About 3 days ago, I woke up from bed and went to the window. Everything was sharp again, I could see everything, the small LG on the air conditioner device that is outside windows, license plates, everything extremely sharp just like before. No question about it, it was 20/20, extremely sharp vision. Not a trace of blur.
After 5 minutes it went away. I didn't voluntarily do any exercises. It wasn't any involuntary squinting because of the sun or anything, so what do you think it was? My hunch is that my eyes finally got some energy after a pretty decent night's sleep, and then the energy faded away along with the vision (it wasn't a good night's sleep). Do you think energy is important to the eyes? Leo Angart (German vision teacher) said that if you don't have energy in your eyes then your eyes can only see for instance at 60-70% of their ability. My vision loss occured when my insomnia got really bad so what do you say?
What is meant by energy in the eyes? I guess you are equating eye strain or gritty eyes with lack of energy? Eyes that feel tired due to lack of sleep?
Have you tried practising sunning ( with closed eyes) after waking up? I have seen no exercise equivalent to sunning that can quickly refresh tired eyes whatever the cause - work, insomnia etc. When the rays of the sun hit the eyes, they suddenly become very energetic. This is also evident from the great temporary improvement in vision after sunning.
I would really like to do an hour of sunning everyday but how do you get access to the sun in the office? So I try to sneak out during lunch and go to an isolated place and quickly have a ten minute session. If anyone sees me doing sunning they will think I am mad because this is not what people do everyday. Even at home I need privacy to do sunning because even my parents and neighbours think I am crazy and make sarcastic remarks!
Ram Wrote:I would really like to do an hour of sunning everyday but how do you get access to the sun in the office? So I try to sneak out during lunch and go to an isolated place and quickly have a ten minute session. If anyone sees me doing sunning they will think I am mad because this is not what people do everyday. Even at home I need privacy to do sunning because even my parents and neighbours think I am crazy and make sarcastic remarks!
That happens to me too... "don't look at the sun you'll burn your eyes!!" and yet after more than 4 months nothing happened... it's vey hard for me to do sunning because I am not an adult and people think that "I do not know that the sun burns the eyes". There seem to be endless miths that everyone knows about... eggs give you high cholesterol, drinking ice water damages your organs (although I don't know 100% for this one), cold showers give you pneumonia, etc. I can't understand why absolutely everyone knows about these.
Sunning produces clear vision for me for about 10-15 seconds but also accompanied by overall yellowishness. Is the yellowishness normal?
Do you do sunning ( closed eye) or sun gazing( open eyed) ?
I do only closed eye and slowly move my face side-side a few hundred times. After that I face the direction of the sun and do some swings, shifts etc, but do not directly look at the sun. Even the sun's rays falling on the eye at an oblique angle feels so good and refreshing, I used to have severe photophobia but nowadays I can easily look at bright objects without squinting or crunching my face. So much tension in the face is gone due to sunning.
With closed eyed sunning there are no afterimages and is quite safe even if you strain. The yellow you see is a temporary scotoma which is probably due to eye strain. There is a blue tank about 200 feet away from where I do sun related routines. When I started Bates I could not see this tank at all. I can see this tank and its outline now but appears pale blue. But when I do sunning and look at the tank it appears deep blue and even the wire fence sorrounding the tank become visible for several minutes - this is how I monitor how the sun improves vision. Strangely enough, people consider the sun as an enemy to the eyes. But direct sun viewing is probably not very safe and needs to be done only by exercising personal judgement. You can gain considerably even from closed eye sunning and looking in the direction of the sun and the sky adjoining the sun and this carries absolutely no risk.
But what risk? Bates says that you can only get temporary blind spots or blindness. By blind spots I mean the yellow-ish things you see after looking directly at the sun. But they seem to always go away. The only risk could be getting skin cancer or something from ultraviolet rays, but it's not like I'm staying 24/24 in the open sun.
I do sunning mostly with the eyes closed. It is difficult anyway for me to look directly at the sun with the eyes open, I always squint. So I do it with the eyes closed, but sincerely I confess that I don't do the head rocking. If I do that I'll probably be labelled as a retard straight away, because everyone is avoiding the sun like the plague and doing the head rocking will only grab even more attention.
At home I do have privacy when I do sunning because I go to the terrace which is rather nearly sealed on all sides ( except for the roof) so nobody can see me there and sometimes I do undisturbed sunning for half an hour. But I can do this only on week ends. The bigger problem is this is tropics and most of the time sky is overcast or raining so I get lesser chances to do sunning. I still dont want my parents to see me do sunning because they might object to "their precious son" risking his eyes! I simply tell them I am doing sun bath which is ok with them. However if I do sunning on the lawn it is a big issue!
Some people get longer blind spots lasting for months or years so you really need to be careful during sun gazing. Unless you know what you are doing sun gazing is risky. If your vision is not good enough you can strain a lot and it is a lot better to adapt to indirect ways of looking at the sun. I think there is a method where you focus the rays on the white of the eye with a lens and it maybe a less risky way - but i never tried it sp far.
One interesting thing that I omitted is that in those 5 minutes when my vision was normal, central fixation happend on it's own. It was automatic and I was aware of it. I blinked often, shifted my view with a blink and eye movement was fast. That is central fixation, right? I have never worn glasses, so maybe the central fixation habit is still in my subconscious. Maybe it is activated when I get the energy for the eyes to function properly. Is that possible?
Mihai_alexandru Wrote:One interesting thing that I omitted is that in those 5 minutes when my vision was normal, central fixation happend on it's own. It was automatic and I was aware of it. I blinked often, shifted my view with a blink and eye movement was fast. That is central fixation, right? I have never worn glasses, so maybe the central fixation habit is still in my subconscious. Maybe it is activated when I get the energy for the eyes to function properly. Is that possible?
Everybody has the capability to see correctly. It isn't something that you have to learn. You only have to unlearn how to not see correctly. When you stop doing what's preventing you from seeing clearly, what you describe is what happens.
Dave
Site Administrator
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
Well, my insomnia improved lately (even though it's 3 AM here) so I don't really think it was from the energy... I don't really know what to say, but I recall looking in a weird fashion on one of the carpets from my room. I think I imagined it while looking at it, or was blank staring... didn't Bates say that he regained his vision after imagining something in a painting? When I was looking at the carpet I wasn't thinking about my eyes, or the Bates Method, I wasn't thinking about anything.
Immediately after looking at the carpet I went to the window and everything was 20/20, I am 101% sure that it was perfectly clear vision. It was not just good vision, it was perfect vision: no effort was required to see anything, including the smallest details, all where there waiting. Then after a few minutes I got nervous about losing my 20/20 vision again and I lost it and it went back to the usual blur...
I haven't seen many succes stories around here, but those minutes with 20/20 vision sure made he believe in the Bates Method.
