Yoga for Eye Sight

The great master Swami Vivekananda said that there are four main streams of yoga:Jnana Yoga, Raja Yoga, Bhakti Yoga and Karma Yoga. To use all these streams of yoga to build the personality. We are now going to focus on Eyesight Development or Eyesight Improvement. In late 60s the TV came afresh in Bangalore city and everybody was so fascinated, particularly the children glued themselves to TV forgetting all their sports outside. Went on watching 3 hours, 4 hours, 5 hours, 6 hours and movies after movies and as expected it started happening in 5 or 6 years, 1972-73 we started seeing most of these children wearing very thick glasses.

We felt too bad. We said can we solve this problem? Many people said that we are not going to allow our children to watch the TV. That is no solution. This is when we started developing yoga module. The specialised techniques that yoga prescribes for eyesight improvement were selected from various yoga techniques. The precautions we have to take, norms that we have to follow were taken care. So we developed this module, iintegrated yoga module for eyesight improvement. We started giving that in Yoga Camps.

One week camp, 15 days camp, one month camp and we started documenting the result whether really it is useful or not. The results were very fascinating. When we have an average of 1000 or 1500 sstudents, we have found that the eyesight can improve by one Diapter for short sight sstudents with a practice of every day half an hour for one month. This iintegrated yoga module can bring such wonderful results. Practice for half an hour every day for one month, one Diaptor is going to reduce. Yoga in Education for Total Personality Development SERIES – 2 8 | Yoga for Eye Sight Improvement

When we continued children with -5, -6, -7 children were able to normalise their eyesight. Then we started taking up this. Initially we have short theory and then we go for the practice and what is the whole basis for the eyesight improvement that we are talking? Many people think that the accommodation power of the lens is going to change. No. It is Eye Ball Curvature. In short sight the image is falling too far in front of the Fovea. But why is that distortion taking place in the eye ball? This is because of the differential pull of the rectie muscles of the eye ball.

So when we do yoga in which we handle the eye excercises to see that the muscles co-ordinate so cohesively that the eye ball starts becoming normal. How do we know it is going to become normal? One of our Opthalimic specialist Dr. Upadhyay in England, measured the eye ball curvature and after 15 days, after one month of yogic practices the eye ball curvature started getting normal. Such results prove that yoga brings in normalisation and it is these techniques that we have used. Trataka is the specialised practice that yoga prescribes. It is one of the six kriyas.

Kriyas are essentially meant for clearnsing and to strengthen the nerves which connect the eyes to the brain which handles the different muscles and calming down of the mind, silencing of the mind, slowing down of the breath, does wonders. Therefore in this module we are going to use some Asanas, special breathing practices and mainly the Trataka and the meditation which help the people develop their eyesight. Yoga in Education for Total Personality Development SERIES – 2 Yoga for Eye Sight Improvement

Let us try to understand the structure and functions of the eye so that we can go ahead to understand how Yoga works in improving our eyesight. We all have two eyes. A resting eye is designed for distant vision. Near work always involve lot of work on the small, little muscles of the eye. Each eye is comparable to a pholographic camera. Just like the camera has a diaphragm and an aperture, our eye also has a dark highly pigmented diaphragm called Iris. This Iris cuts off all the light from entering into the eye ball and in the centre of the diaphragm is the little transparen’t hole called the Pupil.

The diaphragm is called the Iris, the apercher is called the pupil. Through this pupil only nature allows the light to pass through. What are the functions of a good camera? It should have a very good powerful lens so that it can have a very clear image at its focal point and it should be able to adjust very perfectly to the light conditions and also to the distance of the object from the film of the Yoga in Education for Total Personality Development SERIES – 2 10 | Yoga for Eye Sight Improvement camera. Our eye although is comparable to a camera, is not having a shape of a camera.