Let me start with a little story. Stick with me and you’ll see how profoundly important this is to eye exercises.

Do you know of a man known by the name of Galileo Gelilei? Yes, the man who discovered that earth circled the sun and not the other way around. Did you know that even before him, people have always known that something was wrong with the calendar of that time? Every June or so it would start to snow and people in Europe, knowing that it’s not supposed to snow at that time of the year would roll back their calendar to the “correct date”.

There are 3 principles to natural vision improvement that Dr Bates discovered decades ago. If you want to naturally improve your vision, I think it’s crucial that you understand them. There are numerous eye exercises that you can do but it’s inevitable that sometimes you might interpret them wrongly. Understanding the principles behind them, I believe, would prevent this and hopefully, propel you forward instead of holding you back in your efforts to improve your vision.


The three principles are:


1. Movement. Here’s a little experiment that you can do. Look for people you know who have perfect vision. Would you say they are “active”, “squirmy” or “just couldn’t stay still”? They most probably are. Perfect vision requires movement because rigidity causes fatigue while movement promotes circulation!


2. Centralization. Have you ever tried to see everything at once? Back when I was in high school, I used to force myself to see everything in my surrounding since I thought that would give me an advantage in noticing someone is coming for the ball. My eyesight quickly deteriorated because diffusion causes strain and is unnatural. Our eyes are built for centralization, meaning we see only one small space at a time. Bates once said if you look at a chair, you should be seeing its back-rest, its legs and every other parts separately.


3. Relaxation. We have been educated to think that effort is always a good thing. So in out quest for perfect vision, we often place lots of effort into seeing something we cannot see – and therefore causing us to squint. Sight should be just like any other senses, they do not need effort on our part. If we tried to intervene, it will deteriorate rapidly. So try to relax and let your natural vision system to work. That’s what eye exercises allows you to do – take on a new habit to relax your eyes – and thus rebuild your vision.

Photo by Chris Gin

If you’ve read my previous on how sunning can benefit your eye and how glasses deteriorate your vision, then you would know by now that keeping your eyes relaxed is key to perfect vision.

Contrary to popular belief, the more effort you put in to seeing, the worse you eyesight gets. Look at that picture, even birds rests their eye (just kidding). Seriously, your eye works best if no effort is involved in seeing.

If you feel the need to close your eye, don’t keep it open. If you do, that counts as effort and it will definitely strain your eye.

The sun might the key to improve your eyesight naturally but how many times have you heard that the sun is bad for you? Not only are you told that the sun causes melanoma (skin cancer), it also causes cataracts and a host of other diseases.

So did people do? They put on lots of sunscreen and wear their sunglasses every time they see a ray of sunlight. What happens then?

The number of these diseases, allegedly caused by sun, increases! In fact, the incidence of cataracts are expected to triple in the next half century. Now that’s strange. Why do you think it’s so?