Practice with Sunlight: Mistakes and Lessons

It's been a while since I last wrote about the sun treatment, and I'd like to share some new lessons I have learnt.

All newbies seem to make the same mistake. They think the sun has some magic power to cure their eyesight and all they have to do is to let as much light as possible in their eyes for as long as they can. With neophyte's ardor they look directly at the sun only to produce lasting scotomas and other disagreeable symptoms, to no benefit whatsoever. My own scotoma (the worst part of it) lasted for several weeks, and its remnants continued for months, after looking just once at a winter sun for 40 mins. After that I elaborated some safety rules that allowed me to look at the sun without unpleasant consequences, but still I didn't have any real benefit from sun gazing.

The truth is that all "magic" happens inside your mind, and not through any external object or influence, be it sunlight or whatever. When you know mental relaxation, you can use bright light as an aid to that magic, to let it come easier and seep deeper. But there's absolutely no recommendation to sungaze otherwise. You will do it wrong and only make your strain worse.

As you know, I have recently become an advocate of deep body relaxation as the first step in the Bates practice. It really gave me some knowledge of how my mind actually works and what is mental relaxation at all, how it feels. Now I am applying that experience to relearn all Bates practices, including sun treatment. Here is how I do it now.

First, I look at the sun with my eyes closed and imagine/remember a "rest point" in some part of my body, e.g. in my foot, or in a shoulder. Then I carefully open my eyes and look at the sky, still keeping my attention on the rest point. When I do it wrong and lose the memory of the rest point, the sky appears intolerably bright, not to mention the sun; I begin to squint, frown and blink nervously. In this case I close the eyes and remember the rest point again. When I do it right, the sky and the sun do not seem too bright at all; the eyes open wide all by themselves, and blink easily and comfortably. So far I've been able to stay in this state for few seconds. To make it longer, I swing my head and eyes slightly from side to side and notice the opposite movement relative to the rest point.

The point of this practice is to learn to stay comfortable with eyes opened in bright light, but not to just let as much light as possible into the eyes. It's not even necessary to look directly in the sun. In fact, I avoid looking directly at the sun for longer than a fraction of second, as I swing my head and eyes from side to side, because when I look longer, I can feel and identify that I'm immediately beginning to stare.

After such practice vision is improved and no disagreeble symptoms appear.

P.S. If you have white skin, it can age quickly when exposed to much sun. Consider wearing some protecting mask on your face.