Hello! Today I want to share with you natural ways to help improve your eyesight. And if you never thought that was a possibility, open yourself up to it, because yes, it is possible!

Do you wear glasses or contact lenses? I used to, in my early twenties, started with glasses for about a year, for astigmatism, but because I didn’t like to see myself with them and they fogged up in the winter whenever I entered warm spaces (embarrassing!) I tried contact lenses. Well these were HARD to put on, I really had to talk myself into it because it would take me about 10 minutes every morning to put them on, my eyes just seemed to twitch whenever I tried to put the contact lenses. But my biggest problem with them was not that, it was that they made my eyes feel dry whenever I was in places that had air conditioning, which was, basically, everywhere I went.

Another interesting thing I noticed about 2 years into using glasses and contact lenses was that I felt my vision was worse by the end of the day than it was when I woke up. So, being a bit of a rebel and not trusting what I was told (that I had to wear glasses to prevent the astigmatism from getting worse) I just stopped wearing them and threw away the contact lenses (but kept the glasses, just in case I changed my mind!). Never did change my mind though. Well, my eyesight never got worse (as I was “threatened” it would) but it never got back to perfect either. My eyesight is pretty good, both near and far, and I can read pretty comfortably.

But I never gave up on the wish to restore my vision to perfect (or near perfect, who knows what perfect is?), like I had as a child. So I researched and researched and found that you can improve your eyesight naturally, through Dr. William Bates work. He was an ophthalmologist that lived in New York and practiced during the late 1800s and early 1900s. He cured himself of presbyopia naturally, and after that, he developed a natural vision recovery system, based on exercises, now called the “Bates Method”.

In essence, he discovered that sight problems were always connected to habitual eyestrain, which altered the eye’s shape into different formats that would cause different distortions, and that the eyestrain could be caused by poor posture, bad seeing habits, nutrition deficiencies or even shallow breathing. He also believed that glasses only made things worse, as they never corrected the underlying reason that caused the blurry vision to occur in the first place.

Nowadays we’re told (everywhere) that, if our vision is blurry in any degree, we need glasses so our eyesight doesn’t deteriorate over time. Without any other information about the subject, people accept this, thinking they’re doing the best for their health. Well, actually, glasses (or contact lenses) lock the eye muscles in a certain tension to force the sight to be clearer (compensating distortions). In so doing, they’re causing even more strain that will, as time goes by, create even blurrier vision.

If you want to test this for yourself, choose a well lit room and put an open book (or magazine) somewhere you can read. In the morning, before putting your glasses on, choose a spot for you to stand on, and see how clearly you can read that book. Then put your glasses on, let a few hours go by, and go to the same spot, take off your glasses, and try to read it again. You’ll notice that you can read much better before putting your glasses on!

Our eyes are naturally designed to repair and balance themselves once we stop applying constant strain to them. According to Dr. Bates, natural vision has 3 key principles:

• Movement – you cannot perceive anything without moving from a point to the other, and if you try to, it will cause strain in the eyes. Simply put, if you (body, head, eyes,…) stay rigid, so will your eye muscles, and what you’re seeing will blur.

• Centralization – we have central vision (clear) and peripheral vision (blurry). You have to focus on a part of what you’re seeing at a time, and that center focus will be clear (the rest will be blurrier), and move your focus from one part to another to clearly see the whole. Imagine you have a big object nearby; if you try to see it whole in one look, your vision will be diffused. For the object to be seen whole it has to be seen bit by bit, moving your central focus from one part to another.

• Relaxation – if tension causes the eyes to strain and blurrier vision, then relaxation relieves that strain and helps the vision improve. This also applies to the way we see, we tend to want to “lock” objects that are moving, and we “grasp” what we’re seeing. We must learn to allow sights to come naturally to us and direct our focus, instead of trying to control our gaze and lock the objects we’re seeing.

There are also 3 habits of natural seeing, based on the previous 3 principles of natural vision. They are:

• Sketching / shifting – we naturally shift our glance constantly from one point to another, moving our eyes and head, seeing clearly the central part of what we’re focusing, and the rest remains blurrier. When this natural habit is contradicted, as occurs when we’re a long time focused on a computer screen, we lock our eyes, head and neck muscles, and start to see things blurry.

• Breathing – as was also discussed in the breathing article here, deep breathing improves all of your body functions, and sight is no exception. When you breathe abdominally, you take in the most oxygen and your brainwaves get to Alpha (more relaxed, but alert, state of mind), and the brain sends signals to your whole body to relax, including the eye muscles. Fast paced society’s normal clavicular breathing locks energy and creates tension particularly in the neck and shoulders, which then also lock the eye muscles.

• Blinking – this should be a no-brainer, we all have to blink, right? Well, we do, but we can also lock our eyes open for far longer than they would normally be, particularly when we’re staring or we’re squinting. Blinking increases the circulation of lymphatic fluid around the eyes, helps prevent strain and fatigue, and it also creates a small shift of focus, making you shift your eyes from where you were focusing on previously.

So, if you want to improve your eyesight naturally, you have to start adopting (or re-adopting) these natural vision principles, and help your eyes relax even more with palming.

Palming is an exercise where you vigorously rub your palms together, and then cup them over your closed eyes, to block light from entering and also feel the warmth soothe them. You can do as many repetitions as you want, and keep the hands cupped over your eyes as long as you feel the warmth. As a side note, don’t tighten your muscles to do this, you need to be relaxed, and if you’re doing abdominal breathing, perfect!

If you want to see some exercises to help put these principles into practice, I recommend Leo Angart’s video here. You can see the contents of the video in its description and skip right to the part that interests you. He also has a book with several exercises for different eye conditions, you can see it on Amazon here.

There are also many other videos, specific to other eye conditions, you can search YouTube for them, but they are all based on these principles, and knowing the process behind how the exercises work, you can even create your own eye retraining routine!

Remember, you can improve your eyesight, it can return to its natural state, and it’s as natural for you to have clear vision until old age as it is for you to maintain your sense of touch or taste.