Natural Vision #4: Improving your non-dominant eye

Learn key exercises and get tips for healthy functioning eyes

Ideally, we humans wouldn’t have a dominant eye and both eyes would work naturally to see an object (near or far).

However, since the body is asymmetrical, this means the majority of people have an eye that dominates.

The interesting thing about humans is the challenges we experience as a direct results of having a (slightly) stronger or (slightly) weaker eye, or side of the body.

Quite often we are unaware of these inbuilt imbalances until an external event or circumstance brings them into sharp focus (pun intended!).

If you have a problem with your dominant eye (hopefully temporary!), then you might have to cover it and use your weaker eye, for example.

I’ve seen people with broken arms/wrists who have to use their non-dominant arm/hand. This teaches them to adapt, but it’s hard at first. A whole new learning curve, and experience, ensues.

Becoming more aware

Inner practices like yoga can teach us so much about our unconscious ways of holding certain patterns because the body often mirrors the mind.

Is one side of the body more open, another more closed or tight? Is one leg stronger than the other in balancing poses?

Why? Is it really just ‘physical’ or are there mental and emotional imbalances that underpin the expression of that part of the body?

When it comes to our eyes, we usually just accept our hereditary fate because we aren’t taught to work with them in a conscious way. We are, as a society, also still overly reliant on external methods to “correct” the eyes when they deteriorate, either early on, or later in life.

Unfortunately, once you develop a dominant eye, it will continue to dominate in all situations and the other eye will become weaker over time.

Many people who go to the opticians for an eye test and who need glasses or contact lenses will have a stronger prescription for one eye.

In the rest of this article, I’ll touch on finding out which eye is dominant and, most importantly, how to start correcting that.

Further Topics covered in this article.

• Determining your dominant eye

• The brain favours the dominant eye

• Exercise: Creating better visual balance

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Determining your dominant eye