Improve your Eyesight Natrually with Simple Shaolin Exercises

In ancient China, Shaolin monks developed a fighting style based on the physical characteristics and iconic elements of the personality of the Tiger.  They called this Tiger style Kung-Fu.  Since a Tiger has very keen eyesight, the monks developed methods of exercising their eyes to improve thier eyesight.  These would have been exercises that they trained and developed from a very young age.  They would have been performed by eveyone training in the Tiger style regardless of whether they had so-called "20/20 vision".  No matter how good you are at something, you can aways become better with more training.

I have been recently practicing the following exercises and have noticed an improvement in my eyesight over just the past couple months.

One exercise was to count the leaves on a far away tree.  With meditative patience they would focus in and count hundreds of leaves at a time.  (This is a good one to practice in the fall since the leaves are changing colors and you may be staring at leaves quite a bit anyway.)  Start up close with some leaves that are easy to make out and count 50 of them.  With patience, slowly pick trees that are farther away from you and then slowly increase the number of leaves you count.  Work your way up to 200 which will give you a good amount of time with your eyes focused at a distance.  Do this once daily.

Another exercise is to focus on an object very close to your face.  I usually choose my hand.  Get it as close to your eyes as you can while retaining a good focus on it.  Look at it for about 2-3 seconds after you've fully adjusted your focus on it, and then pick another object that is more than 20 feet away.  I generally pick a leaf on a tree or something else that has some fine detail that will allow me to really focus on finer and finer detail.  If you pick a flatt wall or something that doesn't have much texture or detail it will be hard to focus on.  Again, look at the object for 2-3 seconds after you have achieved a good focus.  Go back and forth between these two objects about 20 times and do this exercise daily.

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Pain is Only What you Make It - The Original Tale

Reference previous post: The Pain is Only What you Make It - Mind over Matter

With every impact, blood seeped out of my aching knuckles as I struck the wall-mounted training pad over …and over …and over again. Right, left, right left, right, left… My senior instructor, in his naturally menacing manner bellowed, “Punch harder!! I better feel the building shake! The pain is only what you make it.” as he walked out of the dojo and went upstairs to eat his lunch…

There were two of us testing for our black belts that day and we both took a healthy breath, focused in a little closer to our targets …and we punched harder. As our fists throbbed and knuckles stung, his words resounded in ears, and we persevered. My mind sunk into contemplation and became detached from my current situation. After many years of martial arts training, I knew the capabilities of my body, and I knew how it would react to certain types of damage. “They’re only knuckles. They’ll lose their skin and bleed. Since I’m human I know they’ll heal.”

“If the pain is only what I make it, then the fact that I’m stuck in this situation is unimportant.”

Physical pain is only a response to outside stimuli, and it tells a brain that there may be damage occurring at a certain location on the body. Essentially, it’s an electrical memo sent from your nerve endings to your brain and can be thought of as merely a form of communication. Well, if you are already aware of what is happening with your body, then you have no reason to read the memo. You have the option to disregard the memo in order to more effectively get your task done. Of course, the same philosophy can be applied to more than just the physical sort of pain or suffering.

“I know that I am in pain now, but I know that some time in the future I will no longer be in pain.”

Knowing that pain is temporary is also helpful. When you begin to realize that the climate of life is always changing, then you will always be prepared to embrace the approaching climate, be it painful or joyful. If this is the case, what difference does it make that there is pain now?

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