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Eyesight Exercises -- Bates Method

Two Excellent books on the Bates Method are now online, so you can read them for free:

The Bates Method by David Kiesling:

http://squeebo.home.mindspring.com/batesmethod.html

Perfect Sight Without Glasses by William Horatio Bates:

http://www.i-see.org/perfect_sight/

The best chapter is the one on palming:

http://www.i-see.org/perfect_sight/chap12.html

For more books on eyesight click Books Page

My  favorite exercises are:
Palming
Rub your hands together to make them warm. (You can shake them or hold them in front of a heat vent if you prefer.) Then close your eyes. Cover your eyes with your warm hands. Make sure your hands do not touch your eyelids and that you do not rest your cheekbones on your hands. If you want to place the weight of your head on your hands, put the weight on the forehead. I like to lie on my back with a couple of tennis balls under the achy part of my upper back, and cover my eyes with my hands in that position. Then -- this is the exercise -- LOOK at the dark. My fantasy is that I'm looking at the vastness of the dark universe. My mom prefers to look at black velvet. If you see spots or zaps of light, so be it. Wait. You will see the dark. Don't hurry. Look at what ever you see with your eyes closed for 5 to 15 minutes. Do this at least twice a day. (Hey, that's what 15-minute breaks are for.) Also, be sure to drink lots of water. This isn't in the Bates method -- it's part of what works for me.

Sunning
Try to do this once a day. It requires a sunny day, or a good desk lamp with an incandescent bulb. It's much more enjoyable with the sun. The exercise is simple. Close your eyes. Look directly at the sun through your closed eyes. While facing the sun, slowly rotate your head side to side as far as you can. This gets the sunlight on the peripheral vision, and it helps bring more blood circulation to your neck. Do this for 3 to 5 minutes. It's amazing, even on a cold day, how warm the sun feels on your eyes.

A third exercise -- Vision shifting
It's as simple as it sounds -- whenever it occurs to you that you've been spending too much time staring at that monitor right in front of your face, purposely shift your vision to look at the weave of the fabric on your sleeve, or the poster on the wall, or the tree across the street.

These books and tapes have plenty of other exercises to increase your peripheral vision, to help with farsightedness, nearsightedness, and other common vision problems, even to get rid of cataracts in some cases.

For more free information, visit this Eyesight website  or http://www.visionimprovementsite.com/bates.html

or the I See Site.