Healing Our Eyes from Overuse Watching Electronic Screens

For our practice of the day, we’re going to do something which we occasionally have done, but in a slightly different way. We’re going to work with healing our eyes. We frequently work with the third eye, which gets the eyes also. This is more specific for the eyes—for any fatigue that we’re having, any ailments we’re having—and also will help the third eye, our intuition. But it’s really a little bit more directed at the physical eyes. Since we’re all looking at screens so much of the time, we have this really directed, myopic focus, and it tends to put a lot of strain on the eyes.

Watch Video

In addition to this practice, the eyes benefit greatly from the “20-20-20 rule”—which is every 20 minutes, you look away from your computer at least 20 feet in the distance for at least 20 seconds. Doing it longer is even better.  This is good to do after the practice here.

Our mudra is going to be the hands over the eyes. But we’re going to have the heel of the hand over the eyes—gently over the eyes, not pressing very deeply— so that part of the hand is actually on the cheekbone, part of it’s on the nasal bone, part of it’s on the forehead. But the heel of the hands is pressing gently into the eyes, just giving them a little cushion, a little warmth.

We’ll work with learning the phrase first, and then we’ll put the mudra back on. And let’s do this in a call-and-response fashion: Basir, Shafi. Basir, Kafi. Basir, Shafi, Kafi.

Basir: divine seeing. Shafi: the divine healer. Kafi: divine healing. So we’re going to be bringing healing energy into the eyes. One more time: Basir, Shafi. Basir, Kafi. Basir, Shafi, Kafi.

And since this is a newish one, we don’t have any music with this. We just get to do an a cappella version with me. And once we get started and we’ve done it a few times, we’re going to be bowing gently back, bowing gently forward. Helps the energy of the central channel of the nervous system and gets things flowing a little bit better.

For those of you who need to—glasses off. And let’s sing. Let’s sing it a few times before we put the mudra on. Basir, Shafi. Basir, Kafi. Basir, Shafi, Kafi.

After singing/chanting a number of times, we move to the breath practice.

If you can keep your hands over the eyes, that’s good. If not, you can rest your elbows on your chest leaning forward, or you can drop your hands if you need to.

On the in-breath: Basir, Shafi. On the out-breath: Basir, Kafi.

Feeling the energy in the eyes on the in-breath, keeping it in the eyes on the out-breath.

On the inhale, breathing Basir, Shafi into the eyes. On the exhale, breathing Basir, Kafi into the eyes.

And now we move into assimilation meditation. We drop the hands. We let go of the phrase. We let go of the breathing practice. Let the energy flow deep into all the cells of our beings, letting it flow to wherever it needs to, without any direction from ourselves. We go soft and fluid, letting the energy float to where it needs to.

This is a great practice to do before bed. It’s also a really good one to do about every 20 or 30 minutes if working on screens of any kind—computers, tablets, phones. And after you’re done with your workday or after you’re done with a time of it, to give your eyes a chance to really relax and settle down. Your eyes will thank you. Your head will thank you. This eye strain will frequently lead to headaches and various other things, so we get to prevent those. Amin.