Vision Loss

Your eyes are one of the most important organs in your body. It is through your vision that you mainly perceive the world and what is happening around you. However, as you get into your golden years (that is 65 and beyond), you will have some deterioration in your vision. As a matter of fact, vision loss begins as early as in the 30s, and its initial deterioration is gradual and almost unnoticeable. But it begins to accelerate in the 40s and 50s. Now, if you are already in your golden years, you might have much impaired vision, especially they could have been aggravated by your decline in health, such as getting diabetes. Getting older will take its toll on your body in many ways and your vision loss is just one thing that will start to deteriorate noticeably with age.

Some of the obvious signs and symptoms of vision loss are: difficulty in focusing (slower and less accurate)—a condition known as presbyopia, which is caused by the hardening of the eyes’ lenses; difficulty in seeing either long or short distances—these eye conditions that are known as either nearsightedness or farsightedness.

Presbyopia will result in difficulty to read or doing work that requires accurate focus; nearsightedness or farsightedness may require you to wear bifocals or different eyeglasses.

Other problematic issues with vision loss include an increased risk of age-related eye diseases, such as glaucoma, macular degeneration and cataracts. These eye problems can lead to severe eyesight issues, even blindness, if they are not taken care of immediately.

In your golden years, take extra care of your vision health and eyesight issues to reduce the risk of blindness further down the road. Check your health, especially your eye health, on a regular basis. This may play a pivotal role in preventing further deterioration or even blindness. Prevention is always better than a cure. Eat a healthy diet to get all the nutrients to your eyes. Do eye exercises; if you exercise the muscles in your body, you should also exercise the muscles in your eyes, because they are responsible for your vision health. Use eye exercises to help correct nearsightedness, farsightedness or presbyopia. Eye exercises are easy and simple to do and you can even do them in your own home. For eye exercises to work, you must be persistent

Make sure that you have eye tests done at least twice a year and if you start to notice a decline in your ability to focus or see clearly.

Most vision problems, whether nearsightedness, farsightedness, or presbyopia, have to do with eye stress and strain affecting the shape of the eyes, and hence their capability to focus correctly. Of course, the eyes cannot be relaxed if the body and mind are not.

Your Golden Years and Santa Claus shows you the wisdom in happy and successful aging in the golden years. It is a holistic and comprehensive approach to dealing with vision loss and other health issues, as well as changes and challenges, encountered late in life.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Reading Correctly for Better Vision

Biologically, you eyes are designed to adjust from close to distant focus, back and forth, continually. But, in reality, you focus your eyes for a long span of time at close distance when you read. This is one of the main causes of nearsightedness. Your vision health has much to do how you read.

Reading causes eyestrain, which results in the constriction of eye muscles. Prolonged eye muscle constriction distorts the shape of the eye. Eyestrain is due to the following conditions: 

• Reading material being too close (less than 20 inches), and not parallel to the eye

• Insufficient lighting or too bright artificial lights (fluorescent lights)

• Poor posture in reading, such as slumping or neck-bending-downward position, leading to lengthening of the eyeball

• Reading while eating: digestion drawing blood to the digestive system, thereby temporarily depriving the eye of nutrients 

To overcome eyestrain during reading, do the following:

• Breathe naturally; do not hold your breath.

• Take a meaningful break every 20 minutes or so, and blink your eyes repeatedly.

• Make sure the lighting is sufficient. Inadequate light is the first factor that tires the eye.

• Make sure the print is large enough.

It should be pointed out that speed reading may be damaging to the eye, because in speed reading the eye tends to take in a large visual field without focusing on any specific word. Remember, the macula can see small details only one at a time, that is, moving from one point to another. If the macula cannot focus, it does less work, leading to more blurry vision, which ultimately increases eyestrain—and thus a vicious circle of eyestrain and weak vision.

To enhance vision in reading, do the following to focus on the physical aspect of reading:

Occasionally read a page upside down, one letter at a time, moving from one point to another.

Increase your peripheral vision and stimulate your macula by wearing black cardboard paper to partially cover the eyes.

Adjusting the Eye to Light

Given that light is the essence of good vision, it is therefore important that you train your eyes to adjust comfortably to light, otherwise you may have a tendency to squint your eyes when the light is too bright or too dim.

Eye sunning

Sunning the eye is an exercise that utilizes the energy from the sun for healing the eye and improving vision. The healing power of sunlight should come into the eye at a diagonal angle, and the sunlight should not be too strong (i.e. early in the morning, before 10 a.m. and late in the evening, after 5 p.m.). 

• Sit or stand outdoors, your body facing the sun. You can also sit or stand at an open window, but do not let the sun come through glass.

• Close your eyes; do not wear sunglasses. Let the warm sunlight bathe your eyes.

• Now, move your head slowly but constantly from side to side.

• Breathe deeply and slowly.

• Relax your head, shoulders, and eyes, while continuing the body motion.

• Turn your back to the sun, and briefly palm your eyes for a few minutes during which you visualize black in your mind’s eye.

• Return to the original position, and resume your eye sunning.

• Alternate between sunning and palming. You will notice that during sunning, the color seems brighter, while the black seems blacker during palming.

• Practice this for 10 to 20 minutes a day, if the weather permits.

Sun flashing

Flashing stimulates retinal activity.    

• Sit or stand with closed eyes facing the sun.

• Spread your fingers apart, and wave your hands back and forth across each other in front of your closed yes.

• Wave your hands more rapidly up and down past each other. You will see the interplay of darkness and light.

• Do palming for a few minutes, while visualizing black.

• Blink your closed eyes before you open them so they can readjust to light. 

It is important that you never look directly into the sun, and that you do not practice sunning when the sunlight is too strong so as not to damage the eye.

Do you know that your eyes are connected with your mind? You see not just through your eyes, but also through your mind!

Take care of your vision health!

To get your copy, click here.  

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Get Your FREE Book on Your Money Wisdom

We are living in a world wanting wisdom. The majority of people experience the lack and not the abundance, while only a small number of people feel both the affluence and the wealth. Surviving and navigating in this world of money disparity require profound wisdom—the perspectives of human wisdom, Biblical wisdom, and the TAO wisdom from ancient China.

This 141-page book is about asking many questions regarding money wisdom, given that money always plays a pivotal role in this world of both lack and abundance. Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a German-born American mathematician and electrical engineer, once said: “There are no foolish questions and no one becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.”

So, it is important to ask many self-intuitive questions to enhance your money wisdom. The spirit of wisdom demands you to ask as many questions as possible on how you view the world today based on your own past and present life experiences. Your perceptions of those experiences affect your attitudes, prejudices, and presumptions that may change your perspectives of money. Your money wisdom is your need to think about money more. Don’t bury your head on the sand! Be wise on all your money matters!

Click here to get your FREE copy. It’s FREE only on April 3-April 5 (Friday to Sunday!Don’t miss this opportunity to get YOUR MONEY WISDOM.

The Miracle of Better Vision

Stress affects every aspect of you health, including your vision

Believe in the miracle of better vision through vision self-healing. Vision deterioration is sometimes due to stresses in life. If you live a stress-free life, you may have better vision. But how is it possible to live without stress in a stressful world? Learn how to live your life as if everything is a miracle.

As If Everything Is A Miracle: This 125-page book is about the wisdom in living as if everything is a miracle, just as Albert Einstein once said: "There are only two ways to live your life. One is to live as if nothing is a miracle. The other is to live as if everything is a miracle."

This 125-page book is about the wisdom to rethink your mind, renew your body, and reconnect your soul to realign your being for total wellness and well-being to live stress-free as if everything is a miracle. In this day and age, living in different phases of life is challenging. For one thing, in this world of technology and information, many of us are addicted to speed, which seems like a prerequisite for success in career and in many others facets of life. As a result, stress is unduly created, which may lead to toxic actions, reactions, thoughts and emotions.

Consciously and subconsciously we have created for ourselves a world in which our bodies, our minds, and souls have become toxic and we live as if nothing is a miracle. To do just the opposite—living as if everything is a miracle—we have to renew the mind, renew the body, and reconnect the soul, and realign the being so that we know who we really are, instead of who we "think" we are.

Believe in yourself: believe that you can be a better, happier, and healthier you. Believe that you can be a centenarian, if you choose to. The only hurdle is stress in contemporary living. Learn how to overcome your stress by letting go your ego-self. No Ego No Stress!

Stephen Lau

 Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Your Ego and Your Vision

Get rid of your ego first for better vision health.

This is what stress can do to your body and health:

1. Chronic stress, which causes your body to maintain physiological reactions for long periods of time, especially with respect to the release of hormones, can lead to depletion of vital nutrients in your body, particularly DHEA (a hormone critical to aging and longevity), vitamin C, and the B-complex vitamins.

2. During stress, your body uses its DHEA supply and impairs the functioning of your body’s hormonal glands. According to scientific research, your DHEA levels decrease as you age. Stress is adding insult to injury.

3. Too much stress increases the production of hormone epinephrine, which wears out your hormonal glands.

NO EGO NO STRESS

PART ONE: An Introduction to Stress:

It explains how and where stress comes from; the damage and devastation of stress to human health, including vision. 

PART TWO: Conventional Wisdom:

All the major life stressors may have come from career, money, relationship, adversity, and time. Conventional wisdom offers many strategies for stress relief, such as exercise, herbs, medications, meditation, and psychotherapies, among many others. Conventional wisdom may reduce stress levels, but it does not eradicate stress completely. Conventional wisdom only complements the ancient Tao wisdom for ultimate stress relief.

PART THREE: Tao Wisdom:

This part not only explains what Tao wisdom is all about, but also contains the complete translation in simple English of all the 81 short chapters of “Tao Te Ching” which is one of the most translated works in world literature. Going through the whole script, interpreted and translated by the author, will enable you to understand the essentials of Tao wisdom for stress-free contemporary living.

PART FOUR: No Ego No Stress:

Stress originates from the human mind: how it perceives and processes life experiences. What is stress to one individual may not be stress to another. This part explains in detail how having no ego can eradicate all stress related to career, relationship, money, adversity, and time.

Stephen Lau

Copyright©  by Stephen Lau

The Miracle of Better Vision

Stress affects every aspect of you health, including your vision

Believe in the miracle of better vision through vision self-healing. Vision deterioration is sometimes due to stresses in life. If you live a stress-free life, you may have better vision. But how is it possible to live without stress in a stressful world? Learn how to live your life as if everything is a miracle.

As If Everything Is A Miracle: This 125-page book is about the wisdom in living as if everything is a miracle, just as Albert Einstein once said: "There are only two ways to live your life. One is to live as if nothing is a miracle. The other is to live as if everything is a miracle."

This 125-page book is about the wisdom to rethink your mind, renew your body, and reconnect your soul to realign your being for total wellness and well-being to live stress-free as if everything is a miracle. In this day and age, living in different phases of life is challenging. For one thing, in this world of technology and information, many of us are addicted to speed, which seems like a prerequisite for success in career and in many others facets of life. As a result, stress is unduly created, which may lead to toxic actions, reactions, thoughts and emotions.

Consciously and subconsciously we have created for ourselves a world in which our bodies, our minds, and souls have become toxic and we live as if nothing is a miracle. To do just the opposite—living as if everything is a miracle—we have to renew the mind, renew the body, and reconnect the soul, and realign the being so that we know who we really are, instead of who we "think" we are.

Believe in yourself: believe that you can be a better, happier, and healthier you. Believe that you can be a centenarian, if you choose to. The only hurdle is stress in contemporary living. Learn how to overcome your stress by letting go your ego-self. No Ego No Stress!

Stephen Lau

Digestion and Vision

The lincidence of eye disorders and diseases increases with age. Eye problems have been linked to mal-absorption of various nutrients needed for the eye due to an unhealthy digestive system.

Dry eye syndrome: low levels of digestive juices

Glaucoma: lack of absorption of thiamine (vitamin B1).

Night vision problems: chronic liver disease (constipation)

Red and irritated eyes: lack of digestive juices

The fact that eye problems are prevalent among the elderly population who also have digestive problems attests to the importance of the digestive health in healthy vision.

Your digestive system is one of the parts of your body that is often neglected. But good health begins on the inside.

Digestion is a complex process involving chemical and physical changes, such as breakdown of food and drinks into their small parts, absorption of nutrients by your body, conversion of food to energy for your body’s use, and disposal of waste materials from your body. Your digestive tract is a long tube running from your mouth to your anus. Make this long tract clean and you will have healthy eyes.

The Digestion Process

The digestion process begins with your ingestion of food in your mouth. Your teeth and tongue break down or masticate food, and your salivary glands initiate chemical digestion by immediately secreting saliva with liquid enzymes to break down starches into sugar. Once the food is chewed and softened, your tongue rolls it into a ball, and then pushes it to the throat to be swallowed.

The food then passes into the esophagus, a muscular tube connecting the mouth with the stomach. The esophagus moves the food to the stomach by a series of muscular contractions.

When the food reaches your stomach, the gastric acid containing enzymes mixes with the food and begins mechanical digestion in which the food is churned to break down the proteins in your food. Proteins are the only substances digested in the stomach, but proteins are only partially digested in the stomach.

The undigested food then passes into your small intestine. Bile is released from your liver to prepare the digestion of fats, and pancreatic juice containing enzymes begins the digestion of carbohydrates, while the digestion of your partially digested proteins continues. In addition, the walls of your small intestine also release enzymes to complete the digestion in your small intestine.

Nutrients from your digested food is absorbed into blood vessels on the walls of your small intestine, and then carried to all your body cells and organs, including your eyes.

The material that has not been absorbed moves into the large intestine or colon. Here, water and salts are absorbed, and the remaining solid waste, converted to fecal matter, goes out of your body through the anus.

Incomplete Digestion

Incomplete digestion occurs when there is insufficient stomach acid to digest proteins, and inadequate pancreatic juice to digest fats and carbohydrates.

The presence of undigested food causes an overgrowth of unfriendly bacteria in the lower small intestine and in the colon. The toxins from these bacteria may begin to stress the liver, which has to work overtime to remove those toxins produced.

Efficient Digestion

Poor digestion may cause insomnia, which creates stress and strain for the eye. Therefore, efficient digestion should be encouraged. Improper dentures, over-sensitive teeth, and diseased gums may also affect your ability to chew your food adequately.

Always chew your food thoroughly.

Eat several smaller and lighter meals, instead of one or two heavy meals. As you grow older, reduced blood supply to your small intestine may adversely affect your capability to absorb nutrients from your food.

Do not gulp liquids, or talk, while chewing food. Always eat in a relaxed manner—not watching the television or working on the computer. Be aware of the taste, texture of every morsel you put into your mouth.

Eliminate dairy products from your diet, especially if you are allergic to them; avoid too much high-fat food.

Avoid excessive eating when you are stressed.

Avoid smoking and too much alcohol drinking, which may irritate your stomach lining.

Eat a small piece of fresh ginger with lemon before a heavy meal to activate your salivary glands to produce enzymes to aid your digestion.

Avoid cold drinks during a meal. Drink at least half an hour before or after, but not during, a meal.

Do not lie down immediately after a meal; do not eat before you go to bed.

Learn to follow Nature’s prescription of suitable times for your meals. Your lunch should be the heaviest meal, since your digestive fire is at its maximum potency. A late dinner interferes with your body’s mechanism to detoxify and digest food from the day, making you tired the next morning you wake up. Most importantly, eat only when you are hungry, not necessarily because it is meal time.

Take care of your digestive health to enhance your vision health..

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Thyroid Disorder and Vision

Eye diseases are not the only conditions that can have a negative effect on your eyes. Sometimes other diseases and disorders in the body, such as thyroid disorder, can also cause problems for your vision.

The thyroid is an organ that is located at the base of your neck.. The thyroid is mainly in charge of regulating hormones in the body. A dysfunctional thyroid causes involuntary weight fluctuations, while a functional thyroid may benefit vision health.

If you are suffering from a thyroid problem, in addition to weight problems, you may also have problems in any one of these bodily functions: heart rate, breathing, menstrual cycle, body weight, muscle functioning, body temperature, and cholesterol.

.

The thyroid uses iodine that has been consumed by you to store hormones, which are then released into the bloodstream as necessary to various parts and cells in the body.

The thyroid releases two types of hormones (T3 and T4). When the body is in need of more or less of these two hormones, the brain will send out another hormone to alert the thyroid that there is an imbalance in the T3 and T4 hormones. When these two thyroid hormones are not balanced, they can cause lots of trouble for your body, especially your eyes. 

The eyes are in particular danger because the eye muscles, which control your vision, may be affected, especially in myasthenia giravis, which is an autoimmune disease. When the eye muscles are attacked, the tissues around the eyes may become inflamed. This can lead s. everal other symptoms, including redness, eye and eyelid pain, dry eyes, and bulging eyes. When the swelling progresses, it can even cause the eye pressure to worsen.  

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Asking Questions and Seeking Answers to Live Longer

ASKING QUESTIONS AND SEEKING ANSWERS TO LIVE LONGER

If you wish to live longer or to a ripe old age, you must ask yourself many questions about life; after all, living is about asking questions and seeking answers to the questions asked. Livingfor life in this contemporary world may never be easy because it requires wisdom, which is essentially finding answers to the questions asked about life and living, and then applying those answers to everyday living in the material world.

Have you ever wondered: there has to be much more to life than this—the kind of life that you are living right now?

If you have, then maybe you should, first and foremost, ask yourself questions about why you want to live longer. Your reasons could be some of the following:

You desire to live a better life than the one that you are currently living.

You want to see your children or grandchildren grow up and mature into adults.

You have your life passions, some of which are already accomplished, while others are being pursued but remaining unfulfilled.

You are experiencing some core values, which are not just your life goals but rather your beliefs in humanity that have to be lived in order to fully experience the meaning of existence as well as the innate happiness in humanity.

You still like to enjoy some of the mundane pleasures of life and living that have satisfied your five senses.

You love to maintain good relationships and true friendships with those who are close and dear to you.

You may be fighting some life challenges or health issues—just like Alex Trebek, the 77-year-old TV celebrity famous for hosting NBC's “Jeopardy”, who openly declared in 2019 that he had to live longer in order to fight his pancreatic cancer because of his still-standing three-year contract with NBC. 

Asking the question “Why you want to live longer?” may initiate many other why questions specifically related to you, to others close to you, and to the world around you. Living is all about asking the many why and how questions in your everyday life and living.

In the Bible, Jesus said: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find . . .” (Matthew 7:7) In real life, we must always ask ourselves many thought-provoking questions at all times. Asking questions is self-introspection, which is a process of self-intuition and self-reflection, without which there is no self-awareness and therefore no personal growth and development. A static life is never a life well lived and worth living. Therefore, asking questions is self-empowering wisdom—a tool necessary for living longer.

The truth is that the kind of questions you ask determines the kind of life you are going to live. Your questions often trigger a set of mental answers, which may lead to actions or inactions, based on the choices you make from the answers you have obtained. Remember, your life is always the sum of all the choices you have made in the process. No matter what, life is a journey of self-discovery, a continuous process of asking questions and seeking self-enlightening answers from them. It should be noted that the answer to every question you ask may change over time, because life is forever changing, and changes are often transformative. The more questions you ask, the clearer your mind will become, and the more ready you will be to receive the answers.

Although asking questions is a self-learning process, do not seek absolute answers from the questions asked; more importantly, do not seek answers that might not be given to you. The most important thing in questions-and-answers is to experience everything, not just to pursue the knowledge. As a matter of fact, knowledge can help, but it can also hinder. When you only follow what you know, and forget what you feel, you can easily be led down the wrong path. Extensive knowledge and logical reasoning may not necessarily compound true wisdom.

The bottom line: live every question you are going to ask yourself, and live in its presence. Be patient toward all those questions that you cannot find answers immediately. True enlightenment may dawn on you one day when you find yourself asking no more questions because you already have all the answers; that is the ultimate awakening.

Enjoy the process of self-reflecting all the questions you are going to ask yourself; without this self-reflection, you may exist for other people, and not for yourself. Now is the time to start asking questions, and putting yourself on the right path to intuiting the TAO of living longer.      

THE TAO OF LIVING LONGER

YOU JUST DON’T DIE!

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Good Vision and Breathing

Vision deteriorates with age, especially if you are wearing eyeglasses or contact lenses.

How well you see is dependent on the amount of light passing through the lens in front of your eyeball that focuses the image on the retina at the back of the eyeball, and thus instrumental in sending the visual information to your brain. The human eyeball is held by ciliary muscles in the eye. When the ciliary muscles are weak, the eyeball becomes slightly distorted or out of shape, and thus affecting the focal image on the retina. This is how vision deteriorates, and this is why wearing eyeglasses or contact lenses does not improve vision because these vision aids precondition the focus of the eye.

To improve vision, strengthen your eye muscles through constant eye relaxation. To remember doing this regularly, you must be mindful of it. Eye relaxation begins with the body, and not just the eyes. If your body does not relax, neither can your eyes relax. So relax your body through mindfulness. Relaxing your eye muscles means you do not “stare” or fixate” at an object, and you must constantly shift your vision focus from close proximity to distance. In addition, you must also constantly blink your eyes in order to relax them. To remember doing all these requires mindfulness.

Mindfulness is conscious awareness, which often begins with mindful breathing. Mindfulness is total awareness of what is going on inside the mind. Mindfulness occurs only when the mind is quiet and relaxed. Mindfulness is moment-to-moment awareness that requires training; it does not happen naturally. Begin with your mindful breath; that is, consciously aware of your breathing in and your breathing out. Breathing has become so natural to us that we are totally unaware of it, and mindful breath is deliberately bringing back awareness to your inhalation and exhalation. 

The human breath is most important because without it we die in minutes. But most of us take it for granted because we are not mindful of it. If we have mindful breathing, we breathe right—that is, breathing with the diaphragm (the muscle between the lungs and the tummy)—and we breathe completely—that is, the air fills up the upper lungs, not just the lower lungs, and the breathing out is slightly longer than the breathing in. Mindful breathing is full awareness of how we breathe in and breathe out. You don’t have to have mindful breathing throughout the day, but you need to cultivate mindfulness of your breath every now and then in order to enhance your mindfulness. Mindful breathing enables correct breathing that opens the many doors to relaxation, clear thinking, and self-healing.

With mindfulness, you will not forget to blink your eyes regularly to relax them; you will remember to shift your focus (that is, blinking before you shift your focus from a near object to a distant object), instead of staring; you will be more aware of your vision health.

Read my book Vision Self-Healing Self-Help to learn some eye exercises to improve your vision.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau