The Yoga of Vision

Yoga is union and its practice leads to the integration of the physical, mental, and spiritual energies that, together, enhance health and well-being. Yoga teaches the basic principle of mind/body unity. If the mind is chronically restless and agitated, the health of the body will be compromised, and if the body is in poor health, mental clarity and strength will be adversely affected.

The eyes are, after all, simply tools of the mind but are not simply receptive in their function. They are organs of both receiving and giving. They are reflections of our soul, of who and where we are at any given moment on all levels of being - physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

Therefore, similar to yoga philosophy, to really work on clarity of vision, you must work on yourself as a whole being and you must understand that vision involves relationships.

Even on the most basic level, sight involves the intimate relationship between the person seeing and the object or person being seen. On a more profound level, vision evolves based on your relationships with yourself, your loved ones, your community, your world, and your Spirit. Therefore, your ultimate goal should never stop with simple visual clarity. Rather, it is to move toward having spiritual clarity.

So the natural vision philosophy and yoga practice can weave together to help one achieve higher levels of mind/body unity.

Nothing New Here, and Yet ...

The concept of vision therapy, of improving how we perceive the world visually, was perhaps originally the work of Greek philosophers, who were themselves trying to understand the world.

And they came to quite a good understanding; they understood vision to be a dynamic process, one that involves an interaction, a relationship, between the viewer and the viewed. Plato himself insisted that the eyes not only took in energy but sent it forth as well.

Natural Vision Improvement Philosophy

In today’s world we have focused most of our attention on the clarity of the image itself, so that we tend not to even diagnose many other forms of vision disorder.

I want you to be aware that a pair of glasses has never fixed the vision problems of a pair of eyes. Never has and never will. Quite the opposite, in fact. Because when that pair of lenses makes everything clearer, makes better vision possible, the eyes behind the lenses actually stop trying so hard to see.

It is important to remember that, when considering the workings of the world, the Greek philosophers did not say to themselves, "What can be put in front of the eyes in order to make vision clearer?" but instead asked, "How can we help these eyes to see more clearly, to perceive more correctly?"

In other words, that you observe yourself as you are in the process of observing and perceiving the world around you, necessitates that one live in the present moment. This is part of the philosophy of natural vision improvement, and an important part in attaining greater vision.

A philosopher who touched my life personally was Carlos Castenada and his character Don Juan. He says that, by "talking to ourselves too much and by repeating the same talk and the same choices over and over again, we maintain our world." For Castenada, a "warrior" is the man of knowledge. The man who knows the effects of this inner dialogue and seeks to end the inner chatter. A warrior "listens to the world … and … is aware that the world will change as soon as he stops talking to himself." Again, more of the shapings of the idea of greater vision: our internal chatter lessens as we are more in our own vision and less inside our own heads.

The philosophy of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic medicine is another important tool in shaping my practice of natural vision improvement. The Chinese and Ayurvedic model are holistic ones, based on the idea that no single part can be understood except in relation to the whole. A symptom is not traced back to the cause, but is looked on as a part of the totality. These models are based in the wonderful concept that we cannot measure static "things" in order to find answers for our problems—that to understand the root cause of a problem, we need to look at interactions and relationships. These practitioners look for "patterns of disharmony." For them, direct cause and effect is secondary to the overall pattern of Nature. Remember: don’t ask, "How does X cause Y?" Instead, ask, "What is the relationship between X and Y?"

The same is true for every sort of disease and allopathic medical treatment. Medicine, for the allopath, is sort of a "quid pro quo" prospect. Diagnose the disease based upon the presence or absence of the causative agent and then treat the diagnosed disease based upon the course of action that the diagnosis suggests. But what about the thousands of other things that are tied to that causative agent? What about the relationship of the disease to the human with the disease and the relationships of his myriad of symptoms both good and bad? Where is the consideration of all this in standard allopathic treatment? Indeed, where is the consideration of the patient?