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came forward and in 1989 we carried out a matched control study for one year. The results have been published in the British Journal of Complementary Medicine.
Problems such as short-sightedness, long-sightedness, astigmatism, squint, initial stages of cataract and even glaucoma can be handled very effectively by deep relaxation techniques after trataka. Trataka and palming work wonders with people suffering from eye problems. Our experience with thousands and thousands of people who had minus two, minus four, minus six, shows that even people with high myopia of minus nine and eighteen have been able to reduce the strength of their glasses within two weeks, four weeks and eight weeks. In Bangalore we have a maths teacher with minus eighteen who has been able to reduce to minus eight. She challenged her opthalmic surgeon: "Look here, I am going to make my eyes completely normal and shatter all of your theories!" And that's what we see here. In just two to four weeks the astigmatism has been reduced by 30% and 44.4% in the right and the left eyes.
You may wonder as to how yoga can be used to help mentally retarded children, especially when they cannot learn yoga. We do it in three phases. Firstly, the teacher literally lifts the children into an inverted posture to increase the blood circulation and to bring about awareness in the head region. Gradually, in the second phase the child stays there. In the third phase, the children do it by themselves. A mongoloid girl came to us at the age of ten with a mental age of four years. Within one year she had learnt the technique of doing halasana and other asanas. At the end of one year her mental age increased to eight. At the annual celebration of her school she gave a beautiful demonstration. We found she was very interested in music and also dance, so we channeled her energies and at the annual celebration she danced to music in front of 400 people. Everybody was surprised to hear that this girl is mentally retarded.
We carried out control studies for one complete year. We measured the IQ levels using the Binet-Simon test and the yoga group scored a lot higher than the control group. So, the IQ levels in the yoga groups and the attention span of the children increased, as measured by the Wiener Social Maturity test. The social maturity also improved in all the children. Today, the
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