10-07-2006, 03:16 PM
Here are a few other tips. I used to teach eye exercises and am not currently doing so.
(1) Because computer displays are composed of fairly large dots, spend some time each day looking, in a relaxed manner, at the tiniest details of some examples of high quality print (such as magazine pages with many sizes of type). The eye's focus is amazingly sharp, and it uses very fine details to focus on. Provide those details. Computer screens don't.
(2) Exercise your focus: In addition to looking 20 feet away, focus your eyes through a ladder of distances, very near, near, mid, far-mid, far, very far, and back again. Quickly, easily, in a relaxed way.
(3) Breathe! Better yet: adjust your posture around this standard: Sit so that your breath can happen naturally and fully, without your having to think about it. Don't slump.
(4) "Paint" the environment with your eyes. In a down-time moment, casually sweep your eyes over every part of the visible environment around you, area by area, such that your central focus "paints" the whole scene into your mind. What does this do? It practices using the sharp central focus of the eye to take in detail from the environment and pass it to the peripheral processing. It's a way of, so to speak, tuning your sharpening filter.
Don't strain to see. Be easy. Let your eye-mind do its work without much conscious interference. It's eye-mind, of course, because the brain's processing of sight seems to begin in the retina itself.
And, finally, the mystical moment: Whatever you are aware of seeing has already passed through a filtering and processing system that has "you" written all over it. One of the inexhaustible challenges of life is to seek moments to separate what you expected to see from what you actually see. The result is always a surprise.
(1) Because computer displays are composed of fairly large dots, spend some time each day looking, in a relaxed manner, at the tiniest details of some examples of high quality print (such as magazine pages with many sizes of type). The eye's focus is amazingly sharp, and it uses very fine details to focus on. Provide those details. Computer screens don't.
(2) Exercise your focus: In addition to looking 20 feet away, focus your eyes through a ladder of distances, very near, near, mid, far-mid, far, very far, and back again. Quickly, easily, in a relaxed way.
(3) Breathe! Better yet: adjust your posture around this standard: Sit so that your breath can happen naturally and fully, without your having to think about it. Don't slump.
(4) "Paint" the environment with your eyes. In a down-time moment, casually sweep your eyes over every part of the visible environment around you, area by area, such that your central focus "paints" the whole scene into your mind. What does this do? It practices using the sharp central focus of the eye to take in detail from the environment and pass it to the peripheral processing. It's a way of, so to speak, tuning your sharpening filter.
Don't strain to see. Be easy. Let your eye-mind do its work without much conscious interference. It's eye-mind, of course, because the brain's processing of sight seems to begin in the retina itself.
And, finally, the mystical moment: Whatever you are aware of seeing has already passed through a filtering and processing system that has "you" written all over it. One of the inexhaustible challenges of life is to seek moments to separate what you expected to see from what you actually see. The result is always a surprise.