The human body has some impressive self healing features built in. Regardless of how your body is hurt or worn, it will always do it's best to heal itself. This inbuilt system can be built upon by eating correctly, exercising etc. A part of our body that is often neglected, without getting very much attention, are our eyes. Their health too can be improved by proper use and regular exercise.
Since we use our eye all day long, we seldom stop to think that we would need to DO something with them in order to keep them in great shape. We spend precious time exercising and caring for many other parts of our body, so why should the eyes be an exeption.
From our first day at school throughout our life as grown ups we get to do close vision work like reading and working in front of computer monitors. Then in our spare time we repeat by doing many similar tasks - reading books, watching television and playing video games. Our eyes are constantly working and looking at some nearby objects almost all the time.
This is a problem, because our eyes are not quite meant to constantly focus on something right in front of our noses - or in other words, we use hard vision using mostly the center of our vision.
A stone-age human being, whose biological and genetic composition would be in most aspects identical to our own, would probably have spent a large portion of the day using soft, or peripheral vision, looking into the distance and viewing birds, trees, mountains, cloud formations, stars, animals to hunt etc. Although we have come very far technologically, man (and woman) is still basically the same "machine" he was thousands of years ago.
In modern society we can naturally not be expected to live and act like people of the stone-age, but it is still factual that lots of close vision work like reading, if done incorrectly, over time greatly reduces our ability to see distant objects. Now wonder then that nearsightedness, or myopia, have become more of a rule than an exception.
Most people just accept this condition as the inevitable process of aging, and think that it can only be remedied by wearing corrective lenses or undergoing laser surgery. [Both of which are quite expensive remedies.]
However, as was already hinted, many common vision problems are to a certain degree self inflicted. And the damage caused by of various close vision activities could be greatly reduced by reeducating the way you use your eyes.
Furthermore, conditions like nearsightedness can actually be reversed by regularly performing some quite easy exercises that involves relaxing the eyes and re-training them to focus on object further away.
Our eyesight is one of our absolutely crucial senses - without it our life would drastically change - so wouldn't you say it is about time we started showing our eyes the same consideration we give some of the cosmetically appealing parts of our body?
You can begin today, by re-educating the way you use your eyes.
Author: Michael Hawkins
Author Bio:
Michael Hawkins writes books and articles about Yoga, fitness and health. A free Yoga Ecourse, that explores this exciting world of exercise and meditation, is available at his website www.yoga-central.net
