KEEP YOUR EYES IN PEAK CONDITION

I wish to take this opportunity to introduce readers to some Natural Vision Improvement exercises. I have had used these eye exercises or aerobics for many decades.

If you wear classes, please take them off.

EXERCISE 1: PALMING

This palming exercise will help you to relax your eyes, which in turn will bring energetic heat to your eyes.

First, rub your hands together vigorously until they feel warm (about 15 to 20 seconds).

Then place your cupped hands over your closed eyes, being careful not to touch your eyes with the palms of your hands. The fingers of each hand should overlap & rest gently on the centre of your forehead. Keep your fingers relaxed. Don't create any unnecessary pressure on your face.

If your arms get tired, rest your elbows on a table. Sitting at a table is a good palming position.

Sit quietly for one to two minutes with your hands over your eyes. The more relaxed you become, the blacker the darkness you will see with your eyes closed.

Do this exercise three times a day, including first thing in the morning and at the end of the day to relax.

EXERCISE 2: SUNNING

Sunning is aimed at reducing light sensitivity. To do this exercise, you have to be outside.

Begin if you can by taking half a minute to face the sun, with your eyes closed. I repeat: EYES CLOSED.

Allow the warmth of the sun to penetrate deeply into your eyes and forehead. Gently, turn your head from side to side. Keep breathing. Feel the position of the sun.

As an alternative or variation, you can move your head gently as if you are writing the infinity symbol in the direction of the sun. Do this, say for about half a minute. Remember, keep your eyes closed!

After this exercise, just palm [i.e. do the palming exercise] until the after-images have substantially faded, and repeat two or three times.

At the next sunning session increase the period slightly and repeat it an extra time, building up over the weeks and months to a maximum of ten minutes of sun in all.

EXERCISE 3: NEAR FAR FOCUS

This is an active exercise to keep the lens of your eyes pliable.

Hold your thumb six inches from your nose. Focus on your thumb. Take one deep breath and exhale slowly. Then focus on a distant object about 10 feet away. Take another deep breath and slowly exhale. Repeat back and forth, say a dozen times

As an alternative or variation, cut out a letter from a newspaper headline and stick it on a wall at eye level. Then cut out a small classified ad.

Stand eight to 10 feet from the wall, hold the classified ad up at eye level and read it, bringing it closer to your face until the letters blur.

Now switch your focus to the letter on the wall.

Continue to shift back and forth several times. After you finish this exercise, spend a minute palming.

As an alternative or variation, you can use a picture post card for close or near focus, and pick a distant object, say, a building or a tree, if you are standing at the window, for far focus.

Practicing this technique will improve your focus from near to far and vice versa.

EXERCISE 4: PERIPHERAL VISION

Hold a pencil or similar object in each hand at arm’s length, and gradually extend your arms horizontally out to the sides. Maintain a soft focus on the tips of both pencils, while looking straight ahead at all times. Observe any surrounding objects from the corners of your eyes.

Do not move your head during this exercise.

If you have good peripheral vision, you should be able to see all the surrounding objects within your field of view while still looking straight ahead.

With practice you can widen your field of view.

As an alternative or variation, practise this exercise while sitting on a bench in an open park or inside a MRT train – without the arm stretch and pencils, of course. You don’t want to be mistaken for a cuckoo! Just use your eyes and soft focus.

These four simple and yet effective eye exercises or aerobics can help to relax your eye balls and also to keep them in peak condition.

[Inspired by Janet Goodrich's classic, Natural Vision Improvement]

Today's Straits Times newspaper has a seemingly large ad from a purveyor of lasik surgery.

It has this eye catching caption:

Do you know that the eye is the second most complex organ after the brain, and  it has 2 million parts?

I fully concur, although I recall comedian Woody Allen has had always thought otherwise.

Information experts as well as brain scientists have come to the conclusion that as much as 90% of all the information we learned in a life time comes through our eye balls via visual cues.

In tactical or operational terms, our eye balls gather visual images and pass them to the appropriate brain centres for processing and synthesis. 

[In a normal life-span, your eye balls will bring you almost 24 billion visual images of the world around you.]

In this respect, our eyes balls provide the basic foundation for our long term intellectual development through observing, reading, thinking and writing.

These facts explain how critically important are our eye balls. For this reason, I always have a soft spot for blind people.

In reality, our eyes are actual extensions of our brain.

I have read that about 40% of our brain cells are accounted for by our eye balls, which in turn utilize 65% of all the pathways to our brain.

Therefore, it is imperative for us to take good care of our eye balls by maintaining them in peak condition at all times.

Just think about this phenomenon.

Our fore-fathers were hunters/gatherers. They always had opportunities to look long distances, across the horizon, to look out for food as well as predators. To put it in another way, our eyes were originally adapted for distant viewing.

Also, our bodies were designed to move, not sit.

Today, most of us - I reckon no less than two-thirds of the population - are forced to look short distances, arising from the necessity of working within the confines of a work station in the office.

Worst still, physical stresses that were once borne by our body's large muscles are now concentrated on some of our smallest - in the hands!

On the other hand, our eye balls are only 35cm from the computer screen.

Just imagine the kind of visual pressures on our two small eye balls.

In fact, our eyes are often the first part of our body to register fatigue even when the cause may be postural.

That's why it is very important for us, especially after working long hours on the computer, to do regular eye aerobics. [Please refer to my Next Post]

To ameliorate work stresses on your poor eye balls, it will be helpful if you can occasionally look up from the computer screen to view across the room at some distant objects.

Alternatively, go and stand at the windows to look outside, for a few minutes, at some natural greenery or distant objects.

The eyes you have will be yours forever — treat them right, and they'll never be out of sight!