Bates Method Are Not Exercises

If there is one thing I want to impress on you about the Bares method is that this method is not about physical exercises. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is about maintaining and developing correct visual habits, the right way to use your eyes. Lots of people read his book and think all they have to do is perform certain exercises, and then they wonder why they don’t see any results. Well, Bates method is more like yoga in that respect. If you decide to master, say, Raja yoga, you don’t practice a certain set of exercises and expect to become an adept after a while. It’s more about developing your mind, mind control, things that can’t be developed mechanically. Things that can’t be taught in a book. It is the same with the Bates method.

Palming and sun treatment can hardly be called exercises, techniques maybe, that allow one to relax. Shifting and central fixation are actions that are performed all the time even by people with imperfect vision. They should become more aware of them.

Bates advocated the use of an eye chart but this chart is used more for a feedback rather than an actual tool. You don’t have to use a eyechart, you can use trees, pictures on the wall or whatever object you want. He encouraged practicing shifting with an eyechart because it’s quite easy to do. He never advocated exercises like “roll your eyes all the way to the left, then all the way to the right”, that are so popular. Admittedly, they won’t do any harm. But no benefits either.

Just look at all the misconceptions that are around and used by people “promoting” Bates method

They would talk about “weak” muscles that need strengthening, “just like any other part of the body”. Yeah, right. Eye muscles are not like any other muscle. They are certainly not weak, in fact they are in a permanent spasm. To relax this spasm is what Bates method is all about.

They would talk about eyechart that if you use the same eyechart, you memorize it and it won’t be effective. That is precisely the idea! The eye chart in Bates method is not used to test your vision, it is used to practice shifting, or, if your vision is good, to maintain it just by looking at it as a familiar object. I actually saw someone on internet selling one of the numerous Bates rip-off products the random eyechart generator. These people just don’t get it.

On a side note: the more I look on internet, the more I think that any info product that is sold there is an overpriced scam. Vision improvement products are just part of it. You certainly don't need to buy anything. The Bates book is actually cheaper than books of his followers.

Back to Bates

So I’m afraid it’s back to Bates. The good thing about these Shaolin techniques is that whoever invented them came up with an ingenious method of shifting: counting leaves. I think it’s better than so-called sketching: normal eye shift, you can feel vibrations or shifting inside.

Tracking is also good: follow the bird in its flight or cars driving by.

Interestingly, near-far swing is not from Bates but everybody recommends it and in this case I agree that this one is beneficial. Definitely unsurpassed in eliminating near-point stress. But remember to keep your eyes relaxed while looking at the distance.

Update. I noticed recently that for myopia it’s the “far” part that really matters. The first phase is just to look at the distant object without straining. How do you eliminate staring? One good method is to start blinking often while still looking at the distance. Another one is while you are looking at something, keep shifting, for example if you look at the tree shift from one branch (a peak in the outline) to another all the way to the top.

Bates methods are not exactly exercises but rather correct visual habits. Some of them can be regarded as exercises but the thing about them is that they can be practiced anytime and anywhere. You don’t need an eye chart, you don’t need glasses, you don’t need anything. You can practice shifting, for example on any small object. You don’t need to set up special time to perform them. The idea is to develop good visual habits, like shifting, blinking and central fixation.

Techniques for Improving Your Eyesight

So let’s get to the actual techniques of natural vision improvement. By now if you read my previous post you understand that there is no “mechanical” technique or exercise that will help you to restore vision if you do it regularly. If there is one, we are not aware of it. What we can do though, is practice certain techniques that were reported to alleviate tension and thus improve vision. It follows that other techniques of vision improvement can be developed, some of them might work specifically for you and no one else.

Here are the basic principles of treatment presented by Dr. Bates:

Palming. Palming is covering your eyes with your palms in a way that excludes all the light. Palming is very tricky as it is useless if you don’t have the right mental approach to it. First it calms down the nerves but on the other hand you might start thinking unpleasant thought while palming. You might want to try a combination of palming and yogic breathing (pranayama).

Swinging. Swinging is very useful as it is close to a regular physical exercise, it is excellent for the flexibility of spine as well as your eyes. The idea is to “let your eyes go”, do not try to see anything, in fact, you should strive to achieve illusion that everything is completely blurred due to the movement. And your swing does not have to be fast, go with your intuition. I found out that the best speed is medium.

Sun treatment. Sunning, as it popularly became known, is exposing your closed eyelids to the direct rays of sun. It is very relaxing but again, try to relax your mind. The good thing about sunning that unlike palming it almost forces you to relax mentally as well as physically.

Shifting. Shifting is the closest thing that comes to physical exercises for the eyes. It is also the main habit of good vision. Shifting can be practiced on the eye chart or on any other object. You look at one side of the letter than to the other and notice that the letter moved to the direction opposite of you glance. So you shift your glance to the left of the letter than to the right and so forth, from top to bottom and so on. The quicker you can do it and the smaller the letter you can do it on, the better the vision. People with good vision shift all the time unconsciously.

Central fixation. That is when the part of the object regarded directly is seen best. It is so because the retina has macula lutea or the area of the highest sensitivity. By shifting the eye with high speed we get the perception of the whole object. In fact shifting is so fast that people with good vision think they regard the whole object all at once when in fact the eye shifts from one part of the object to the other and it does that quicker than the brain has time to record the impression and make a perception of the object as a whole.

People with bad vision, on the other hand, do try to see the whole object all at once. It is, of course, impossible, but their retina loses sensitivity and their shifting becomes slow. The thing to do, then, is practice the correct visual habits of shifting and central fixation.

Vision Changes All the Time

One of the main concepts of the Bates theory is that he discovered that vision changes all the time. Nobody has perfect eyesight all the time. There are periods when our vision gets better and other periods when it gets worse. This applies to everyone with no exception. Periods of improved vision are usually experienced when a person is happy, relaxed and in familiar environment. If the person is tired, fatigues, stressed, in unfamiliar environment his eyesight is often worse than usual.

The difference is usually not extreme for people with normal vision but it may be drastic for people with bad eyesight. Probably all of us noticed a tremendous improvement during days of bright sunshine.

This, according to Dr. Bates, proves that vision is not static but dynamic. Muscles contract and relax all the time. If it is possible to relax the muscles surrounding the eyeball for a second, it should be possible to relax them for longer periods of time as well, until the eyesight becomes perfect…

The Bates Method Overview

OK, it’s time to finally divulge what this Bates method is all about. There is lots of misinformation on the internet about this method, some people claim to be Bates teacher who did not grasped the concept.

In fact Bates method is very simple but also very complicated. I mean it’s easy to understand but not easy to actually master it, to really apply it.

Why is that? Because the main concept behind the Bates method is relaxation. As long as our extraocular muscles (the ones that surround the eyeball) are relaxed, we’ll have perfect vision. Well, maybe not perfect but pretty good anyway.

So what happens? In case of myopia certain extraocular muscles get tensed and change the shape of the eyeball to an elongated one. In case of hypermetropia another set of muscles tense and the eyeball becomes squeezed. Little strain leads to greater strain. When we start wearing glasses that state eventually becomes fixed and the dreadful condition of myopia or other ones appear.

Here’s a quote from Perfect Sight Without Glasses that sums up the point:

It has also been demonstrated that for every error of refraction there is a different kind of strain. The study of images reflected from various parts of the eyeball confirmed what had previously been observed, namely, that myopia (or a lessening of hypermetropia) is always associated with a strain to see at the distance, while hypermetropia (or/ a lessening of myopia) is always associated with a strain to see at the nearpoint; and the fact can be verified in a: few minutes by anyone who knows how to use a retinoscope, provided only that the instrument is not brought nearer to the subject than six feet.

So myopia is produced not by excessive near work like we’ve been led to believe but by an effort to see distant objects!