Important Nutrients for Healthy Vision

Balanced Acid-Alkaline to Combat Free Radicals

Your body cells need a balanced acid-and-alkaline environment to fight against free radicals. Acid and alkaline are substances that have opposing qualities. Your body functions at its best when the pH is optimum, which is slightly alkaline. The pH of your blood, tissues, and body fluids directly affect the state of your cellular health, in particular, that of the eye.

The pH scale ranges between one and fourteen. Seven is considered neutral. Anything below seven is considered acidic, while anything above seven is considered alkaline. Deviations above or below a 7.30 and 7.40 pH range can signal potentially serious and even dangerous symptoms, forewarning you of a disease in process.

When your body is too acidic, the tissues of your cells are forced to relinquish their alkaline reserves, depleting them of alkaline minerals, which are the components of the tissues themselves.

Over acidification comes from excess intake of foods containing great amounts of acid (animal proteins, sugar), and insufficient elimination by the body through the kidneys (urination) and the skin (sweating).

Alkaline foods contain little or no acid substances, and they do not produce acids when metabolized by your body. Alkaline foods include: green vegetables; colored vegetables (except tomato); chestnut; potato; avocado; black olives; bananas; dried fruits; almonds and Brazil nuts; alkaline mineral waters; cold-pressed oils (e.g. olive oil).

Alkaline medicinal plants also maintain the optimum pH level.

Black currant fruits are a good source of vitamin C and other vitamins and minerals, including an omega-6 fatty acid to increase blood flow to the eye.

Cranberry has been in use since the Iron Age, but the Romans were the first to recognize its medicinal values. Cranberry contains anti-asthmatic compounds, and is high in vitamin C and antioxidants. Eat fresh or dried cranberry, not the sugar-loaded cranberry juice obtainable in the supermarket.

Alkaline energy boosters can enhance your alkalinity to fight against free radicals.

Blackstrap molasses is an excellent source of iron and calcium, copper, magnesium, manganese, and potassium.

Make a healthy alkaline drink with a tablespoon of organic blackstrap molasses (mixed in some hot water first) and ¾ cup of soymilk. Add ice.

Cod liver oil, which comes from fatty fish, such as salmon and sardines, is rich in vitamin A and vitamin D, and essential omega 3 oils. It enhances the absorption of calcium and maintains a constant level of blood calcium. Cod liver oil improves brain functions and the nervous system, which play a pivotal part in vision health.

Alkaline supplements, such as coral calcium, can keep all mineral levels up, and each and every mineral in balance. Alkaline supplements should contain calcium (Ca), sodium (Na), silica and copper, and other minerals to aid de-acidification of the body. More importantly, they should contain every mineral in similar proportion to that found in the human body. Remember, the human body functions synergistically: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Every mineral has its crucial role to play in the human anatomy, including the eye.

Essential Fatty Acids

The high consumption of foods loaded with saturated fats and cholesterol, as well as man-made fats in egg substitutes, margarines, and basked foods, has led to a host of age-related eye disorders, such as macular degeneration, glaucoma, and retinal vein occlusion, among others. The explanation is that the tiny blood vessels located in the eye may become easily clogged with fats and other deposits that may cause eye problems.

The omega-3 fats, on the other hand, are good fats that help the normal functioning of the eye:

Regulating eye pressure

Moistening the eye

Relieving spasms in the eyelids

Reducing the eye’s sensitivity to the sun

Boosting the immune system

The omega-3 fats are found in chestnuts, flax seed, northern beans, soy, walnuts, wheat germ, and fish, such as cod, mackerel, salmon, and tuna.

For the omega-3 fats to be potent in protecting against free radicals, they must be combined with antioxidants.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

The TAO to Heal

Millions and billions of people worldwide are suffering from autoimmune diseases, including myasthenia gravis which is only one of the many different autoimmune disorders that are causing anxiety, fear, pain, mental confusion, and even suicidal thoughts in some of those afflicted.

According to Western medicine, there is no known cure for autoimmune diseases due to the complexity of their causes. Understandably, patients afflicted with autoimmune diseases are seeking healing from many different healing modalities, such as the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the Ayurvedic medicine, and among many others. In addition, they are desperately looking for help from herbs, fruits, and all kinds of natural nutrient supplements, as well as from physical exercises and spiritual practices, to rejuvenate their failing health due to their weakened immune systems.

The TAO may play a pivotal role in the healing process of any autoimmune disease, including that of myasthenia gravis.

The TAO is the profound wisdom of Lao Tzu, the ancient sage from China more than 2,600 years ago, who was the author of the immortal ancient classic Tao Te Ching on human wisdom.

The word “TAO” (道) in Chinese originally meant “road.” Later, it came to mean “way” and hence “the Way.” The TAO is “the Way” of looking at the world with a certain attitude of the mind, which is totally different from that of the West, and that is why it is so intriguing and fascinating, as evidenced by the fact that Tao Te Ching (道 德 經), the book of the TAO by Lao Tzu, is one of the most translated books in the world.

The TAO may provide self-inspiration and self-intuition for those who have to confront all the changes and challenges when diagnosed with myasthenia gravis or any autoimmune disease.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Letting Go

What Is “Letting Go”?

“Letting go” literally means releasing your close or tight fist in order to abandon or give up something that you are holding in your hand. If you are close- or tight- fisted, you also cannot receive anything. “Letting go” is detachment.

The opposite of “letting go” is “attaching to” something that you are stubbornly holding on to.

To live well, you need to ask yourself many self-probing questions as you continue on your life journey in order to find out: who you really are, and not who you think or wish you were; what you really need, and not what you want from life; why certain undesirable things happened while certain desirable things did not happen to you. Without knowing the answers to those questions asked, you can never be genuinely happy because you will always be looking for the unreal and the unattainable, just like the carrot-and-stick mule forever reaching out for the unreachable carrot in front.

In many ways, the human brain is like a computer program. Your whole being is like the computer hardware with the apparatus of a mind, a body, and its five senses. The lens through which you see yourself, as well as others and the world around you, are the software that has been programmed by your thoughts, your past and present experiences, as well as your own desires and expectations. In other words, it is you—and nobody else—who have programmed your own mindset. All these years, you may have been trapped in a constricted sense of the self that has prevented you from knowing and being who you really are. That is to say, your “conditioned” thinking mind may have erroneously made you "think" and even "believe" that you are who and what you are right now; but nothing could be further from the truth.

By asking relevant questions, you may have the human wisdom to "change" that pre-conditioned mindset, and thus enabling you to separate the truths from the half-truths or even the myths that you may have created for yourself voluntarily or involuntarily all these years.

What Are Attachments?

An attachment is basically your own emotional dependence on things and people that define your identity, around which you wrap your so-called “happiness”, and even your survival. Attachment is holding on to anything that you are unwilling to let go of, whether it is something positive or even negative.

An attachment is no more than a safety blanket to overcome your fear—fear of change and fear of the unknown from that change. To cope with that fear, all your attachments become your distractions.

We are living in a world with many problems that confront us in our everyday life, and many of them are not only unavoidable but also insoluble. To overcome these daily challenges, many of us just turn to attachments as a means of distracting ourselves from facing our problems head on, or adapting and changing ourselves in an ever-changing environment.

All our struggles in life, from anxiety to frustration, from anger to sadness, from grief to worry—they all stem from the same thing: our attachment to how we want things to be, rather than relaxing into accepting and embracing whatever that might happen after we have put forth our best effort.

Given that attachment is closely related to the thinking mind: how it processes life experiences, it is therefore important to know and to understand the different phases of life.lo, such as the development phase, the transitional phase, the consolidation phase, and the letting-go phase.

The Letting-Go Phase

With advancement in age, and as age begins to take its toll on the body and the mind, most of the life habits that control how they should live have become well established. Their thoughts, based on decades of their past experiences, now dominate their thinking, and hence control how they live the rest of their lives. At this point, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to alter the way they process their experiences and perceptions—just as the saying goes: “It is difficult to teach an old dog new tricks.”

In this final phase in their lives, unfortunately, they have to learn letting go, whether they like it or not. Everything begins to slip away from their lives: their youth, their health, and inevitably their minds too.

All in all, how the mind processes experiences and perceptions determines the type of person you are and will become. The happenings in your life are real, but the way you process and perceive them may positively or negatively affect your life because they are stored in your subconscious mind, which may either give you valuable life lessons, or create delusions and self-deceptions that may not only confuse you but also lead you astray. True human wisdom, therefore, plays a pivotal role in how the thinking mind processes all life experiences and their respective expectations.

It is in this final phase that you must learn how to let go of anthing and everything in order to live the rest of your life as if everything is a miracle.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Food Choices and Vision Health

Food choice holds the key to healthy vision. Always eat naturally to avoid seeing the doctors. Always eat whole foods. Your food choice should be based on nutrients, neither availability nor convenience. Processed foods offer you nothing except convenience.

There are many reasons why you should avoid processed foods:

(1) Processed foods are dead foods, devoid of nutrients. For example, bleached flour lacks nutrients, and it contains unnatural products.

(2) Processed foods are often loaded with salt, and high levels of salt lead to high blood pressure. Remember, the salt in processed foods is not natural sea salt, but chemicals that contain brain-toxic aluminum.

(3) Processed foods often require high level of processing, which not only removes anti-cancer agents that may be present in the food, but also produces cancer-causing heterocylic amines during high-heat processing. In other words, processed foods provide an environment promoting cancer growth.

(4) During food processing, fiber is degraded, if not totally removed. Fiber is beneficial to the removal of pollutants and toxins from the body.

(5) During food processing, unnatural toxic amino acids are formed, and they may adversely affect the production of DNA.

(6) Processed foods are often loaded with trans-fatty acids and other oxidized fats that damage the arteries, and thus affecting heart health as well as brain health due to clogged arteries. In addition, neurotoxic chemicals are one of the causes of dementia and Parkinson's disease.

(7) Simple sugars are often added to most processed foods. The high levels of simple sugars affect mental alertness when blood glucose levels drop. In addition, artificial sweeteners not only affect the absorption of amino acids by the brain, but also cause toxicity and hyperactivity in children.

Most food items in the supermarket that come in a box or carton are processed foods. In grocery shopping, read the food labels before any purchase. If they contain chemicals or terms unfamiliar to you, they are additives, colorings, and taste enhancers. If the main ingredients contain more than five items, you can forget about that food item - it is processed!

To live long, you need wisdom not only in food choice but also in living lifestyle. Get a copy of my book: The Book of Life and Living for more information on healthy living for healthy vision.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Age-Related Eye Problems

Age-Related Eye Problems

Age-related eye problems may affect your vision health as aging continues. Your eyes are one of the most important body organs because vision is one of the most important senses in that it affects how you look at the world, and thus affecting every aspect of your life and living.

Some of the most common vision problems are your focusing errors, such as astigmatism, farsightedness (hyperopia). nearsightedness, and presbyopia.  

When you have astigmatism, your cornea with irregular shape causes light rays entering your eye to split into different points of focus, and thus creating blurry vision.

When you are farsighted, your eyes cannot focus on near objects because light rays entering your eye focus on a point far beyond your retina.

When you are nearsighted, your eye balls are too long, and light rays "fall short" of achieving a point of focus on your retina.

When you have presbyopia, your eye's natural lens starts to lose elasticity and your eyes can no longer focus at multiple distances. This condition typically causes your near vision to start blurring, beginning at around age 40.

Most of the age-related eye problems have to do with your eye muscles that control how your eyes see. In real life, you exercise your body muscles; there is no rhyme or reason why you do not exercise your eye muscles to maintain your vision health. When you "exercise" your eyes, you move your eye muscles to create up-and-down, side-to-side or circular motion. You also "work" the muscles controlling back-and-forth movement of your eye's natural lens, to help achieve sight at multiple distances. There is a saying: “Use it or lose it”; that should also be applied to exercising your eye muscles.

Of course, there are many other ways of taking care of your vision health, just as there are many ways of taking care of your physical health. Don’t wait till it is too late to do anything. Your vision health has to do with your diet; for example, a diet that is bad for the heart is usually bad for the eyes, because anything that creates blockage in blood vessels may be damaging to the eyes, and not just the heart.

Read my book: Vision Self-Healing to find out how you may heal your eye problems through diet, exercise, and the mind. With better vision health, you can live your life as if everything is a miracle.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Understanding What Freedom Is

  Your freedom is about your right, your choice, and your obedience.

     But your right does not necessarily become your choice, and your choice may also involve your obedience to act accordingly. Remember, you are living your life, and nobody can live it for you. So, what is someone’s right does not have to be your choice, and your choice may be subjective to your obedience to others. Freedom is complicated and paradoxical, but it does play a pivotal role in every aspect of your daily life and living.

     The bottom line: To have a better understanding of what is “true freedom”, you need wisdom to open your mind.

 WISDOM

      Opening your thinking mind is your wisdom, which is not the same as your knowledge. Knowledge refers to the information you have acquired, while opening your mind means using the information collected to apply to your everyday life and living. So, an individual can be knowledgeable but without being wise.

     Then, what is wisdom? And where does it come from?

     Wisdom is all about opening your thinking mind to find out how it perceives and processes not only all your life experiences but also all the information you have been exposed to through your individual five senses. Your perceptions and processes create the so-called “realities” in your own mind, and they subsequently affect how your mind thinks, giving you your beliefs, your attitudes, and even your self-delusions.

     The reality is that you have both a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. All your past information is stored in your subconscious mind, which controls and dominates your conscious mind.  In other words, your wisdom is your mental capability to separate the truths from the half-truths, as well as to discern and discover the self-delusions and the self-illusions stored in your subconscious mind. Without that mental capability, you will not fully understand your “freedom”, as well as your choice and obedience to do this and not to do that.

 

“The reason why man may become the master of his own destiny is because he has the power to influence his own subconscious mind.” Napoleon Hill

 

     So, your wisdom is all about controlling your subconscious mind.

An Empty Mind 

     Your wisdom begins with having an empty mind, which is clarity of thinking. Your mind cannot think clearly with its many pre-conceived ideas and thoughts.  Only an empty mindset can free you from the many shackles of life that might have enslaved you for years, keeping you in bondage even without your knowing it.

Questioning

      Thinking is also a process of self-intuition through asking relevant questions to create self-awareness and self-introspection. It is the natural habit of your thinking mind to solve problems by asking specific questions. Solving problems with specific questions is self-empowering your thinking mind to attain wisdom because it creates your intent to learn, to discover, and then to change for the better.

     Knowing the importance of asking questions and the continuation of asking more relevant questions is the way to attaining true human wisdom.

     For example, to develop your empty mindset, do your reverse thinking—which is thinking backward by asking questions to find out how and why you might have your current thoughts of thinking with your attitudes and prejudices, as well as with your beliefs and emotions. Your reverse thinking may then show you that your so-called “new realities” are, in fact, distorted and even unreal.

FREEDOM with BONDAGE shows you how you can have "freedom" and not "bondage" in your everyday choices and decisions. 

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Vision Fitness Resources

Eyes are one of the most important body organs. Your vision becomes your life: what you see becomes your experiences with which you weave the fabrics of your life. Vision deteriorates with age, creating many poor vision problems.

Click here to get the resources for better vision health.

Stephen Lau

Understanding the Human Eye

Understanding the Human Eye

The human eye is not just a mechanical tool for vision; it is one of the body’s most important body organs. The importance of the human eye is due to the following:

It gives perception and vision of the outside world. Eyesight is the most important of your five senses.

It is also connected to the inner world—your mind. Seeing is believing, and perception is reality. Your vision affects your perception, and hence your personality; it creates your own world.

It is inter-connected with different body organs, such as the brain (which controls how you see), the heart (which pumps blood and transports oxygen to your eyes), the liver (which supplies nutrients to the eye, according to Chinese medicine).

How the Eye Functions

Simply put, you cannot see without light.

When you see an object, the light from that object passes through the lens (in front of the eyeball), which is held in place by ciliary muscles in your eye.

The lens then focuses the image on the retina (at the back of the eyeball), which sends the visual information through the optic nerve to the brain.

The human lens is designed for distant vision, not close vision. When the object is too close (i.e. less than 20 feet away), the ciliary muscles must contract in order to focus the visual image correctly on the retina. This process of contraction or expansion of the eye muscles is known as accommodation.

AWARENESS Consciously train your eyes for distant vision! Regularly look up from your computer or your book!

How the Eye Malfunctions

Poor vision is a result of the malfunctioning of the human eye, causing all types of vision problems.

When the ciliary muscles (eye muscles in the eye's middle layer that control accommodation for viewing objects at varying distances) are too weak to contract properly, the  focal image of a distant object may fall in front of the retina (i.e. when the eyeball is too long), instead of directly on the retina itself, and hence it creates a blurred image. This happens in nearsightedness.

When the ciliary muscles are too weak to contract properly, the focal image of a close object may fall beyond the retina (i.e. when the eyeball is too short), the resulting visual image becomes blurry and distorted. This happens in farsightedness.

The main causes of eye malfunctitoning are: mental stress, and eye muscle strain.

Therefore, the key to vision self-healing is to address these two critical issues.

AWARENESS: The shape of the eyeball determines the power of vision. The relaxation level of the eye pre-determines the shape of the eyeball.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Parental Anger

 Conflicts and misinterpretations often lead to anger with parents, resulting in the development of future relationships with a lack of love and trust.  Conflicts with biological parents, stepparents, foster and adoptive parents may vary in intensity, and even change drastically due to the separation and divorce of parents. In addition, bad parental relationships may worsen due to the following:

 

·       The birth of a new baby demanding more parental attention.

·       Financial problems, such as unemployment.

·       Development of anxiety and depression in both parents and children.

·       Experiences of abuse and bullying at home, at school or elsewhere.

·       Drug and alcohol use.

 

     Children, while growing up into preteens and teenagers, often become more independent and more responsible, with their own perspectives and preferences in every aspect of their lives. Their mental and emotional changes are the foundations of their disagreements with their parents, including their time management, their doings, and non-doings, as well as their obedience and disobedience to their parents’ demands.

 

Irrational anger

 

     On November 21, 2022, a 10-year-old boy shot and killed his mother by mistake. He allegedly claimed he took the gun from his mother’s bedroom down to the basement, where his mother was doing her laundry. The boy initially claimed that he was twirling the gun around his fingers when it went off and “accidentally” killed his mother.

     But, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the boy later confessed that he carried out the heinous act out of his anger after his mother refused to buy him a VR headset. Members of his family further revealed the 10-year-old boy’s many previous episodes of erratic anger and rage issues, such as setting fire at home and causing explosion when his demands were rejected by his mother.

     Even while being interrogated by the FBI, the boy surprisingly asked if the VR headset that he ordered from Amazon the day after killing his mother had arrived or not.

 

The Bottom Line

 

     So, as a parent, you need to improve your relationships with your children by doing the following:

 

·       Spending more quality time with more one-on-one interactions with your children as they grow up.

·       Finding the right time to address any issue, instead of responding to it right away.

·       Listening to complaints without any interruption.

·       Acknowledging their needs and wants, and explaining to them the differences between needs and wants.

·       Connecting or reconnecting them with warmth, such as hugging.

·       Being willing and open to any compromise.

·       Teaching them about love, compassion, forgiveness, and empathy.

·       Helping them set their own life goals, and not what you want them to do.

Angry No More: A new book on how to control and eradicate your anger.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau