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.