering Your Strong Eye

About 20 percent of the people that I’ve met have no difference in strength between their two eyes. Even so, the majority of people do have very different levels of strength between their eyes. A small number of those people have one eye stronger for looking from a distance, and the other is stronger for looking near.

If you experience an extreme difference of ability between your two eyes, you probably already know it by now. You may know which eye needs a stronger prescription for correction. You may have had an injury to one of your eyes, or you may simply be aware of which eye you tend to use to look. If you are not sure which one of your eyes is your dominant eye, there is a way you can test it.

To see which eye is dominant for distance, make a loose fist with a pencil-sized hole through the center, like a telescope. Hold your loose fist about a foot away from your face. (It could be closer for people who see poorly or farther for people who see sharply.) With both eyes at the same time, look at some distant point through the hole in your fist. Now close one eye and see if that point disappears. For example, if your stronger eye is your left eye, when you close the right eye, you will still see the object through your fist. When you close the left eye, you will not see the object, and vice versa. Then you’ll know which eye is stronger.

To see which eye is dominant for close distances, look at a page in this book, with its big and small letters. Look at the smallest letters you can see, and then close one eye at a time. Whichever eye can see the small letters better is your strong eye for nearby vision.

If you cannot figure out on your own which eye is stronger, you can go to an optometrist and ask for help.

Figure 2.3. Discovering the dominant eye.

But we ignore the periphery so we can focus on computers and paperwork all day without being distracted by our environment. We try to concentrate on the task at hand and can’t be distracted by the commotions around us. When we don’t notice the periphery, the strain on our central vision becomes much greater, which, in time, makes us use it poorly. This causes us to strain our central vision, decreasing its clarity and eventually losing it. The old adage that says use it or lose it holds true here. With time, we lose the connection between our brain, our optic nerve, and the rod cells of the periphery. Along with genetic tendencies, this can be a cause of glaucoma.

What we need to do right now is to exercise our periphery.

Periphery Exercise 1: Look into the Distance

Sit somewhere comfortable where you can see something in the distance that you enjoy looking at. As you look into the distance, start to wave your hands to the sides of your head to notify your eyes that a periphery exists. Don’t look at your hands waving; just look into the distance. Allow your eyes to recognize the movement of your hands.

Wave your hands in such a way that your fingers point toward you and your wrists are loose. Do this for a minute or two. As you do this, you should feel your eyes release their tension; this relaxation in your eyes is vitally important to healthy vision.

Figure 2.4. Will wakes up his periphery with a wave of his hands as he looks at the distance.

Periphery Exercise 2: The Small Pieces of Paper

Cut out a small piece of opaque paper (about one inch by two inches) and tape the paper horizontally on the bridge of your nose so that the wide parts are centered in front of your eyes. This will disrupt part of your vision.

Walk around in a familiar environment with this paper on your nose for a minute or two. Now sit down and wave your hands to the sides of your head like you did before. Stand up and sit down several times, moving your whole body up and down, as you wave your hands to the sides. As you do this, it reveals to your brain the existence of a moving periphery with which it normally does not connect.

Figure 2.5. Will uses the smallest piece of paper to block his central vision while activating his periphery.

In the past, people used to walk at night, sometimes in total darkness and sometimes with light from the stars and moon. Imagine how important it was for them to notice things moving in their periphery at night! For millions of years, our ancestors used to walk this way. Now we have the city lights at night, and our peripheral cells are hardly being used because they are mainly designed for night vision.

Waving our hands to our sides wakes up the peripheral cells because the rods of the retina respond to movement rather than to still images; conversely, the cones respond better to a still picture. These cones are mainly in the central part of the retina (the macula) and are used to look at details. An overwhelming number of the retina’s cells are the rods, which respond mainly to the impression of movement. When we exercise these rods, we take away a lot of stress from the overworked cones, and we make it easier for them to function more correctly. Instead of the brain forcing the eye to freeze and to strenuously see a picture, the brain will command the eye to look gently and easily in order to see the entire landscape better.

Figure 2.6. (a) Will blocks even more of his central vision. (b) As he waves, he leans forward and back to create more movement in his periphery.

Next, put a longer piece of paper (one inch by five inches) on the bridge of your nose and repeat this exercise. Then use a piece of paper that is one inch by seven inches. By blocking so much of your central vision, and even some of your peripheral vision, you will discover a periphery that you hardly ever use consciously. Now go back to the medium-sized paper and repeat the exercise. Then use the small piece of paper and repeat the exercise for a final time. You may find that the small piece now seems even smaller in your perception. That is because much of your brain that had been suppressed is now engaged in peripheral vision.

To finish, take the small paper off, stand, and do the long swing so your brain will absorb the exercise you have just performed.

Step 4: Sunning and Skying

Sunning

Surrendering to the sun briefly each day can make a huge difference in terms of our overall feeling of well-being.

Since the 1980s, physicians have warned us against the dangers of exposure to the sun. Now they understand the benefits of sunlight and recommend that we have some exposure to it daily. The sun is one of the best nurturers that nature has given us. It is important, however, to adapt your eyes to the strong light of the sun. Sunning is a great exercise for this purpose because it is relaxing to the eyes and can also help you with your sleep.

I once had a patient who complained about terrible insomnia. She had not slept for many nights and had a tremendous amount of tension. I taught her the sunning exercise and massaged her in the sun. After her first session, she went home and slept right through the night; after taking only three sessions at the school, she reported that she had slept much better. That was years ago. To this day, she practices the sunning technique and no longer experiences sleep deprivation.

Today, physicians suggest that we should not expose ourselves to the sun, except before 10 a.m. and after 5 p.m. In my opinion, we should sometimes expose ourselves to the sun even at midday. If you are sensitive to sunlight, you should start by practicing the sunning exercise early in the morning or near dusk, or for just five minutes at a time in the middle of the day.

To begin sunning, all you need to do is close your eyes and face the sun. Now move your head from side to side, rotating it from shoulder to shoulder. As you face the sun, the sphincter pupillae constrict the pupils. As you move your head away toward one shoulder, the radial dilator muscle dilates the pupil, even though your eyes are closed. Some people find it easy to move their head 180 degrees from shoulder to shoulder. If you find this full range of motion difficult, simply bring your opposite shoulder forward slightly; it will help you to move your head all the way toward the side and to compensate for the limited range of motion until you loosen up. The more you practice this exercise, the more your range of motion and flexibility will increase.

Figure 2.7. (a) Move your head from side to side, rotating it from shoulder to shoulder. (b) As you face the sun, the sphincter pupillae constrict the pupils even with the eyes closed. (c) Move your opposite shoulder slightly forward if your neck does not move as freely as this yoga student.

The movements should not be fast, but they should not be slow, either. Just relax, breathe deeply and slowly, and visualize that the sun, with its energy and light, is penetrating your face and nurturing your eyes as well as your mind. Your eyelids should be closed softly; don’t squeeze your eyelids shut. You want the eyelids to close as gently as if you were about to go to sleep. The less you squeeze your eyelids, the more relaxed your eyes will become.

When I was in high school, I had been doing this sunning exercise on a camping trip. Seeing me rotate my head back and forth, a girl asked, “Why do you keep saying no? Can’t you say yes?” So I moved my head up and down as if to nod “yes,” and I had a revelation. I noticed that this movement led to a greater variability in the angles at which light reached my eyes, thus awakening more parts of them. This additional exercise allowed for greater stimulation and an increased sensation of lightness and darkness. I would recommend that this additional exercise be included during sunning.

Whenever you experience that difference between extremes of dark and light, your pupils become stronger. The pupils of most modern people are very weak because they wear sunglasses when they’re outside, which weakens the pupils. Automatic activities, like those of the eye’s iris muscles that affect the pupils, are influenced by function and use. The more you constrict and expand your pupils, the stronger the iris muscles become. Your retina also benefits from more concentrated light, and blood flows much better to the eye as a result of the pupils contracting and expanding.

The sunning exercise is mandatory for people who want to improve their vision. Like any exercise, it doesn’t create drastic change for everyone. But quite a few of my clients have experienced huge vision improvement and have reduced the strength of their eyeglass prescriptions when they have diligently practiced sunning. When you have a break at work or school, I recommend sunning instead of smoking cigarettes or drinking coffee.

Skying

Skying is a simple exercise. It is similar to sunning, but you do this as an alternative when there is no sun. You just put one hand behind the back of your head and one hand on your forehead, applying pressure so that you massage your head as you turn it from side to side. Now move your head from side to side like you are sunning and blink rapidly at the sky.

After two minutes of skying, do a minute of swinging. Then do three minutes of skying and two minutes of swinging. Then do three more minutes of skying and two more minutes of swinging. This is an antisquinting exercise, and as you sky and then swing, you are letting more light into your eyes and stopping the tendency to squint.

Figure 2.8. Apply great pressure to the head, holding the arms fixed as you blink at the sky and turn only your head from side to side.

Figure 2.9. Long swinging and skying go hand in hand.

Step 5: Night Walking

Night walking is the complementary exercise to sunning. The idea is simply to walk at night, in the dark, with only the light of the moon and the stars to guide your way.

Most of us, even if we live outside of a city, are surrounded by the glow of city lights. Those of us who live in remote areas often use flashlights. We have all learned to live with artificial lights, but once you get completely away from them for a time, you begin to realize how profoundly the city lights burden your eyes. Yes, we are happy to have them because they light the streets, making us safer and allowing for activity after the sun has fallen. But remember, as valuable as they may be to our industry and safety, this constant light is not beneficial to our eyes. For this reason, we must take part in exercises (like night walking) that strengthen our eyes and compensate for the burden of city lights.

Every time I teach an extensive eye course, we spend one evening in which we walk together in the dark. It is very pleasant for all of us to walk in places like the park, where we are free from artificial light. Of course, it can be dangerous to walk in the dark whether you live in the city or in the country, so I recommend that, when practicing night walking, you get a group of friends to walk together.

In the dark of night, it takes only three to four minutes to expand your pupils to nine times their normal size in the daytime. It takes about forty minutes to wake up the rods of the retina that sense movement and periphery. After night walking for about fifty minutes, you are finally utilizing the full potential of your eyes.

Night walking is a wonderful opportunity to try all the other exercises you are learning. After finding a nice, safe place to walk in the dark, set out and explore the many benefits of this practice. During your walk, stop at times and do the long swing exercise. Allow yourself the time to adjust to the darkness, and let your brain comprehend the change it is experiencing.

Palming (discussed in the next section) is another exercise that works great as an addition to night walking because it allows your eyes to better adjust to the dark. After they have properly adjusted, you can try peripheral exercises if you feel secure in your surroundings. Tape a short piece of paper between your eyes, and wave your hands to the sides of your head while walking to wake up the periphery.

By the time you finish your night walking, you will have awakened your eyes and reminded your brain of the way it used to function in a more primitive time, before light pollution filled the earth. Therefore, if you are serious about improving your eyes, night walking is an effective and enjoyable exercise that I would recommend doing at least twice a month when weather permits.

Step 6: Palming

Note: Before palming, individuals with glaucoma should read “Special Instructions for Palming with Glaucoma” in Chapter 6 for important modifications to this exercise.

Tibetan Yogis have been practicing palming for more than 1,500 years. It is an exercise that complements every other practice you will learn from this book.

Many people believe that they receive sufficient rest for their eyes while they are asleep. While sleep is very important, even with adequate sleep, many people still experience eye fatigue. There are a few reasons why this happens. One reason is that in these modern times we often hear noise around us while we are asleep; even though we don’t feel disturbed, the noise upsets our rest on a subconscious level. The other reason sleep often fails to sufficiently rest our eyes is that many people sleep in rooms that are not completely dark. I suggest that you darken your bedroom as much as you can. The darker the room, the more rest you will give your eyes. Sleeping in total darkness produces hormones, such as melatonin, that relax your body, allowing you to experience deeper and more refreshing sleep.

In order for sleep to be completely satisfying, quite often we dream. Dreams enhance our state of being; it is as though they wash away the day. Although dreams allow for physical and mental relaxation, the saccadic movement during dreams doesn’t allow for full relaxation of the eyes.

The greatest rest is a conscious rest, not a passive rest. William Bates, the originator of eye exercises in the modern world, understood this principle. And the Tibetan Yogis, who have mastered the art of meditation, understand this concept perhaps even better than anyone else. When you meditate, you enter a state of transcendental relaxation. As with meditation, palming helps us to quiet the mind and focus on eye relaxation. This produces a very powerful effect.

There is a great Jewish adage that says the truth is always simple. The way to the truth, however, may be complex.

To palm correctly, and to receive the benefits of this powerful exercise, you first have to engage in the correct preparation. You must have relaxed hands because this exercise takes you to a place where your hands nurture your eyes. Healthy hands can bring warmth, energy, and blood flow to the eyes, but there is no way for you to energize your eyes if your hands are angry, irritated, or numb in any way. Ensuring relaxed hands is necessary to receive benefits from this exercise.

Preparing to Palm

The most important thing when palming is that you are not stressed. I recommend massaging your temples, face, shoulders, and the top of your head in order to bring good blood flow to the eyes and become as relaxed as possible.

Loosen your shoulders. Move your shoulders together in a rotating motion, forward and then back. Then rotate each shoulder separately, forward and back. Picture that the shoulder tip is moving the shoulder. Now tap on the tip of the shoulder with your opposite hand and say out loud, “Shoulder tip.” Moving the shoulders in a rotating motion increases blood circulation; as you repeat this exercise several times, your shoulders will feel lighter.

Figure 2.10. (a) Massage the scalp and temple. (b) Massage the cheek bones. (c) Massage the scalp. (d) Massage the neck.

Figure 2.11. (a) Move your shoulders together in a rotating motion, forward and then back. (b) Intertwine your fingers, straighten your arms, and move your arms in a circular motion.

Next, lift your arm up and move your whole arm in a rotating motion, imagining that your fingertips are moving your arm. By focusing on your fingertips, your body will naturally loosen. Tap the wall with your fingertips and say, “Fingertips.” Then put your opposite hand on your shoulder and move it in a rotating motion. Repeat this series of movements with the opposite shoulder and hand.

Quite often the area between the shoulders gets contracted, and energy becomes trapped because there is not enough movement happening in that area. Consequently, there is not enough blood flow, which quite literally freezes the hands.

The next step for palming is to open and close your fingers one hundred times, visualizing that the fingertips are initiating the movement. From time to time, tap with your fingertips on the opposite forearm. Now massage your hands, front and back, by pretending you are washing them with soap and water. Then rub your two palms together, with the front of your fingers rubbing back and forth against each other in a circular motion.

Figure 2.12. (a) Rub your palms together to warm them. (b) Place the palms very gently over the eye orbits, putting no pressure on the face.

The result of this exercise is that your fingers will be warm and your hands will be loose. The warmth and relaxation of your hands will enable you now to palm in a way that is correct and beneficial. Though it is very important to be relaxed while palming, not all these shoulder exercises will be necessary each time. At the very least, rub your palms together to warm them; then intertwine your fingers, straighten your arms, and move your arms in a circular motion. Utilize your full range of motion several times in both directions, first with your hands palm to palm, and then with your palms facing outward. Depending on the time available, these relaxation exercises may last anywhere between two to eight minutes.

How to Palm

Now that you have prepared your body for palming, sit somewhere comfortable. You need to have your elbows resting on pillows or on a table top with a pillow so that your head is leaning neither forward nor backward. In other words, you are sitting comfortably in good posture. It is very important that you are not holding your arms up, that you are not straining your neck by letting your head tilt back, and, most important, that you never put any pressure on your face at all. If you put your weight on anything, it is on your elbows. Rub your palms together to warm them and place them very gently over the eye orbits. The palms never touch the eyelids, but notice how your palms feel over your eye lids, over the entire eye orbit. Can you feel the warmth? Do your hands feel nurturing as they sit ever so lightly over your eye orbits? This is important. If you are stressed or angry, your palming session will not feel good. Repeat the exercises to prepare for palming or do some kind of activity that helps you to let go of the stress or the anger you are carrying.

How Long Should You Palm?

The duration of your palming may change depending on your schedule and your state of mind. If you are busy, perhaps you might take a break in the middle of your work from time to time and sit for a few minutes to palm. You can palm for one minute just to rest the eyes, but it takes a minimum of six minutes to clear the retina from neurological waste products. Of course, it is even more wonderful if you can palm for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time!

Visualization While Palming

While you palm, there are two visualizations that will help you to receive the full benefit of this exercise. The first is that you visualize a figure eight, or an infinity sign. You can visualize a boat on the ocean moving in the figure-eight pattern, or a train in the mountains traveling a route shaped like an infinity sign. This is a fluid movement that helps your mind be able to travel from detail to detail easily and fluidly.

The second visualization is of total blackness and increasing blackness. Close your eyes and begin palming. Now visualize that the room you are in is being painted black. Visualize that your body is being painted black. Visualize that the neighborhood is being painted black. Visualize that the city is being painted black. Visualize black paint covering the entire world. Visualize that all the stars and the sun are being painted black. This is total blackness you are visualizing. Black is the color that allows the optic nerve to relax.

Breathing While Palming

Remember to inhale and exhale slowly while palming. Visualize your abdomen rising slowly and falling gently. Count to eight as you slowly breathe in, then count to eleven as you slowly breathe out. Don’t tense up; just let yourself breathe in and out.

Right now, you feel that your whole upper torso is expanding while you inhale and shrinking as you exhale. At the same time, you should feel that your head expands as you inhale and shrinks as you exhale. You visualize that your pelvis expands as you inhale and shrinks as you exhale, or that your legs expand as you breathe in and shrink as you breathe out. You visualize that your whole body expands as you breathe in and shrinks as you breathe out.

Relaxing the Ears

A good addition to palming the eyes is resting the ears from external noise. As a result of the noise we live in, our senses are under continuous pressure. Pressure causes tension, and if we are tense, we can never get to a place of relaxed eyes.

So, when you finish palming, rub your hands together again to increase the blood flow to your fingers; then put your thumbs deep inside your ears. Listen to your breath. What does it sound like? It may sound like ocean waves or wind. Breathe deeply and slowly to the count of ten, and palm again. You will feel your neck muscles becoming loose, and your whole head will start to relax.

Benefits of Palming

People who have multiple sclerosis and have an attack on their visual system quite often receive cortisone treatments from their doctors. In many cases, if such patients just sat down for a whole day palming with a nice cloth around their eyes, they would be able to overcome the attack on their visual system simply through rest. It’s a simple truth that relaxation is very powerful. When you relax completely, your body returns to its highest and best functioning.

Figure 2.13. Put your thumbs deep inside your ears. Listen to your breath.

I am in awe of nature for giving us such wonderful tools with which to see. In all its complexity, nature has fine-tuned our vision. Vision is completely integrated with our development as human beings and is progressing side by side with it. Most of the visual process is subconscious and unknown to us. But science is gradually realizing the marvelous energy behind vision!

We have 125 million photoreceptor cells in each retina, with a billion light rays bouncing against some of them every single minute, converting light into visual energy. To allow the process to function at its best, we need to learn not to squint. You may not be aware that your eyes squint even when you sleep and dream.

Palming can work away our tendency to squint. When you palm with soft, relaxed hands, and when you see black, there is a wonderful release of the eyelids, the temples, the forehead, and the entire skull. Squinting is eliminated, and you notice a relaxed sensation as you open your eyes. You also sense much more periphery because, with fully open eyelids, much more light can penetrate your eyes.

Quite often, physicians say that squinting does not have any ill effects, but it does. In this respect, the wisdom of the Tibetan Yogis was definitely greater than the wisdom of modern medicine. Modern medicine still needs to adopt the concept that rest and relaxation are so powerful.

Combining Palming with Other Exercises

After you have mastered palming, next time you are sunning, practicing the long swing, or night walking, stop for a few moments, put your hands over your eye orbits, and do your palming. Breathe slowly, in deep breaths. Your pupils will have time to enlarge a bit. Then take your hands off and return to your other exercise.

From time to time, also stop to massage your eyebrows. Massage the right eyebrow from the bridge of your nose to your temple; then do the same thing on the left side. Massage your cheekbones and stretch the muscles of your cheekbones from nose to ear. Every time you firmly massage your cheekbone, you may find that more light penetrates your eyes and you experience a sense of less squinting.

Step 7: Shifting

Shifting is an exercise designed to wake up your macula and help to develop the retina. In the retina, we have 125 million photoreceptors. Five million of them look at fine details, and 120 million of them look at the general picture. When we try to look at fine details, we can see them well only if we look at them centrally. We see them poorly, however, if we try to see them with our peripheral vision.

Shifting is all about moving your gaze from detail to detail. The eye has a natural tendency to shift from point to point. If you are the type of person who takes your time to see the beauty of the world and to look from detail to detail, you’ve already started this exercise.

Figure 2.14. See the beauty of the world and look from detail to detail.

Figure 2.15. Let your eyes see whatever they see. Relax.

Practicing Shifting

All you need to do is to open your eyes and look at details, without contacts and without glasses. The beauty of this exercise, and the reason you can feel good about practicing it without glasses, is that you don’t need to strain to try and see details clearly or perfectly. You just observe them. Let your eyes see whatever they see. Relax. If what you see is clear, that is wonderful. If what you see is fuzzy, that is wonderful, too! So enjoy the clarity or relax and maybe start to enjoy the fuzziness.

After you observe the details of whatever you are looking at, close your eyes and visualize the margins and distances between details. Think about the contrast between those details. Have you ever thought about the pleasure of seeing contrast? Even if your general vision is fuzzy, when you notice the contrast between details, you start to activate the mechanism of perception that is so important when trying to establish a visual sense of your environment.

You can look at details from near, or you can look at details from afar. Go for a walk and look at a house. Then look down at the sidewalk. Look at a road and then look at another house. From time to time, look into the distance for a short moment; then look back at the details of the street, the details of the road, and the details of the houses. Embrace the contrast.

Some people think the normal speed of the macula is as quick as seventy-two eye movements per second. The macula moves at a great speed, and we want to help our eyes look from detail to detail rapidly, by doing it correctly and looking right. By shifting, looking at one detail and then looking at another, and examining the contrast between these details, we can reverse this habit and open up the tendency to truly look.

Look at More Details

Now that you are slowing down to notice the details of your environment, you can further vitalize your eyes by looking at even smaller and smaller details.

There was a time when I looked at details for thirteen hours a day, every day. I looked at windows and air conditioners. I looked at blinds and bricks. I would sometimes ask a friend of mine with better vision to look at the exact details that I was looking at and to describe them to me. My friend would always describe different details than the ones I saw, and this would make me want to study the details even more.

It is also helpful to get a group of people to stand and look at details together. As the group looks at an environment, such as the waves on the ocean, they take turns describing what they see. Someone might describe a boat or a ship at a distance. Someone else might describe the boat’s shape or color even more specifically. There could be a particular light in the horizon with different coloration. The larger the number of people describing these details, the more everyone can find new things to look for and discover new ways of seeing.

This happens instinctively with little kids because they get so excited when they respond to something they see. The same thing is true for us adults: the more we look at details, the more stimulated we get. That sense of excitement in our eyes is apparent, and when anyone looks at our eyes, they see vitality in them. There is nothing as frozen as eyes that don’t look, and there is nothing as alive as eyes that do look. When you look from point to point, you project that you have a sense of presence and attention.

The pleasure of looking at details is a form of unity with the world that nature gave us. The more we look on a regular basis, the less casual life is for us. Everything in life becomes interesting as we see all the differentiation within it.

I remember a biker who came to one of my classes in the 1980s. He rode his motorcycle from the Peninsula, a forty-minute ride to our school. After studying for two and a half hours in a vision class, he went straight to Golden Gate Park just to watch the beautiful flowers in the Arboretum, one by one. He looked at their petals and at their veins. He looked at their stems and at their leaves. Smaller and smaller details he continued to find. The class had stimulated him to want to look at beauty.

I used to ask my daughter, Adar, to go to the beach with me. I would take along an eye chart, some tennis balls, and her glasses, which had an obstruction for her left eye—it was her stronger eye—to give her right eye a chance to work more. Since she almost always resisted going, I had to tempt her by suggesting that I would put her on my shoulders. Fortunately, she remembered that she had enjoyed being on my shoulders from the time she was a baby, so she would agree. When we arrived at the beach, she would do eye exercises as she looked at the waves and into the distance. Eventually, Adar began to notice that her reading of the chart had become much better and would always say, “Daddy, why did I oppose coming to the beach? It’s just so nice to be here.”

On our way to the beach we would stop from time to time, and I’d get her to look at signs. At times, we would stop at a flowerbed right near the beach, and I’d ask her to count two hundred petals with her weak right eye. As she counted, I would look at my watch and find the count had taken between fifty-five and fifty-nine seconds. This always surprised me because it seemed too quick. I also remember another time during her adolescence, while massaging and relaxing her in a dark room, I asked, “Adar, how many petals can you count in one minute?”

She answered that she could count between thirty-five and forty.

So I said, “Adar, I have timed you and found that you can count two hundred of them in less than one minute.”

Upon that, she replied, “But, Daddy, I can’t follow my count.”

“That is the exact point,” I answered. “What happened was that you had counted automatically, and by exceeding normal speed with your counting, you engaged the macula in a function it already knows how to perform. You directed your macula to look.”

So, my daughter, whose lens was removed, and whose cornea is small, was able to exceed all expectations about her vision by connecting her brain and her macula. Everyone can do the same, either with a healthy eye or with an eye that has some defect. Like my daughter, you too can make the connection between your brain and your macula. You can move from detail to detail rapidly, and as a result your vision can become as sharp as my daughter’s vision had.

Find a lovely place to sit and look at beauty, to look from detail to detail of a beautiful thing. Once you gain this desire, the world will look beautiful to you, and you will want to mobilize yourself. It is so important that you retain curiosity about details. As children, we have it naturally; as adults, we have to make an effort to give it our attention and our souls. It is wrong to be childish, because that is immature and taxes you, but it is wonderful to be childlike, to be unfrozen and in a state of perpetual awe.

If you were born with macular degeneration or have an inclination toward it, looking at details will slow it down and may even reverse it. Looking from detail to detail is the work of the macula. Your macula becomes activated as many millions of cells start to come alive; their activity triggers activity in the brain. This activity in turn creates more synapses between the macula and the brain, and between the brain and the macula. It’s amazing how a small part of our body, the macula of the eye, can energize the whole body. It’s also important that all of us strengthen our macula so we will be able to see well for the hundred or more years that we could live.

Shifting is one of the best habits to get into.

Figure 2.16. Find a lovely place to sit and look at beauty.

Read the Fine Print

People used to look at raindrops on leaves. They used to look at fruit that matured on the tops of trees. Nowadays, people tend to look just at the big picture. We learn to try and look at whole paragraphs of pages, just to grab their contents without looking at details.

In the past, we used to revere the written word. We used to read poetry. People used to look at every word and find something to respect. People used to read the same poem over and over again and find new meaning each new time they read it. Those times are over. These days, every poet who would try to live off poetry may just as well apply for welfare because there’s no way that he or she can make enough money by selling it. On the other end, suspense stories and prose with low-level content sell, and because they’re not extremely interesting when you look at them page by page, people don’t mind skimming through a whole novel to get the gist of it. This only weakens the activity of the macula. It’s the tragedy of the modern world that we don’t really engage with great presence in whatever we’re looking at.

This next exercise, therefore, is a good push in the opposite direction. Look at the page in this book with different sized paragraphs of print. Look at the third print size, which is the size of normal print.

No one has

perfect vision

all the time, and

our eyesight

varies.

Figure 2.17. Look at each letter slowly, in detail,

as if you were writing it with your mind.

Bates checked hundreds of thousands of eyes

human and animal, young and old.

While his subjects slept, ate, got sick, underwent anesthesia,

posed for photos, did arithmetic, gazed at stars, played ball, and sewed on buttons,

Bates tagged after them and measured their vision.

The results surprised him.

Bad vision got worse, got a little better, had flashes of perfect vision.

Sleep often produced worse vision.

Normal eyes went nearsighted every time the subject told a lie.

Look at each letter slowly, in detail, as if you were writing it with your mind. Follow each part of each letter with your eyes, point by point, line by line. For example, if you see a Z, you can look at the lower line of the letter; then notice the middle line, and gradually take in the top line. Look even closer to see many different points in the bottom line, many points in the middle line, and many points in the upper line. Try to distinguish between parts of the Z, even though it is just one letter. Then continue to look at all the other different letters in this same way. Look at each different part of each letter as if you were writing them slowly with dark ink

This way of looking utilizes the macula, the center of the retina, in the exact way you looked at the details in the world when you were an infant. At first, you may not have seen them well. But once you looked at whichever details you could see, you woke up the connection between the brain and the macula.

Now look at the first print size: the large print. Look from point to point on each letter in the large print. Then look back at the smaller print size and find whether you see them better than before. You can do this same exercise from two perspectives. You can start with small print and then look at larger print, or vice versa. In both ways, you should be able to reach the same results. You are training your brain to look at smaller areas than your normal tendency.

After you read the print in this way, look away from the page for a minute and see if you remember what you read. It is amazing how many people have absolutely no recollection of the text, or a very limited recollection.

I enjoy sharing this story about someone in a recent class who lost vision in one eye almost completely and could not really see text. I had him read an eye chart, and he could read only eight letters. When I quickly moved his face away from the chart, he did not remember even one out of those eight letters, for three times in a row. We finally made some progress when he remembered at least one. Consequently, he started to have some vision in an eye that both he and his doctors had dismissed as being completely blind. The first day of the class, he had to be led around by another person; that was when his stronger eye, or what he called his “seeing eye,” was patched. The second day, he still had to be led around but felt more confident and could not be stopped. After trying to recollect what was on the chart, he walked with an eye patch without any disturbance and looked with the eye that he had dismissed as blind. He didn’t see well yet, but he was not blind.

On a much smaller scale, what’s amazing is when you start to remember part of what you read; even if you don’t remember but just try to recollect it, you’ll find that the vision in both eyes becomes much stronger.

This work with the macula can change you physically and spiritually. Quite often, we have a single-minded idea about the reality of life, when the reality of life actually has many levels and many variations. Looking at many details helps you experience the variations that both the physical and the psychological worlds have to offer.

The Ink Is Black and the Page Is White

With a small piece of paper taped to the bridge of your nose to block the central vision in your strong eye, look at an eye chart in bright sunlight or under bright inside light. Look at the page and imagine that the black ink of the print is interrupting the white of the page. Slowly move your attention from letter to letter. Start with the large print in line one. Meanwhile, wave your hand to the side of the stronger eye. This way you’re simultaneously working to increase the periphery of the stronger eye and improving the central vision of the weaker eye.

You are engaging your weaker eye in practice that it’s not used to. Normally, the strong eye dominates. When there is stress on the visual system—and I would like to suggest that most of us, even those who have good vision, have some visual stress—the tendency of the system is to use the strong parts and suppress the weak ones. But this is unhealthy for us. It makes us work very hard to see. When you wave to the side of the strong eye and look with the weaker eye, you wake up cells in the eye and in the brain that normally are not working. When you wake them up, there’s a great relief because there is more balance in the system, and no one group of cells works harder than the others.

Now close your eyes and imagine that the space is white and the ink is black, and remember a single letter you just saw. It will give you a sense that you are really looking at that letter. Say out loud, “The ink is black and the page is white.” You don’t need to wave your hand while your eyes are closed, but you can imagine that you are waving your hand to the side of the strong eye while reading with the weaker eye. Then open your eyes and wave to the side of the strong eye and read the next line with the weaker eye. Now close your eyes and say out loud, three times, “The ink is black and the page is white.” Then open your eyes and wave your hand to the side and read the next line. Next, look away into the distance, and wave your hand to the side of your head. Now look back at the fourth line without changing the distance at which you started; then close your eyes and visualize the letters again. Repeat the process for the last lines of text. Each time you close your eyes, say out loud, “The ink is black and the page is white.” Or say the opposite: “The page is white and the ink is black.”

When you finish doing all these movements, look back at the third line and see how clear it became. Then look back at line number one. What you did is that you trained your brain to look at smaller details with the eye that normally did not work as much as the other. In this way, you create equality in your brain, which takes away the stress from underusing the weaker eye and overusing the stronger eye.

You should see these results rather quickly. Most people are astounded at how much better they can see when they take the paper away from their eyes. For a time span that could last for two seconds to several minutes, they can see the page in much greater clarity because they used their weaker eye.

Repeating this exercise two or three times a day for the first two months, and once a day for the next three months, will forge a whole new pathway in your brain, and the brain will become accustomed to utilizing both eyes in unison.

Accompanied by other exercises that we will do, this will start to wake up the precious macula in both eyes. This is relevant because the macula reflects what is in the universe. One of my workshop participants, a physician by profession, spoke like a poet, and his poetry resonated deeply within me and within the other workshop participants. He said, “The macula is like the sun, and the periphery is like all the stars around the sun, and the farther you get from the sun, the less bright it is. The farther you get from the macula, the dimmer you see. But you would see with dim light.”

He was absolutely right. The farther you get from the macula, the less you see bright light and clear details, but the more you see dim light and unlit details. There is a place for both the macula and the periphery. We need to use both. The macula can be stimulated by strong sunlight with the sunning exercise. It is stimulated by your thoughts and by your actions. The more you look at details, smaller details nearby and smaller faraway details, the better you see.

Look far away right now. Look at a cloud. Look into the distance, just like you had learned to do before. As you look far into the distance, you see clouds and mountains, buildings and sky. While you see clouds moving, or mountains on the horizon, wave your hand to the side and look into the distance. Also, pay attention to smaller details than the ones you would normally see. Let’s say you see the windows of a faraway building. Now close your eyes and visualize the windows and their frames. Try to recall details within one single window. Then open your eyes and look from window to window. Do not strain to see. Take a look at the absolutely smallest details you can possibly see in one window, as long as you don’t strain.

Now close your eyes and visualize a contrast. If you saw a white curtain with a black frame, visualize the differentiation of those colors. If you saw wrinkled curtains, close your eyes and visualize the difference between the wrinkles and the protruding parts; then look up and down that window. From there, start to look at all the rest of the windows. Moving from one to the other will activate your macula. Additionally, you don’t lose the periphery and you pay attention to what you see with your weaker eye while waving your hand to the side of the stronger eye.

In most cases, a person’s weaker eye for proximity is also his or her weaker eye for distance. However, with a minority of cases—but still a high percentage—it can be that one eye is stronger for seeing near, and the other eye is stronger for distance. If this is the case with you, do this exercise first with your eye that sees well from nearby; then do it with your eye that sees well from far off. This work can make a very big difference to you in that both eyes will participate more equally in whatever you’re looking at. As you continue to look from afar, you will see that your eyes get sharper, just like from nearby. As you look at smaller details, the larger ones become clearer because your macula has gained function and can look at a great speed from detail to detail. In fact, the speed is so great that you cannot notice.

You can also examine how well you see from mid-distance. Mid-distance is somewhere between four feet and fifteen feet. You can use the same “fist telescope” technique that was mentioned earlier to tell if one eye is stronger at mid-distance.

Comprehension Problems with the Weaker Eye

A third of those who have disparity between their eyes have comprehension problems with their weaker eye’s reading, meaning that they don’t necessarily retain what they read with the weaker eye. This exercise works to correct the disparity.

I recommend blocking your strong eye with a small piece of paper taped to the bridge of your nose. Now wave your hand to the side of the strong eye. Read three sentences with your weaker eye; then take the page away and use a tape recorder or MP3 player to record yourself as you repeat, from memory, what you read. Now play the tape back while reading along with the weaker eye; 80 percent of everyone who does this will realize that their retention of information is bad with the weaker eye.

If you have a partner to work with, keep reading the sentences to your partner as you recollect them until you get the sentences right. This will help to build retention with your weaker eye. Before doing this exercise, be sure to palm for six minutes, in addition to sunning and working with both eyes; only then should you isolate the weaker eye.

Step 8: Blocking the Strong Eye

This next exercise, as physical as it is, can also give you a whole new mental outlook of the world. Sunlight is the best lighting in which to do this exercise. Otherwise, very strong interior light will work if it makes it easy for you to see the letters.

Look at the page in front of you from a distance that is comfortable and easy to read. Wave your hand to the side of your head, from all the way above your forehead to the side of your eyes and beneath them. You could also wave around a colored piece of paper, a toy with different colors, a stick with a ribbon, or anything else that draws your attention. Look centrally at the letters on the page while peripherally sensing the object that you wave. As a result you will be working both your periphery and center together. That will release your eye from strain. Your eyes, as I mentioned before, cannot strain if both eyes are being used together.

Whenever there is strain, it is because one eye is being used more than the other. This exercise can make a huge difference by helping you to integrate the center and the periphery. Anytime you are looking at something that you can’t easily see, like a menu or a newspaper, wave your hands to the side, and slowly but surely the letters will become clearer to you.

Now take a small piece of paper, approximately one inch by two inches, and tape it to the bridge of your nose so it covers your stronger eye. To make sure you have done this correctly, close your weaker eye and make sure you cannot see the page with the stronger eye that is covered. Then wave to the side of your covered eye and read the page with your weaker eye.

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 purpose 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 here 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.

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.