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.”