Join our membership for exclusive content: https://drsambernesmembership.com/join_us

Come to our practitioner’s retreat July 2025 in Santa Fe, NM https://www.drsamberne.com/unlock-your-bodys-natural-healing-with-somatic-movement/

Show Notes

Keywords: Iridology, eye health, iris analysis, health insights, holistic health, dietary recommendations, preventive health, Sam Berne

Summary: In this conversation, Sam Berne discusses the practice of iridology, explaining how the iris serves as a map to the body’s health. He elaborates on the significance of eye color and pigments in diagnosing potential health issues, emphasizing the importance of dietary and lifestyle changes for prevention and overall well-being. Berne highlights the educational aspect of iridology, advocating for a proactive approach to health rather than merely treating symptoms.
Takeaways
• Iridology analyzes the iris to reflect organ health.
• Eye color can indicate specific health tendencies.
• Blue eyes may suggest lymphatic and respiratory issues.
• Mixed eye colors often relate to liver and digestive health.
• Brown eyes can indicate blood toxicity and sluggish elimination.
• Iridology helps identify genetic health patterns.
• The shape of the pupil can reveal spinal health.
• Pigments in the iris indicate metabolic inefficiencies.
• Dietary changes can support eye and overall health.
• Iridology is a preventative tool for health education.
Sound Bites
• “The iris is a map to the body.”
• “Iridology can be used as a tool.”
• “Brown eyes struggle with blood toxicity.”
• “Iridology can show inflammation signs.”
Chapters
00:00Understanding Iridology: The Eye as a Health Map
13:06The Colors of the Iris: Insights into Health
19:51Pigments in the Iris: Indicators of Metabolic Health

Sam Berne (00:00.414)
One of the methods that I use to analyze and help people is by doing a investigation into the colored part of the eye called the iris and the iris is a map to the body and iridology is the study of the color the pigmentation and the structure of the iris and we also look

at the pupil which is inside the iris and through lots of clinical research over the years. There have been certain say patterns that show up based on the color of your eyes. So just generally speaking, if you’re blue-eyed like I am, there’s a tendency toward lymphatic weakness, sinus congestion.

lung congestion and arthritic symptoms, arthritic symptoms. If you’re dark brown, that’s a person that tends to be more towards having blood issues and glandular disturbances. And then the third type is the kind of the mixed where that’s a person that’s inherited both the brown and the blue eyes.

And they tend to suffer liver and digestive issues. So when we look at the colored part of the eye and we’re looking at the color the pigmentation and the structure. This is going to reflect several things our organ health our glandular health. It’s also going to show us genetic tendencies that perhaps our parents or grandparents were dealing with, you know, where could be things like

blood sugar issues or heart issues thyroid issues just as some examples, but iridology can be used as a tool. It’s the way I use it to measure different strengths and deficiencies that are located within the body and especially when you use it with kids like I do at kid power where I’m working with a lot of special needs kids. I mean just the other day I was

Sam Berne (02:28.673)
doing some, you know, vision analysis of several kids and I did a little iridology on them and parents couldn’t believe how spot-on I was about what their nurture points were in terms of their digestive health, their glandular health, toxicities that they might have to deal with. So when we look at the iris, we’re looking at all these different

pigments and patterns and colors that can be proactive and preventative, you know, like for example, sometimes I’ll pick up say a cardiac issue in the iris. I’ll see say a certain way the the heart. You know the heart pattern is and so that can tell us that herbally we might be able to do some things like Hawthorne.

as a way to support the heart better. Or if we have lymphatic congestion, it might be advised to avoid foods with gluten and dairy because those are definitely going to set off the respiratory issues and it’s also going to affect the lymphatic health which is going to cause inflammation.

So I want to give a shout out before I go any further to the father of iridology in the US, Dr. Bernard Jensen and Dr. Jensen. I actually studied with his daughter-in-law Ellen, Dr. Ellen Jensen. She was my teacher and that’s how I became certified in iridology. But Bernard Jensen was such a pioneer in the field of iridology. mean, he, I think he taught.

iridology in like 55 different countries amazing and he had the wherewithal to develop the maps and you know collaborated with a lot of different doctors around the world to create a mapping system today that is really great in terms of pinpointing different patterns in the iris and you know we talk about

Sam Berne (04:48.013)
How you know the eye is very connected systemically and metabolically to the body through Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Well, it’s also very connected to our glands our organs are inflammatory issues possibly cholesterol problems thyroid issues and to be able to have that validation proactively and especially in kids it’s

really really a great tool to help kids get what they need because if they have the proper energy on a cellular level, they’re going to learn faster and develop quicker, especially through the functional vision therapy programs that we’re talking about. All right. So I started off by talking about the three different colors of the eye.

blue eyes mixed and brown. I want to go into a little more detail on each one and it’s very simple. If you’ve got blue eyes, they can be light blue, gray, green, blue. There tends to be a sluggishness in the lymphatic system, mucus and sinus congestion. Inflammation is a big issue for the blue-eyed person, especially in the upper respiratory tract.

where you get, you know, conditions like croup and bronchitis and you know, colds and things like that that create a lot of mucus. So it really comes down to number one eliminating gluten, dairy and sugar and this includes, you know, wheat and making sure you’re getting enough of an anti-inflammatory diet things like celery. That’s probably my number one celery cucumber.

sprouts and lemon water. Okay, you can also do apple cider vinegar sipping it is a is a way in a glass of water. Again, you want to get the raw you can put apple cider vinegar is vinegar on your salad dressing berries apples. Pears are great for the blue-eyed people herbal teas like nettle dandelion clover. One of my favorites is oat straw tea.

Sam Berne (07:10.001)
Or you can do Mullen teas very good for the respiratory health. Omega-3 things like flax chia wild-caught salmon. These are things that are really helpful and foods that you want to avoid. If you’ve got blue eyes would be dairy products for fine sugar and heavy starches like the white foods white bread and pastries. All right, the second color Constitution is the mix the hazel.

These are like a pure green light brown. There’s a blend of blue and brown. I mean you can ask the person or ask the mom, you know, do you think your child has blue eyes or hazel eyes, you know, get their feedback. So with this particular set of colors, the mixed colors, there tends to be a problem with the liver and digestive health. There’s more inflammation in the digestive tract. They might not be digesting their food well.

This could be leading to things like candida or irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease. And of course, liver is very important for our eyes, but it’s important as a detoxification organ. Another thing the the mixed Constitution will show is blood sugar fluctuation. So we might see markings on the pancreas as an example, bile insufficiency, sluggish gallbladder.

Remember that it’s very important for us to absorb our eye nutrients vitamin A, is fat soluble lutein and zeaxanthin. So if we have a problem with our gallbladder or we don’t have a gallbladder or we’re dealing with a lot of toxins in our body, then we’re not absorbing those fat soluble foods that are really feeding the eyes. That’s why we get night vision issues, dry eye retina issues, cataracts.

You know macular degeneration all of these things show up later. what is the recommended food for the mixed color? I would say number one liver supporting foods. This would be carrots beets artichokes turmeric and lemon high fiber vegetables really good the cruciferous vegetables would be like broccoli or cauliflower kale radishes and then the low glycemic

Sam Berne (09:35.157)
fruits and I think this goes for everybody is if you’re going to do some kind of fruit or carbohydrates pastries sugars, you want to go more towards low glycemic index foods. So this could be berries cherries grapefruit and bitters. So this would be something you put on your salad in the middle of the day could be dandelion greens arugula the bitter bitter type.

vegetables for your salads go a long way for cleansing the liver. Obviously foods you want to avoid fried greasy fast foods, alcohol, processed sugars and food additives and dyes. I mean that goes across the board. And then the third type I call the hematogenic type or the brown eyes. These are the dark brown black brown may look velvety.

or uniform. So these people tend to have a really strong constitution, but they struggle struggle sometimes with blood toxicity things like anemia or you know blood imbalances. They also can lean more towards sluggish elimination. So you have a tendency toward liver and bowel sluggishness and there’s a risk of

Mineral imbalances like not absorbing the minerals. These are really people that are on the go a lot. So they need B vitamins and minerals that they’re absorbing and the B vitamins help them. They’re going to do mineral rich foods and this would support the thyroid really well seaweed dolls. And then of course the dark greens lentils work really well quinoa.

clean proteins. So if they’re going to do, you know, more animal products, I would say cage free eggs, wild caught salmon, grass-fed beef, organic chicken, and then chlorophyll rich foods like chlorella, spirulina, wheatgrass works well. They tend to do better if the foods are cooked. So things like Kitchery, that’s an Ayurvedic formula.

Sam Berne (11:58.955)
rice and beans and vegetables that’s very healing for the body and you can use different Ayurvedic herbs like cumin, coriander, turmeric.

Sam Berne (12:12.403)
Those things help with the digestifier and Kitchery is a really great great thing for the brownite folks. You want to avoid excess red meat, white sugar, refined grains and synthetic binders and fillers. So that’s kind of the scenario with the with the colored part of the eyes.

The next thing I want to do is I want to go into the pigments of the eyes before I go into the pigments. I want to reveal I want to share what are the inherent strengths of what iridology can do and what it can’t do. So first of all, iridology can improve the organs the glands and the tissues. It tells us what

is weak what we need to nurture on what nutrients they need to utilize what what are the the problems with toxicity? they discharge the toxins? Sometimes the pigments and the markings can tell us what special nurturing is needed in terms of toxicity. Iridology can also show inflammation signs.

in an organ or a gland and that tells us how we might react to illness autoimmune disease. It’s also going to show us genetic patterns. So even though we may not be dealing with it, there might be tendencies based on our mother and father and by the way, the right eye is the father and the left eye is the mother in terms of our, you know, genetic connections. Another thing that we can look at in iridology is the

The shape of the pupil that regulates how much light gets in and it tells us the pupil shape tells us about the health of the spine. It can also tell us about what part of the spine is traumatized or is injured based on the shape. And so chiropractors use this quite a bit as a diagnostic tool. I certainly use it in my practice in craniosacral therapy.

Sam Berne (14:32.347)
looking at the shape of the pupil. If it’s not completely round, if part of it is kind of flat or it’s elliptical. This tells us that there’s definitely some problems with our spinal health. Everything from the cervical spine all the way down to the sacrum. Now, another thing the iris will show us is problems, weaknesses in our connective tissue.

Tendency towards tend we might have a tendency towards hernias hemorrhoids, varicose veins and even scoliosis. Iridology can show us glandular deficiencies, high cholesterol levels and lymphatic congestion. But now here are some things that iridology can’t do. We can’t diagnose disease and treat based on that. It doesn’t diagnose things like parasites.

our Candida. cannot confirm bacteria viral or fungal infections. We can’t tell whether a woman is pregnant. We can’t diagnose tumors cancer or whether a person has kidney issues in iridology. We talked about the three different constitutional types. And now what I want to do is I want to move towards the pigments. So

What are the pigments mean in iridology pigments are the colored spots. There are the the flex there the specs that we see in the iris and they can be there. Usually we see them really quite prominently where they’re kind of deposits of byproducts of inefficiencies in our metabolism.

Sometimes they’re inherited. Sometimes they show up later. So they offer insights into different glandular and organs of the body. So for example, one of the most common pigments that we see is orange and this is often related to pancreatic stress or blood sugar metabolism issues and it can be a predisposition to things like hypoglycemia.

Sam Berne (16:56.679)
insulin resistance diabetes. It’s also something I look for in cataract development because sometimes cataracts develop based on blood sugar imbalances. And if you can repair those sometimes the cataracts can slow down their progression and even in reverse and early stage cataracts. Brown either the rust or the reddish brown suggest

that there’s stress in the liver in the gallbladder in the digestive tract and there might be a history of poor detoxification or exposure to environmental toxins. The third pigment that I see is yellow and this is related to lymphatic congestion. It also can be related to kidney stress. Usually you’ll see a diffused ring maybe around the

the edge of the the iris and this also can affect the skin health. This can tell us about skin. Another pigment will see is dark blue or black and this often relates to stagnation or degeneration in a certain organ zone. So this can relate to long-standing toxicities or poor circulation that area. One of the things I look at is dental health and

If you’ve had mercury amalgams or mercury removed, have you done enough toxicity release of the mercury or is it still, you know, part of your systemic and metabolic health? And then there’s the white pigment around the edge of the iris and this can relate to cholesterol imbalances, fatty deposits, circulatory congestions, drusen in the retina.

and inflammation and acute stages. Whenever I see cholesterol rings, one of the things I’m really looking at is liver health because if we can prove improve liver health that can really affect a lot of different aspects of the health and the body. So I think it comes down to a couple things. First of all, I think we need to take a look at our genetic tendencies. Number two, I think we need to take a look at

Sam Berne (19:21.695)
What are the actual nurture points of our glands and organs in our current health and can we be proactive in educating ourselves in dietary changes possibly supplements and obviously reducing things like sugar dairy gluten wheat and then the third is lifestyle our stress response to life and you know how we deal with family dynamics with

You know relationships, I think the lifestyle is also part of this whole situation. So in summary, what I would say is that iridology is an educational and preventative tool where we can work on proactively our health and restore balance and vitality from the inside out. So we’re not treating symptoms. We’re not treating disease, but we’re trying to restore balance and harmony.

 

 

 

For even more from Dr. Sam, check out his new exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars: https://drsambernesmembership.com/

Check out his upcoming practitioner’s program starting May 13th!
https://www.drsamberne.com/practitioners-training/

Keywords

nutrition, brain health, children, vision therapy, developmental delays, biochemical imbalances, essential nutrients, meal planning, healthy eating, cognitive function
Summary

This presentation by Sam Berne explores the critical role of nutrition in enhancing brain health and functional vision therapy for children aged 3 to 16. It emphasizes the importance of addressing biochemical imbalances, essential nutrients, and effective meal planning to support cognitive function and overall development.
takeaways
• Nutrition is a building block for children’s learning and development.
• Biochemical imbalances can hinder nutrient absorption in children.
• The digestive system’s health is closely linked to brain function.
• Sugar addiction in children can complicate dietary changes.
• Essential nutrients like Omega-3 and zinc are vital for brain and eye health.
• Hydration is crucial for maintaining cognitive and digestive health.
• Meal planning should focus on whole foods and nutrient-dense options.
• Early discussions about nutrition can improve therapy outcomes.
• Healthy eating strategies can be adapted for busy families.
• Food choices directly impact children’s behavior and learning capabilities.

Sound Bites
• “Sugar addiction is hard to break.”
• “Zinc is important for retinal health.”
• “Food is the fuel for vision.”

Chapters
00:00Introduction to Nutrition and Brain Health
02:47The Importance of Nutrition in Developmental Delays
06:11Biochemical Imbalances and Nutritional Testing
08:59Essential Nutrients for Vision and Brain Health
11:55Meal Planning and Healthy Eating Strategies
14:48Conclusion: Fueling Vision and Learning

Sam Berne (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome to the program today. So this is a lecture that I gave recently to my students on the aspects of nutrition and high brain health and this is working with kids between the ages of 3 and 16. So I hope you enjoy the presentation. Thanks for tuning in. Hey everyone, welcome to the presentation today. So it’s

It’s great to be here. I enjoyed your Q &A at the beginning. So I want to jump in and talk about the nourishing vision and this has to do with what are the best foods in nutritional practices to enhance functional vision therapy in children. So I’ll start off by telling a story.

I was practicing in the East Coast at the time and I was giving a presentation down in Florida and it was a very well received professional lecture on vision therapy, nutrition, naturopathic medicine. And at the end of the lecture, there was this man that was sitting in the front row.

and everybody had left and he said I want to introduce myself. My name is Dr. Sutton. I’m a professor at Berry College here in Fort Lauderdale. I’m also a developmental optometrist. I’ve been in practice over 45 years and I really enjoyed your lecture, but there were some holes in it and I was kind of taken aback by it because

You know, I was a hot shot. had already published a couple of books. I was very well known. I was lecturing all over the place. And here was this gentleman saying, you know, dude, you got some holes in your thinking. So it caught my attention and we went out to dinner and he told me a little bit about his background and all the things he had done working with special needs kids.

And so we struck up a friendship and I actually became a student of his. And over a course of many years, he and I did a lot of collaborations together. And he was in practice in Miami Beach, Florida. And he was a professor at Berry College where he taught special ed teachers and teachers who worked with learning disabilities.

So I definitely had a lot to learn and got some humility over it. And there are many things I learned from Dr. Sutton, but one of the main things that I did learn and this had to do with nutrition is that when we would consult on a lot of different cases and these were complicated cases where there were multiple developmental delays sensory motor integration issues birth trauma.

Obviously there was biochemistry issues. One of the things that he taught me was that the nutrition is an essential piece the building block sometimes the secret in the puzzle and really stimulating a child’s learning and development because what he said was that when a child has got

developmental delays, possibly traumas, other issues that usually there’s a biochemical imbalance going on on a cellular level, meaning that there is an interference in the child’s ability to absorb nutrients. Now, of course, there can be things like inflammation, oxidative stress, poor digestion.

And you know, many other things that are obstacles which inhibit the ability of us to absorb our foods. mean, plenty of us as adults have had these kinds of dysbiosis imbalances in the digestive system. And we know the digestive system has been called the second brain and it mirrors a lot of the things that go on in our upstairs brain in our head.

And because our eyes originate from the brain, we have to include the eyes in the brain discussion. And so the eyes are distant relative to our gut health and especially working with kids where we’re trying to have them make big changes in their development and getting them to learn. They have to have the energy to do that. And if they have

biochemical imbalances on a cellular level. They probably don’t have the energy to do the learning and the changing and the transformation that we as therapists are asking them to do. So in the sequence of when we might introduce the conversation of biochemical imbalances, especially with parents. It’s important to have that discussion early on. Now, one of the ways that I open the door with that is

That in my history, and it’s a very extensive history over 12 pages, lifestyle, birth, motor skills, auditory skills, many other things that we have the parent write out. What does a child eat? What do they eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks? What are their drinks? Because a lot of times if there is a biochemical imbalance, we start to see where kids

gravitate certain to certain types of foods and one of my favorite games. I like to play with the kids is I’ll say, okay, Johnny, we’re going to leave your mom and dad out of this discussion. You and I we’re going to go down to the local grocery store. Just you and I and I want you to take me to your favorite aisle. What would you go for? What would you eat? What are you thinking about and 99 % of the time it’s either cookies candy.

carbohydrates, sodas, you know, all the things that are going to interfere with having that long-range energy that we need to have proper brain chemistry, mood and also the ability to learn because we need the energy to do that. So once we have the diet, once we know, you know, what we’re dealing with another thing that we have to

Take into account in the equation is that if a child is going for sugary things, carbohydrate things that this has almost become an addiction and it’s very difficult to just go cold turkey on any kind of addiction, especially sugar. So one of the things we have to look at and there are many tests that we can use. I have a book that I wrote about 10 years ago called taking it in and in that book I talk about

different biochemistry tests that I do that give us a baseline on what’s going on. Now we can obviously do a 24-hour blood test. could certainly order, you know, other things like what are your D3 levels? What’s your, know,

protein inflammation, homocysteine levels will tell us about inflammation. A lot of things that we can we can ask for but usually in a blood test things are missed because unless there’s a gross imbalance, everything’s going to look pretty normal. So then we start looking at more subtle tests like a 24-hour urinalysis test urine test, which can give us information on heavy metal toxicity.

or saliva test, which gives us information on endocrine health or hair mineral analysis, which tells us about what are the minerals that work. We’re excreting into the hair and these minerals are the spark plugs which make ourselves work and based on mineral ratios. We can see if we’re either sensitive to carbohydrates, not absorbing carbohydrates, whether we have inflammation, adrenal thyroid imbalances.

heavy metals, other toxicities. So there’s a lot of things that you can get from all of these kinds of tests. Not one test gives you everything. I also like stool tests. If we’re thinking about parasites and you can even do bio resonant testing, which is more of an energetic way of measuring the body’s compatibility, especially with foods and supplements and so on. Another way we can test it is by going through certain

guidelines, which I’m going to talk about and you can do something called kinesiology muscle testing and for those of you that aren’t doctors certainly doing kinesiology, which is where you read the body based on the body strength while they’re holding the supplement or the food or the or the whatever and if it’s strong, then the body could use it. There’s a good chance. There’s a compatibility going on.

So the role of nutrition is so important in our functional vision therapy program because if we can improve dietary absorption and get the right foods in the body, it is going to have a very high impact on things like visual processing, visual coordination, visual tracking and cognitive function as we call it our prefrontal cortex. So

The the issue around not having the proper nutrients in the body affects us from everything when we start the primitive reflex therapy vestibular stimulation gross and fine motor skill sets that we’re working on and common nutritional deficiencies that we can say pretty much are in most of these kids would be number one Omega-3 fatty acids.

Number two would be the trace mineral zinc. Number three would be the fat soluble vitamin A or beta carotene and then B vitamins magnesium and perhaps other minerals trace minerals depending on the stress level. Most kids are under stress. So they’re going to need B complex and minerals. A lot of times they’re not holding their minerals. We can look at iridology.

And we can tell say on a blue-eyed person their constitution is saying they need to have a strong lymph system and the very sensitive to gluten-dairy and sugar. We can look at the mixed hazel color, which has to do with the possibility of maybe liver gallbladder issues. And then we can look at the brown colored eyes, which can reflect certain things blood disorders and certain issues with

Most of the glands and organs could be pancreas liver gallbladder and so on. So we can use a variety of different ways to figure out what are the possible nutritional deficiencies. So going through this in more detail number one, I think omega-3 is so essential not only for our eye health retinal health, but also our brain health and some of the sources that we can get omega-3 would be wild-caught salmon.

grass-fed eggs. Obviously everything we do is related to organic non-gmo very important. So omega-3 wild-caught salmon sardines walnuts flax seeds chia seeds. These are all possibilities vitamin A, is related to retinol or beta-carotene. This affects our night vision. It affects our focusing muscles.

It affects our retina health. So these would be foods that contain eggs, carrots, sweet potatoes and dark leafy vegetables. Then there’s the fat soluble plant carotenoids called lutein and zeaxanthin which protect us against blue light and they also can help with visual acuity. Lutein and zeaxanthin can be found in spinach, kale and eggs and bell peppers.

I find that zinc and copper are notoriously low in kids and zinc is very important for retinal health and it’s also a neurotransmitter. So it’s copper. And so where can you get these pumpkin seeds chickpeas cashews and shellfish and then we look at the B vitamins and I would recommend getting folate not folic acid. Make sure you’re getting an end niacin B3

It’s really good for circulation, but you want to get a full spectrum B complex. This is so good for nerve function and stress. So where do we get B vitamins grass-fed meats eggs legumes dark leafy greens and then finally magnesium magnesium is such an essential trace mineral and most of us are really deficient in it.

Magnesium helps in so many different chemical reactions on a cellular level. It’s really great for the muscles, especially the eye muscles and visual stress. We can find magnesium things like avocados, nutseed and cacao dark chocolate. Obviously the foods you want to avoid would be processed foods, sugar, artificial dyes and preservatives, omega-6 overloads. So too much

Omega-6 creates more inflammation and then of course gluten-dairy considerations. I find with most of these kids if we take them off gluten-dairy and sugar immediately their behavior gets better and their cognitive health improves. Something that’s not talked about is hydration. Make sure you’re getting six to eight to ten glasses of healthy water daily.

We’re now recommending hydrogen water or and or structured water. Those can be very helpful in terms of giving the cell more energy and being able to absorb the water better because when we’re dehydrated this affects our brain health and our digestive health and it creates more inflammation. So you have to be really really careful. All right. So in terms of meal planning some things we talk about would be

getting those Omega-3 rich smoothies in the morning. If you can get a smoothie in there that works really well. Again, we use things like celery and beets and kale. Maybe a little ginger turmeric. You could add a date if you wanted to. Cabbage also. Again, it’s kind of you have to see what kids with their texture.

their ability to handle different textures. I should say especially orally some kids just can’t do smoothies try to get more protein in the morning whether you do almond butter eggs avocados and try to do more whole grains as opposed to white food again when we when we get into the white food. This is really going to be low calories.

lots of carbs, a boosting or a spike of the blood sugar levels, which are going to throw us off in our behavior and our focus. So lunch and dinner could be things like wild caught salmon, grass-fed meats, root vegetables. If you’re going to do snacks again, organic nuts, cacaua, fruit with almond butter, hummus.

with carrots and easy food swaps. So healthier, healthier alternatives for busy parents. How do you figure this out? Because you can’t keep going to McDonald’s or Wendy’s and you know, expect to get the proper nutrients that you need. So food is the fuel for vision. That’s what I’m going to leave you with and you want to

have this discussion about nutrition. Either in the first or second sessions are very early on in your physical vision therapy program. And the reason is is the earlier you can Institute the food conversation the supplement conversation the better chance you have of getting success in the physical therapy. Remember if you’ve got the energy you’re going to absorb what you’re trying to learn better.

than if your energy is inconsistent because of poor diet. So this is round one of nourishing your body and nourishing your vision. And these are some of the best practices and foods that enhance function in children.

 

 

 

Keep Up with Dr. Sam
Website: https://www.drsamberne.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SamBerneOD/?fref=ts
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samberneod/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/drsamberne
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drsamberne/

To make a one on one time with Dr. Berne for an Iridology session and/comprehensive functional vision assessment, contact him: appointments@drsamberne.com

To learn more about his practitioner’s program go to: https://www.drsamberne.com/practitioners-training/

Keywords

color therapy, light therapy, vision improvement, holistic healing, emotional health, energy fields, chakras, adaptogenic therapy, natural light, functional vision therapy

Summary

In this podcast episode, Sam Berne discusses the principles and applications of color and light therapy, emphasizing its benefits for vision improvement and overall health. He shares personal experiences and case studies, explaining how light therapy can enhance emotional well-being, energy fields, and even physical health. The conversation covers the historical context of color therapy, practical techniques for implementation, and the adaptogenic nature of light therapy, encouraging listeners to explore the natural light around them.
Takeaways

Light therapy can improve vision and emotional health.
Color therapy has historical roots in ancient civilizations.
Different colors can stimulate or relax the body.
Light affects our biological systems and energy fields.
Color therapy can be adapted for children with spectrum disorders.
The eyes are a key entry point for light therapy.
Light therapy can be used to balance the nervous system.
Natural light exposure is beneficial for health.
Color preferences can reveal emotional connections.
Light therapy should be approached with respect and care.
Titles

Sound Bites

“Light therapy can do a lot of great things.”
“Light is energy and it’s also information.”
“We need light as well.”
“We can actually fill up our body with light.”
“Color is a language. They understand.”
“Light therapy is like that as well.”
Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Color and Light Therapy
02:57 Applications of Light Therapy in Vision Improvement
05:52 Understanding Light and Its Biological Impact
08:45 The Role of Color in Therapy
11:56 Exploring the Color Spectrum and Its Effects
14:46 Practical Techniques for Color Therapy
18:13 Color Therapy for Children and Spectrum Disorders
21:07 The Connection Between Eyes and Emotions
23:58 Adaptogenic Nature of Light Therapy
26:52 Conclusion and Practical Advice on Light Therapy

Join our practitioner’s training! For more information: https://www.drsamberne.com/practitioners-training/
For even more from Dr. Sam, check out his new exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars: https://drsambernesmembership.com/

Keywords

vision therapy, behavioral optometry, eye health, personal development, holistic healing, functional vision, primitive reflexes, meditation, emotional health, professional coaching

Summary

In this conversation, Sam Berne discusses his journey in the field of vision therapy, highlighting the influence of his mentors, Dr. Albert A. Shankman and Dr. Albert A. Sutton. He shares insights on the importance of holistic approaches to eye health, the role of emotional and physical well-being in vision improvement, and the significance of primitive reflexes in developmental optometry. Berne emphasizes the need for surrendering to the process of healing and the value of continuous learning in his practice.

Takeaways

Functional vision integrates physical, emotional, and spiritual health.
Vision therapy can significantly improve reading comprehension.
Surrendering to the process is essential for healing.
Primitive reflexes are crucial for children’s vision development.
Holistic approaches are often overlooked in mainstream optometry.
Continuous learning from mentors shapes professional growth.
Emotional tension can manifest as vision problems.
Building connections in the professional community is vital.
Vision improvement requires commitment and consistency.
Dr. Sutton’s techniques are applicable in special needs education.

Sound Bites

“Primitive reflexes start in utero.”
“He was way ahead of his time.”
“Take good care of your vision.”

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Functional Vision Integrative Body
04:12 The Influence of Dr. Albert A. Shankman
12:16 Learning from Dr. Albert A. Sutton

 

Sam Berne (00:00.078)
Hey everyone. Welcome to the program. Before we start. I have a few announcements. First of all, many of you know that I’ve started a practitioners training and it’s called functional vision integrative body. And this has come after 40 years of distilling

A lot of information, not only about improving your eyes and vision, but things like brain health, body health, working on a physical, emotional and spiritual level, using things like color therapy, iridology, craniosacral, somatic movement and many other things.

So I’ve written up this course for non eye doctor. So it’s a coaching program and it works for any practitioner. let’s say you’re a chiropractor and somebody comes in and they’re complaining about their eyes while they’re exercises and strategies and educational things that you can teach your clients or patients to get better.

I’ve been working with a few body workers like massage therapists, craniosecral therapists, somatic experiencing therapists, and they’re just loving the program. So if you’re interested, contact me appointments at drsamburn.com and we can have a conversation, see if it’s a good fit for you.

Sam Berne (01:39.842)
The other thing I want to mention is my membership program. We’re going on year number three and what I’ve done is I’ve taken a lot of my creative energies that I used to put towards social media and I’ve created content that is exclusively for the membership.

It’s about 20 bucks a month. It’s really worth it. If you’re interested in some of the deeper issues that might be going on not only about your eyes, but about health spirituality meditation energy medicine things like that. So if you’re interested in the membership, I highly recommend it.

You can go to my website, drsamburn.com and right below the word vision. You’ll see membership and you can click on that and there’s a free seven-day period where you can join and you can peruse the content.

What I’ve started to do over the last few weeks is post my written blogs. I’ve written a lot of written blogs over the years and I’m starting to post those in the membership. know some people like like to read and so we’re going to offer you things whether you listen watch or read.

reduce the resistance in your quest of the information. The last thing I’m going to be offering which I’ve actually started is some professional coaching in the area of marketing, social media, brand building.

Sam Berne (03:24.174)
I’ve been very successful at doing those things. In fact, I was recognized by a nonprofit organization here in Santa Fe to offer seminars and do some private coaching. And of course, this is all volunteer, but I want to widen the net. So if you’re a health practitioner, if you’re a young entrepreneur,

Contact me, you can go to my business website, iClarityBusinessSolutions.com and you can read some of my blogs and some of my offerings. And if you want some help in the area of growing your business, I love working with young entrepreneurs, that’s what I’ve done with this nonprofit. Contact me and we can see if we’re a good fit.

Okay, let’s go on to the show today. My number two mentor is an optometrist Albert A. Shankman. Dr. Shankman. You want to know about this guy?

So Dr. Shankman was an optometrist. He was a behavioral optometrist who practiced in the Connecticut area. And after I moved back to the East Coast after my internships were over and I was moonlighting in a lot of different primary care offices, you know, looking for the place where I could start in and open my own office or affiliate with somebody.

I remember getting a flyer in the mail and it was an invitation from Dr. Shankman and he was saying that he is doing a year-long program for any optometrist who’s interested in learning his method of vision therapy and he called it psycho behavioral vision enhancement. In fact, he wrote a book about it. Vision enhancement training, psycho behavioral vision and enhancement. you’re interested.

Sam Berne (05:17.997)
And so I enrolled in the course. Now I was living in Philadelphia at the time and I just started a practice there. And in my own vision, I had a couple things going on for, so I was very nearsighted. And the second thing was, is that reading was not something I was very interested in. Even though I was an A student, I did well in school, I was in the National Honor Society. I was never really good at taking, you know, the, the SATs and you know, those, those kinds of tests.

And comprehension was not easy for me reading comprehension. So when I contacted Dr. Shankman and I went up and I had an evaluation from him, I decided I was going to be a patient of his. So I would go up once a month. It was about four hour drive.

and I would do vision therapy with him over the weekend. Now at that time, he was in his mid 70s, so he had sold his practice and he was living in a retirement community, had a great condo and his wife, Shankman, she also worked in his office as a vision therapist and we became quite close like family.

And every month I would go up there and I would, you know, get an update in my vision therapy program. And then in between I was doing 20 to 40 minutes every day, seven days a week of vision therapy practices that were very different than what I learned in school. They were very involved in movement and balance and working with the eye patch and

looking at psycho-emotional and spiritual and energetic reasons around, you know, my own vision problems. And I remember Dr. Shankman said two things to me at my first visit. He said my myopia was a result of the tension that I carried in my eyes as a way to muscle my way to the answer. And that was pretty accurate. Second thing he said is the reason why I wasn’t a good reader is that my left eye wandered out. I had very poor convergence.

Sam Berne (07:23.631)
with my eyes, especially when I read and this either leads to confusion, double vision, suppression in the eye. When our two eyes don’t work together, the brain gets confused and it tends to suppress, you know, the non-dominant eye. And so I started in an Invisvision therapy practice and within a couple of months, I noticed that my nearsighted prescription reduced and it kept reducing and as I kept reducing,

Consciousness opened up insights opened up things changed for me and you know myopia is related a lot to the kidneys and fear.

and tension. And I noticed that a lot of that stuff was kind of just evaporating. And at the same time, I also noticed that I was reading better, that my comprehension got better, that I understood what I read. I could read more. I could read faster. And I got to a point six months in the program and he made you commit to a year. And that is a actually very important point because

You know, people think, I can go to a behavioral optometrist once and get the changes and that’s not true.

because the habits and the conditioning and the belief systems around our visual system get ingrained very early on. In fact, our eyes are like, you know, videotape library where we as children internalize our parents’ experiences. And Dr. Shankman pointed that out to me and he was right. And then about six months in, I got kind of frustrated because I want my, I was very goal oriented and I wanted to get to a place where,

Sam Berne (09:10.873)
want to get rid of my nearsightedness completely. And it wasn’t happening. In fact, the more I stressed into it, the worse my eyes got, even though it hadn’t been making a lot of progress. So he said to me two things. He said, first of all, you have to give up the goal. I said, I can’t do that. And second thing he said to me was you’re too attached to the results and you have to really dive into the process.

like, man, I love results. I want results. That’s what I live for. So I wrestled with that. I remember talking to my brother and my brother said to me, very smart, he said…

I said, well, you you paid this guy a lot of money. You’ve invested all this time. Why don’t you just do what he says, you know, give it up, man. And so sometimes brothers have the wisdom. So I ended up surrendering. Surrendering is a big thing and letting go as we all know, you know, because change is is constant, right? And we’re always changing. Things are always changing. Sometimes it’s very uncomfortable. But how can we surrender into and

with the change. So after I changed my mindset with him, with Dr. Shankman, some magical things started to happen. My eyesight really started to improve. In fact, one day I woke up and I was late to the office. I lived in Center City, Philadelphia. My office was out on the main line and

I was like halfway to the office. I went, my goodness. I forgot to put my contacts in and I can read the road signs. So that was kind of like a come to Jesus moment where I was like, wow, I don’t really need these lenses anymore.

Sam Berne (11:00.077)
And so we continued on. One of the things that Dr. Shankman recommended that I do is take up meditation, which I did and I still meditate. so doing a lot of different modalities along with vision therapy, I completely dissolved my near sighted prescription and I was 28 years old at the time. So it inspired me to move into a direction where I was going to exclusively work in a practice

where I was helping people improve their vision. Road less traveled because if I’d gone mainstream, sold glasses, gotten into disease-based care, I probably would have made a lot more money. I would probably, in some ways, in terms of the profession, been more acknowledged. But I took the road less traveled, kind of like my modus operandi. I tend to do that a lot.

And it set me off in a career where I’m still doing it today, 40 years later, and probably will continue to do it until I physically can’t anymore. So Dr. Shankman, kudos to you for giving me so many gifts, and you’re right up there in Mount Rushmore with Dr. Sanit.

Okay. The third eye doctor I want to talk about is a developmental optometrist who practiced in Florida. met him when he was in his seventies and it’s an interesting story. His name is Dr. Albert A. Sutton, Dr. Sutton. And when I moved to New Mexico, I had a hard time getting a license to practice because New Mexico is a good old boys state.

and it’s a poor state, 48th poorest state in the union. And so they kind of limit the number of outsiders that come in to get a license. And I was having trouble, even though I thought I passed all the tests and I had to retake the national boards, which is a standardized written test.

Sam Berne (13:04.043)
I had to take pathology slides, you know, things like that. So I was at a conference and I met Dr. Sutton and I told him my dilemma. He said, why used to be on the state board in Colorado? And here’s the strategy. This is what you need to do. You need to call up the president of the board, tell him you’re doing vision therapy, behavioral optometry, and you know, let him get to know you. Don’t try to sue him or, you know, get mad at him. Be friends, make connections.

network. And so I did that for about six months and magically and miraculously. I got my license after the third try. So New Mexico license is very valuable not only for New Mexico, but then I recognize that there was a reciprocity deal with New Mexico and Hawaii. So I also have a Hawaii license and in my next show. I’m going to talk about my relationship with Hawaii and talk a little bit about travel there.

I tend to like to go outside of just talking about eyes. So stay tuned for that show. Anyways, Dr. Sutton and I became friends and I became a student of his and Dr. Sutton was really a pioneer in the field of development in children learning and his testing was very whole body.

He had a test called mind body testing where he tested vestibular visual fixation body movement bilateral integration many different things. And then he brought two of my now close colleagues from Scandinavia Lena and Thorkeld Rasmussen who were

doctors of optometry and they practiced in Denmark and Sweden and he brought them to the United States and they taught us the primitive survival reflexes and the primitive reflexes is such an essential part of vision therapy, especially with kids.

Sam Berne (15:14.925)
OTs, some of them do primitive reflexes. There are a few people out there that are teaching it, but primitive reflexes, those movement patterns start in utero and the purpose of those movement patterns is to help the newborn adjust to being outside the birth canal in the womb. And many, many kids who have vision problems that are school-aged still have the primitive reflexes. And Dr. Sutton recognized that because he worked with Arnold Gazelle at the Gazelle

Institute. It’s place that I attended in the mid 1980s and the gazelle Institute was at that time a beacon of light for vision development. Now again, I’ve talked about the difference between eyesight and vision. Eye sight is eyeballs and glasses and reading the distance chart, but vision is how the eye brain and body work together and there’s a developmental process on when kids develop their vision as it relates to learning and

academic performance. And Dr. Sutton was an expert at this. He had studied it and he developed many different protocols. He also got me involved in biochemistry testing, hair mineral analysis, and the importance of

the energy in the cell having to be really high cellular health to be able to make the developmental changes that are needed, especially in the sensory motor system. He taught at Berry College in Miami and he was a world renowned expert in developmental optometry. In my view, he was not recognized enough by optometry. That was, and I remember towards the end of his life, he said to me, you know, take it to the math.

because the optometrists, they’re just not ready for this. I mean, they had a hard time understanding. You get on the floor with your patient and you do things like primitive reflexes and you do craniosacral and you do, you know, vestibular training. Now, I think it’s a little more accepted in the behavioral optometry world, but back then it wasn’t and he was way ahead of his time in those things. Now, I remember I was giving a seminar at a

Sam Berne (17:32.463)
workshop in Florida and he attended it and people loved it. You know, they thought I was a rock star and at the end it was just him and me. The room was pretty dark and he said, you know, you’ve got some holes in your thinking. I was like what?

He said, yeah, you you’re not really addressing and understanding the sequence of development in a child’s learning. And of course, you know, my ego was bruised by that, but he was a hundred percent right. And so I started to study with him and learned a lot about testing and diagnosing and treating and managing, especially in that developmental model. And to this day, I use many, many of the things that

that he taught me. One of the places I work is a place called Kid Power, which is in Albuquerque. And it’s a place where kids have a lot of special needs, Down syndrome, minimal brain dysfunction, autism, you know, they’re in the autistic spectrum.

and I apply many of Dr. Sutton’s techniques there to this day and learning those primitive reflexes back then has been such an essential part in being able to help kids reach their potential. So I put Dr. Sutton up on the Mount Rushmore with Dr. Sanit and Dr. Shankman. I’ve got a few others that I’ll talk about in another show, but I think that’s a

That’s a mouthful right now. So I think I’m going to end it here. I want to thank you so much for tuning in today. Share this podcast. If you found it helpful again, you can go to my social media me social media feeds and also my website dr. Sam burn.com and until next time everyone take good care.

 

 

If you are a practitioner, please join our practitioner’s training: Schedule a free discovery call: https://calendly.com/drsamberne/retreat-interest-call-with-dr-berne?month=2025-03

For even more from Dr. Sam, check out his new exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars: https://drsambernesmembership.com/

Keywords

Kid Power, child development, vision therapy, learning disabilities, trauma, craniosacral therapy, nutrition, primitive reflexes, holistic approach, ADHD, nutrition, child development, strabismus, amblyopia, screen time, vision therapy, mitochondria, eye health, functional medicine, holistic approach
Summary

In this conversation, Sam Berne discusses the multifaceted approach to understanding and supporting children’s development, particularly in relation to vision and learning. He shares his personal experiences with learning disabilities and emphasizes the importance of a holistic view that includes trauma, nutrition, and primitive reflexes. The discussion highlights the need for individualized care and the integration of various therapeutic modalities to help children thrive. In this conversation, Dr. Sam Berne discusses the critical role of nutrition in child development, the complexities of vision issues such as strabismus and amblyopia, and the detrimental effects of excessive screen time on children’s eyesight. He emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach to therapy that includes understanding the child’s unique needs and the role of mitochondria in eye health. Dr. Berne also provides practical advice for parents and practitioners on how to support children’s visual development and overall well-being.
Takeaways

Understanding each child’s unique needs is crucial.
Personal experiences can shape professional insights.
Vision therapy goes beyond traditional eye care.
Trauma can significantly impact a child’s development.
Nutrition plays a vital role in cognitive function.
Primitive reflexes are essential for motor and cognitive skills.
Holistic approaches can unlock a child’s potential.
Collaboration among specialists is necessary for effective care.
Children’s development is influenced by their early experiences.
Individualized treatment plans are more effective than one-size-fits-all solutions. Nutrition is a linchpin for child development.
Understanding where to start with a child is crucial.
Biochemistry analysis can help identify nutritional deficiencies.
Physical vision therapy is essential for addressing vision problems.
Screen time is contributing to an epidemic of nearsightedness.
Natural sunlight exposure is vital for children’s health.
Mitochondria play a key role in eye health and energy production.
Red light therapy can improve visual acuity.
Parents should not let diagnoses define their children.
Building trust with children is essential for effective therapy.

Sound Bites

“Cracking the code with each child.”
“I was diagnosed with a learning disability.”
“Vision is how the eyes and the brain work together.”
“The eyes are brain tissue and fall under neuroplasticity.”
“We need to understand the global situation with these kids.”
“Trauma creates a paralysis in our system.”
“Nutrition affects our brain, our emotions, our cells.”
“Nutrition is more important than you think.”
“Treat the whole child, not just the symptoms.”
“Our eyes are not made to look at screens long term.”
“Sunlight is very important for these kids.”
“You don’t have to live out of diagnosis.”

Sam Berne (00:00)
you know, really trying to hear it towards the kids and. Yeah, it’ll be there. Is there any specific like seeing that you’re thinking about that you wanted to come here about or just general, just general interest, general interest? OK, sounds good. of our grandkids. Are you the director? Yeah, yes. Used to be. I don’t even know. Dr. Did you know that I sold the YouTube guarantee? Yeah, so I.

30 years but there’s two younger therapists that just took over. I didn’t know that. Well but yours has his parents if you know. yes. Yeah we’re yeah that’s why we’re here is because we have all the grandchildren and so we thought this would be good information for all of them in case they don’t zoom in. Right. And so we wanted to get what we could for them for us for everybody.

Wow, well welcome. It’s so nice to meet you. Hi Deb and Dave and I just met her husband a couple weeks ago. So that’s so sweet because I knew the whole story but I hadn’t met him yet. So you know one of our therapists is married a gentleman and they both together combined have seven children all under the age of 15 is the oldest 15 and younger. Yeah. Yeah.

15 down to. my god, it’s quite the Brady Bunch. Yes. And then we have our other four-year-old, so we take care of four years old up to. So yeah, yeah. Yeah, three-year-old is well not quite right. The two-year-old is in Denver. we don’t see him as often, but the information is something that I know they’d be interested in. So I had Cassie send the family group Zoom.

text so that she could let them know up in Denver so that they could watch. That’s terrific. I wish I thought of it sooner and she wishes she had thought of it sooner but she’s a little busy. I think most parents are. Yeah they don’t have time for this. yeah it’s great that they’ll be able to do it and stop it and start it and watch that night when the kids go to bed or whatever. It’s just I think it was a great idea that you

Hey everyone, I want to welcome you to my talk today here at Kid Power in Albuquerque. Kid Power is near and dear to my heart because it’s a place I’ve been coming for, I don’t know, over 20 years and I help the kids with their vision. So I’m going to talk about that today. And to begin with, what I want to do is I want to talk about a core issue

that has been coming up in the context of working with kids. And that core issue has to do with cracking the code, cracking the code with each child. What is it going to take to turn the switch on so that they are thriving? And when I see a child here in Kemp Power or in my practice,

That’s my biggest curiosity because usually, you know, parents are coming in and we know as parents, we’re really struggling with what’s going on with my child and why are they struggling in school? And how come they’re not reading? And we just went to an IEP, you we did the testing and now they may end up in a special education class.

So I have to say I have some personal experience because I was one of those kids. I grew up in the Northeast and I came from a family that really stressed education. And my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, a bunch of intellectuals. And so I remember my uncle going to his house and he had like all these books on foreign language he actually spoke.

five different languages. And my mom and dad, I mean, they just stressed college and grad school. But the thing was, is I was eight years old and I was diagnosed with a learning disability. And as I think about it now, it’s kind of a painful time because I didn’t want to read. I didn’t like reading. I wasn’t a good reader. School was really challenging for me. And so my…

My mom took me to a lot of places and we actually ended up like a lot of the kids here at Kid Power, I ended up at an eye doctor’s office. And he said to me, well, you’re nearsighted and let’s give you some glasses. And so I got these lenses and I started to memorize. That’s how I got through school. And I never was a good test taker and I just worked really hard.

And I was able to do pretty well in high school, college, and got into professional school, graduated. And I met a, what we call a developmental optometrist. This was an eye doctor who looked at vision in a more holistic way. And I was 28 years old and he had a course that he was offering. And he also was offering his services.

as a doctor and as me as a patient. So I started going with him and he diagnosed me with a condition called convergence insufficiency, meaning my left eye used to wander out. would see double vision. I couldn’t focus. I had a little bit of impulsivity, a little bit of hyperactivity and sounds like ADHD, right? And that’s kind of what I had. And so through his physical therapy exercises, I was able to

heal that condition and because of my pretty extreme nearsightedness that completely dissolved. So I didn’t need my lenses anymore. so today I’m on my fifth book that I’ve written and I read voraciously and my learning is incredible. But when I see kids, I have a lot of empathy for them and their parents because I was the puzzle. I didn’t…

you know, the first thing that my mom didn’t know at that point that there were other resources like this. And so when I meet a child and meet a family, I’m not just looking at the eyeballs, you know, and in traditional eye care, you know, we’ve all been gone to an eye for an eye exam. And what happens, you sit in a dark room and the doctor is flipping lenses. You’re looking behind the machine and

you know, especially in children and then they use eye drops and it’s a pretty traumatic experience, right? And, and I just, I just kind of go, look, there’s more to this than trying to figure out a lens prescription and use eye drops to figure out, you know, something that’s going on that maybe is a learning issue, a developmental issue that’s much more than in the eye.

And one of the places that I studied was a place called the Gazelle Institute. So, Gazelle, Arnold Gazelle was a physician who in 1948 started this institute. At that point, it was affiliated with Yale University. And being a developmental specialist, he brought in a multidisciplinary group of professionals who would evaluate children. It reminds me a little bit of kid power in the sense that

This is a multidisciplinary clinic where the therapists and the professionals are studying a variety of different things. Well, I went there in the mid 80s, I spent a year there and I learned how to evaluate a whole, the whole child, the whole person, not just the eyeballs. And so we looked at speech and language. We looked at actually primitive reflexes. We looked at nutrition. We looked at

the stipular health, we looked at trauma. There were many things that we did at that Institute, which helped me understand about seeing the whole picture, seeing, okay, what is the time we should be introducing this activity or this modality? And it was really a profound training. And it launched me, along with my personal healing, into my, you know, my current

professional state and of course I’ve had many lifetimes in it studying many different things but the point is is that with a child that is struggling and you know by the way you know the diagnosis of ADD, HD, ADHD and the whole spectrum disorders is off the charts you know back in 2016 there was an article that was published in one of the medical journals

that said about 15 % of all kids who are diagnosed with ADHD have vision problems. And maybe right here I should make a distinction between what is a vision problem? Can you define that? So when you go to the eye doctor and they have you read the eye chart, that’s called 2020. That’s your eyesight.

Vision is how the eyes and the brain and the body work together. It’s a developmental skill set that we actually start learning. I say we, because all of us started learning while our mother was carrying us in gestation. That’s when we start to develop our peripheral vision, living in the amniotic fluid. Or the birth experience coming out of the birth canal. There’s signals, cues and signals that the infant needs to have.

in order to have their sensory motor systems turned on. And then the bonding period is also critical in, remember, establishing eye contact with your mom and dad, breastfeeding, exploring your environment on the floor, creeping and crawling, doing tummy time. See, all of those fundamental experiences affect our sensory motor development, our brain function.

And I just want to say that the eyes are the only part of the brain that sit outside the cranial vault. But the eyes are brain tissue. And because they are brain tissue, they fall under the category of something called neuroplasticity. And all of these kids, one of the main things they have going for them is they have a plasticity in their

nervous system, their fluid body, their movement, their emotional body, and so on that can be repaired, can be stimulated, it can be improved upon. And the problem that I see in traditional medical care is that number one, all the medical practitioners are staying in their little world.

And so if you go to a certain doctor, they’re going to diagnose you with that particular thing that they’re specializing in. And so then parents go to three or four of these specialists and they walk away and they’re totally confused with, what do I do with my child? Where do I plug in? How do I do this? And I remember when I first met Carla and we talked about, you know, children and learning. We were so

in resonance about with these families understanding that there’s more to it than treating the symptoms, instead getting to the root cause and understanding the global situation with how to unlock the blocks that these kids maybe have come in with and it’s part of their process.

So in the exploration in my part of it, in vision, I’m gonna talk a little bit more about the difference between visual acuity and visual processing. So if you think about this particular contrast, seeing things clearly is a static experience. I see it clear at 20 feet, I see it clear up close, and that’s…

static. But in vision, it’s so related to our movement, our balance, our orientation, our ability to see the parts and make a whole. Perception through your ground, when I see the detail and make a relationship with the whole picture. Visual memory, recognizing shapes and forms.

You know, I know in my case when I was back to that eight-year-old, one of the things that I knew is I was able to see patterns. And I see some kids here that, okay, they may have some confusion going on, but if you can set up the environment in a way that’s supportive, then you start to see some of the view this time through. And each one of them has an individual walk.

and see that we have to put together some vision of the public health. This is another issue I’ve seen in some of the big medical practices is one size fits all. And this is certainly coming from the school system, especially in the public schools, and understandably so because they’re overwhelmed with the public schools, they’re starting to have the staff, running out of money. And then these schools get put in in special education classes.

and they get lost. And that’s why I’ve always said to parents you have to do the school’s deal, you have to ask for more services, you may have to step outside your normal, your everyday public school experience to get some help. So that being said, when I am evaluating a child, one of the things that I’m looking at is

in their visual system, how connected are their eyes to their body and their movement? And I would say the fundamental theme that I see over and over again, whether it’s here at Kid Power or in the bigger stage with kids along the spectrum disorders, is that their eyes and their vision are developmentally

behind some of their other sensory motor skills. And when you think about any person, we think about their nervous systems, right? We call that the fight, flight, breeze response. One of the people that’s really done a lot of great research and writing on it is a man named Stephen Porges. And he came up with a theory called the polyvagal theory. I would recommend looking at that. It’s a very complex

theory, then I want to give Dr. Porges full kind of honoring in what his writings are and his teachings are. But one of the aspects that I really take away when I study Dr. Porges is trauma. And so I want to take a moment and I want to talk a bit about trauma. Gabor Mate has written a lot about trauma. I highly recommend him. He’s a very well-known psychiatrist.

He’s written a number of books. wrote a great book on ADHD many years ago. And he’s talked a lot about trauma. I have personal experience with trauma in that when I started my first practice in the Philadelphia area, I associated with another developmental optometrist. His name was Dr. Ellis Edelman. And for five years, I apprenticed in his office. And it was probably one of the most…

deepest experiences I had in learning how to work with kids. Dr. Elman was amazing. He was in his 60s when I was in my 20s. And I was so grateful that he took me in and we actually ended up becoming partners that built up a very big practice in Philadelphia, which I sold and moved out to New Mexico about 25 years ago. But the point that I’m trying to make is that in

this trauma situation, one of the things that I had to do to build my practice in Philadelphia, because I couldn’t get any patients, because we were in a very conservative area, is I went to some of the hospitals and I volunteered to help their traumatic brain injury patients. And over a period of about three months, I was able to help hundreds of people heal their double vision, their blurred vision, their

brain fog, their memory issues through the physical eye therapy techniques that I learned at the Gazelle Institute. And it launched me into a position where I became very well known in Philadelphia because of my traumatic brain injury work. And the regular eye doctors, they had no interest in working with these kinds of patients.

but the physical therapy was the thing that brought them back. Now in that process, I also recognized there was a whole population of kids in the Philadelphia area that were special needs. And these were Down syndrome, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, obviously the spectrum disorders. So I focused on that community and I said, I can really help this community. And between working with those kids,

and working with the traumatic brain injury, they kind of came together and it’s how I built a very successful practice. And I got my name out there and it was very well known and I did some research and writings on traumatic brain injury. And so I really understood how trauma affects our nervous system and even more deeply our brain, our cerebral spinal fluid, our

connective tissue, or fascia. And with the visual system, when we are exposed to trauma, because the eyes are kind of a soft tissue, doesn’t show up on the MRI scan. So it’s soft symptoms like, as I say, double vision, blurred vision, focusing issues, memory problems, issues with vestibular imbalance and orientation. And so…

through the physical therapy, I was able to help people heal and release the trauma. And it kind of catapulted me into this next phase is when I moved out to New Mexico and I started working with birth trauma. I started working with kids who were along the spectrum disorders. And I remember working with an OT up in Santa Fe where I practice and live.

And she said, you know, I think you ought to go back to massage school and learn craniosacral therapy. And this was a major breakthrough for me because I spent about two years studying craniosacral and I started to apply it with these kids who had birth trauma and it unlocked the developmental delays that they were going through. It not only did it improve the visual system, but it seemed to balance out their nervous system. And it also

helped their ability to sleep better, to function better, to learn better. And so I recognize this is a great modality in releasing trauma. So one of the things to note in this whole population is what was the birthmark? And this is such a pivotal question to be asking. And it’s kind of weird.

When I go to conferences and I might start talking to other doctors about birth and the importance of birth, deer in the headlights. They have no concept, relationship or interest in how our birth imprint affects us. But if you think about things like forceps delivery, you think about the suction or breech birth.

or cesarean. When I did my cranial training, we worked with pregnant moms. We worked with women giving birth, doing craniosacral right after birth. It was mind blowing to see how those kids launched differently by removing those early impediments. So that’s why the birth is so important.

in this conversation. And then the next conversation to have is bonding. So many of these kids are taken away from their mom at the most essential time when they need to bond, which is right after birth. You’ve heard of the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin is one of those love, I love you hormones.

that mom and her newborn get to have that experience. Now, sometimes in premature babies, we have to put them in the incubator or again, they’re taken away or mom is completely knocked out because of pitocin or other drugs. These are the issues that later on start to affect our eye brain connection.

more than that, speech language auditory or motor and and so on, even our biochemistry which I’ll get to in a minute. So the point of the story is trauma. Trauma creates a paralysis in our system. It also reduces those good brain hormones that we need like dopamine and serotonin which are critically important in our circadian rhythms and our moods and those kinds of

So when I studied craniosacral, I started to understand how much trauma impacted a child’s sensory motor developmental arc. And then I got introduced to something called the primitive survival reflexes. And here at Kid Power, they have…

They have dove deeply into how critical the primitive reflexes are. You know, when I’m on social media and I’ll mention primitive reflexes, most people have not even heard of them. And sometimes moms have heard of the moral reflex. But these primitive reflexes are motor patterns that start occurring in utero and they help set the stage for a child’s

visual thinking, motor, speech, language, auditory integration with the brain. It’s really a reflection of their nervous system. And when you combine the craniosacral treatment, which is more of the fluid health with the nervous system health, so you’re doing craniosacral and you’re doing primitive reflexes, what you’re doing is you’re releasing so many of those restrictions and obstacles that then catapult the child

into a developmental space that then they can reach their full potential. I learned my primitive reflex therapy from a group of optometrists in Denmark and Sweden, and they’ve been doing primitive reflex therapy since 1975. And when I brought that back to the US with my mentor, Dr. Al Sutton, we started to teach seminars to eye doctors and they didn’t want it. thought getting on the

was absurd with kids. What does that have to do with the eyeball? So today, fast forward, I see more and more behavioral optometrists at least knowing about primitive reflexes. So things have changed. But in the OT world, and then what KidPower has done is they’ve studied a variety of different teachers in primitive reflexes. And when I come here and evaluate,

I’m looking at the visual component of the primitive reflexes. And it’s amazing that when we work together, there’s this synergy where we then come up with a plan that helps these kids integrate those primitive reflexes, which then allows them to start to understand their inner ear, their vestibular system more. And the visual system and the vestibular system are married. They’re parallel to each other.

vision stimulates vestibular, the vestibular stimulates vision, and the primitive reflexes are a component that influence both. And if you saw one of the exams that I do, we actually use these special gilked prisms, these special prisms that we have the child wear, and we have them walk the plank. We have them walk

And you can see in their posture and their movements where those primitive reflexes occur, which ones are there. And it gives us a roadmap that unlocking of what it’s going to take to help this child thrive. And talk about an eye exam that tests the whole child. This is to me the future of what we need to do.

to help these kids and realize that it’s an individual by individual situation that we can’t give the child the same thing. Every child gets the same thing. It just doesn’t work that way. So the next topic I want to move to is our nutrition. And this is a hot topic. In my process,

One of the specialties that I really admired and I started to study was functional medicine. And I’m thrilled that there’s so many naturopaths, chiropractors, physicians that are now embracing functional medicine, functional nutrition, that people are becoming awakened to the importance of what we eat and how it affects

our brain, our emotions, our cells, our aging, and in kids, they’re learning in concentration. So I remember one of my mentors, I want to give him credit for helping me understand this principle that I’m going to share with you. His name is Dr. Al Sutton, and he was another one of these just world-renowned developmental optometrists, and he was practicing in Miami Beach.

When I met him, he was also a professor at Berry College and he was teaching teachers and educators and psychologists this form of developmental optometry. And one day I was at his clinic in Miami and he pulled out a lab test and it was a pair mineral analysis. And he said, you know, this particular test is a reflection of a person’s ability

to deal with their stress. So that makes sense, right, okay. So we were looking at mineral ratios and the minerals in our body, they kind of get ignored, but they’re so important because they’re the spark plugs. They keep our pH levels as they are, they help us with dietary absorption, they help us with detoxification, they balance our pH levels, they influence our inflammation. So there’s a lot of things that happen

when we start analyzing the body. And one of the things he taught me, which I still think about today, is that when a child is diagnosed with a developmental delay, whatever it is, it could be speech language, could be visual, it could be whatever, the thing is, is that on a cellular level, they are probably in a depleted state at some level.

And the reason they’re into the plebiscite is because somewhere along the line, and this is if they’ve had a normal development, they weren’t given lots of antibiotics for ear infections or they had colic or they were in the hospital or whatever it was, these are the normal kids that if they’re not getting enough energy into the cell,

then they’re not gonna have the energy to absorb the therapies that we are giving them. And it’s why over and over and over again, and I get communications from many parents around the world, again, because of my social media presence, where they go, you know, I’ve done the DOT, I’ve done the counseling, I’ve done the tutoring, and my child is in exactly the same place.

So my next question is, well, have you ever done a biochemistry analysis? What’s their diet like? If you took them into a grocery store, what foods would they be attracted to? And every time there’s a disconnect. I never thought about nutrition and diet in this equation. And that’s the place I feel we need to start. So with these kids, if you can give them more energy, then they’re going to absorb

the therapy much better and they’re going to grow, they’re going to develop in a much greater accelerated way. And that’s the linchpin. That’s the starting point. And where you start sometimes is really important. Where are you going to plug in with this child? And you really have to be adept as a practitioner, as a therapist to understand that concept and not just think, well, hey, I learned this

technique, let me give this kid my technique and I’ll give every kid the same technique. You’re not going to get anywhere. I mean, you might make a lot of money. You might have, you know, whatever, whatever it is, but you’re not really dialing into, where is the place that I can start in with this child to help them flower? And so with the nutrition part, and I know you’re all the time here with Kid Power.

When I asked the parents, have you looked at the nutrition? Not really. You know, we go to McDonald’s, we, it’s a lot of fast food. We don’t have a lot of time. I said, okay, so what we need to do right now is we need to do some kind of a biochemistry analysis to get a baseline. And then based on that baseline, then we can start giving your child the nutrients that they’re missing. And what you’re going to see is this expansion.

in their energy, which then when they start doing whatever the therapies they need, they’re going to really take off. And parents kind of buy into that. And so the point of what I’m making about nutrition is that it’s more important than you think. And it can be your kind of health care, especially if you eat foods that are non GMO that are pesticide.

free, that are organic as best as you can. And I know they cost more, but in the long run, when you eat in a more conscious, mindful way, where think colorful vegetables, you know, think low sugar, think good fats and oils, good protein, think about ways to support the digestive tract. You know, these are all strategies.

in functional medicine that we talk about, that we think about. And I think it’s an essential component just as important as physical vision therapy, pre-esacral therapy, primitive reflexes, auditory therapies, and so on. So I really want to implore parents to take stock in

what is their nutrition and what is their nutrition with their child and what are some things they can do to up the bar so that they can give their child a better opportunity to develop their learning and their skill set so that just like I did, they flower in a way so then they can have the expression on what they’re supposed to be doing in this life. Instead of…

maybe withdrawing or having some mental or emotional challenges, addiction issues, you know, it just goes on and on and on. And there isn’t a simple formula, but this is a roadmap that I’m talking about in our process. So there’s a couple of other things I wanna speak about today. The first is more vision related.

And this has to do with a condition called strabismus. So strabismus is a condition where we see a child and their eye is either turning in or it’s turning out and it may be an alternating situation or it may just be on one side. And it’s interesting, I want to give a plug here. I was just on a podcast that’s very well

attended and received Katie Wells and Wellness Mom. And I just did a podcast, she interviewed me about how to do a proper vision exam with a child. And since that podcast, I’m getting so many parents calling me saying, well, I went for this exam, they did the drops, they gave us a really thick, strong prescription, my child doesn’t want to wear it, I’m concerned because the eye is turning in and turning out, what should we do?

So it’s perfect for me because I will share with you what we’re going to do. Now, another thing about this is that in the strabismus world, the tendency is for the doctor to want to possibly get really strong glasses or do eye muscle surgery. And both of those are very

symptom based. Let’s fix the symptom. And again, it’s back to Gazelle, which is Gazelle would say, treat the whole child. When there’s a vision problem, it’s not just in the eyeball, it’s in the whole child. So the strabismus pattern is in their movement, their posture, probably their emotional reactions. Why in the world would you want to give strong glasses? That’s only going to stunt

the visual development and reinforce the eye crossing. Or if you do the surgery, you’re going to change the length of the muscle, but the brain is going to get very confused because it’s the brain that directs the eye muscles to begin with. And so what you do is you cut the muscle and so the eye will look straight for a little while, but then it’s going to revert back. So the success in that, in that

surgery is very, very low. And it’s also very traumatic. So we talk about trauma, we don’t want to create more trauma than these kids. This is where the physical vision therapy works so beautifully as an organic method to help the child understand integration. How to get

both sides to talk to each other because when an eye is turning in what the child is saying is

It’s too stressful for me. I’m scared. I’m vulnerable. Or it may be if the eye is turning out, they’re saying, I can’t focus on all this. I got to space out. Now the thing is, is that that is a symptom of my middle. Where is the midline in myself? And how can I learn how to use both sides together? So they’re going to be in the school of vision, which is

How do I learn to use these two eyes with my brain and with my body? And this is where radio sacral therapy can be beneficial, the primitive reflex therapy, the gross and fine motor things that relate to vestibular stimulation. All of these things give the child the power for them to start to explore, okay, what is it like for me to be simultaneous, to use both sides together?

And there’s a learning curve. doesn’t happen overnight. And one of my big counseling points to parents is some days are going to be better than others. Some moments are going to be better than others. Keep the big picture. And if you see the eye turning, it’s just a signal your child may be getting sick, may be fatigued, may be stressed. Time out is necessary, but don’t get hooked into, my goodness.

there’s a problem because as long as you kind of access this plasticity that I talked about at the beginning these kids can change right away and when you put strong glasses on them you are stunting their potential being able to make the changes they need to make and that’s really for any glasses prescription which I’ll talk about in minute.

So in strabismus, we want to create more integration. Now, the other side of that is what we lazy eye or amblyopia. And what this means is that one of the eyes is seeing much more blurry than the other eye. And it could be because of many reasons. Birth trauma, some kind of injury. It could be that that eye is just developmentally behind the other.

to be how they were in utero, how they came out of the birth canal. There’s many reasons why we develop this lazy eye where we’re not stimulating. So the last thing you want to do, classic approach is, well, let’s patch the good eye for eight hours a day. You never want to do that because that is going to create more trauma. The child is going to be more confused. And it really doesn’t solve anything in creating an environment

which is the environment is how can I set up some conditions so that this child can learn and problem solve in being able to use their visual system in a better way? And that’s really what I learned in physical vision therapy is setting up the conditions that’s a problem for them to solve. And the way they solve it is they have to use that eye more. We have to stimulate both eyes together. And in our visual system,

There are certain skills like visual tracking, visual focusing, visual coordination, hand-eye coordination. They’re probably all familiar to you. Innately, you adults, we know how to use those skills. But this is what’s missing with these kids is their visual skills have not come online to their brain. And so this is where stimulating their physical vision.

in different experiences through movement and balance and catching a ball and jumping on a trampoline and many, many things like that, the child then begins to have the experience of what am I supposed to do with these two eyes and how am I supposed to use them? And this is the baseline of men organically then learning how to use their vision through their brain and through their

And doing this a long time, I have seen so many success stories with kids who have gone through this and then what they’ve done with their lives. It’s been pretty profound for me and that’s why I keep doing it. So that’s Strabismus and Amblyopia. But let’s talk about the conditions like nearsightedness, barsightedness, and astigmatism. So my latest book, it’s one of the reasons why I’m doing this,

this recording is called vital vision, clear-eyed solutions for the life and beyond. But in the book, even though I’m talking more about adults and eye disease and how to improve eye disease through more functional medicine methods, the fundamental things that happen when we go to the eye doctor because our eyes are blurry in near-sightedness, which is the inability to see far away,

We are reaching an epidemic. And the reason we’re reaching an epidemic is that, and I just read this statistic, 94 % of all public schools are now using a computer in the classroom. digital devices and our eyes. Do you know how many questions I get a week from parents? How is this impacting my children’s lives?

And obviously COVID was a real game changer because that’s when the schools went online and these five and six and seven year olds were being asked to stare at a screen for much of the day to learn the curriculum. But the bottom line is that our eyes are not made to look at the screen for long term. This is not what we’re made to do.

Now we’re adapting and one of the adaptations we’re making is that we’re giving up our distance acuity. We’re becoming nearsighted. So our vision is now all in our phone, our tablet, our screen, our computer. And not only are dealing with the, you know, the pulsing of the screen, but we’re dealing with the blue light, the artificial blue light. And this is a whole other topic because

Artificial blue light is a very chaotic frequency that does some very damaging things to our body. Number one, and this happens especially after 6 p.m., it begins to fool the pineal gland, it tricks it, so that it’s not producing the melatonin that’s needed to help us with sleep. So it’s affecting our sleep profoundly. Now sleep is so important in our regenerative.

capability. If we don’t sleep well, we’re not going to heal. Sleeping is so important. So with the blue light situation, we’re not sleeping as well. There’s more disturbed sleep. Next, because we’re in this visual confinement, our eye muscles are not able to move beyond that 14 to 16 inch range. Number three, because of the blue light, this flies our eyes out more.

creates more inflammation, it’s affecting the brain. And overall, whether you’re learning or you’re gaming, there’s a lot of the kids that I see on TikTok and I’m talking to them, they’re doing video gaming. And hours upon hours a day with their vision, well, how is that affecting them? They’re all people in their sight. Another piece of this is astigmatism.

where the eye begins to change its shape. So it becomes more egg-shaped. And this is stigmatism. It is another factor with the nearsightedness that’s creating all this blurriness. And so instead of dealing with the problem here up close, the eye doctors have decided to say, let’s just correct the distance, which is treating a symptom. But what it’s doing is it’s reinforcing the problem. And this is why

kids get stronger and stronger and once this is what happened to me, I became nearsighted. I began reading and my eyes just getting progressively worse. So I know the drill. I know what happens. So we’ve got that side of the aisle and then we’ve got the far side of kids. And these are kids that maybe they tend to want to be more out into the bigger picture. Nearsighted they look good here.

far sighted, the more distance based and focus is hard for them. It’s hard for them to come into the computer to focus. So they get a magnifying lens, which makes things artificially as bigger, but it shuts off their focusing, responsive, and muscle. And so they start wearing that magnification lens and guess what happens? It gets stronger and stronger and stronger. And then they’re wearing this big magnification lens and it’s very distorting.

but it’s shutting down their accommodating ability, their ability to focus. And one of the things we do in our vestibular therapy is we actually have people balancing, changing their focusing. So focus here, focus there, focus there. This is one of the best ways to integrate the visual vestibular system. But if you’re farsighted and you’re wearing this magnification lens,

you have lost your ability to change your focus because you’re now dependent on the fact that the lens is making things artificially large. So you go, I don’t have to do it because the lens is doing it for me. And so this in both scenarios, near sighted, far sighted, what’s going on is these descriptions are now becoming the fabric of the visual system. And that’s okay, know, glasses are fine.

But the thing is there are other ways that you can work with the vision so they don’t have to have this disability, this weakness. And the way we’re going with screens, I don’t see it changing. I see the trend continuing along that we’re going to have more and more and more vision problems. So beware with the screen time. There’s some great research I want to share with you.

about this particular topic. And what it is is this. Researchers say that if you can take a 30 to 60 minute break from your screen time, go outside, go outside into the sunlight, especially in the morning, what it does is it creates a rebalancing in your circadian rhythm. It increases your mental

capability or mental focus, and it also ups your dopamine levels, your mood. So you need to spend time outside every day, preferably more in the morning. And when you get that natural sunlight, it can offset some of these negative things that you get exposed to in these artificial environments, whether it’s fluorescent lighting, whether it’s screen time.

And all of these things come together, which is now creating another downward spiral and the kids are paying the price for it. So sunlight is very important for these kids to get out there. 30, 60, 90 minutes a day is really what the researchers are saying. And since we’re on the topic of light, I want to talk about one more thing. And this has to do with

something in the body, very high concentration in the eyes, called mitochondria. Mitochondria is a buzzword right now. And I think it’s partly because mitochondria are organelles that live in almost every cell in the body, and they are responsible for energy production that helps us absorb better nutrients.

get rid of toxins, reduce inflammation, reduce oxidative stress. Now, one of the conversations that is really going on is the mitochondria that exist and live in the eye. So let me explain. You know, in neuroscience, there has been some incredible research on the regenerative capability of our eyes.

But if you go to an eye doctor’s office down the street, that concept of neuroplasticity is non-existent. It’s not there. And in fact, and I was trained this way as well, so I’m guilty of it as well, is that looking for disease is the goal for the eye doctor. You walk in, they immediately are looking at two eyeballs and they’re looking for the disease.

And they’re really looking forward to kids as well, even though the percentage is pretty low. So there’s no talk that you can regenerate your eyes, that you can improve your vision. In fact, if you actually met some of these folks, these professionals, they would probably either laugh at you or invalidate it or just say it doesn’t work. And it’s too bad because

In the body of research that’s in Harvard, Stanford, some other very well-respected journals, neuroplasticity is something that’s talked about a lot. And especially with conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia and aging, the fact that there’s this kick of anti-aging. So whatever it is, the mitochondria is the key.

Well, it just so happens there was a study done by an ophthalmologist at the University College of London, where he took a group of adults between the ages of 40 and 70 who had degenerative retina diseases like macular degeneration, drusen, other retinopathies, maybe due to diabetic retinopathy or hypertensive retinopathy. So he took these subjects and he applied

red light to their eyes every day. So only a few minutes in the morning, we did this for 12 weeks. And in his published report, he said, these people increase their ability to read the eye chart by 22%. Now, that is an astounding number, because if you look at eye research, whether it’s stem cell, whether it’s, you know, whatever the nutritional therapy,

The most, the best code that we can have is maybe a two to 5 % increase. 22%, that’s huge. Just by looking at red light, what’s the story? So the story is, is that there’s some reason the mitochondria like the red light. And after about age 40, we begin to lose

our resiliency in the retina with our eyes. They start to age.

When they age, we start seeing oxidative stress, we start seeing inflammation. This leads to conditions like cataracts, glaucoma, macular degeneration, whatever it is. And so what the Jeffries lab, the guy’s name is Dr. Jeffries, what he wrote in his paper is that this red light stimulates the mitochondrial and it reduces

the negative things that get produced when the mitochondria stop producing their energy. And so as the mitochondria get better and it produces more energy, all of these conditions fade away, or I would say most of them. So we’re back to light therapy. And the eyes are one of the main portal, portals into our body and our skin is as well. Here, kid power.

What I’ve taught the therapist to do is something called color therapy. So we use all the colors of this vector because it’s a language that the kids understand. You want them to fixate, you start shining a red or a blue or a purple and you keep tracking with them. You’re going to start to see some things around their visual engagement. So with the red light now, this is highly therapeutic.

in being able to increase the mitochondria function. And increasing the mitochondria function, the cells are going to work better. There’s more vitality. There’s more resiliency. In fact, in some of the research I’m looking at right now, if you use like a red box, a big red LED lights, they’re saying that it can reverse conditions like arthritis, fibromyalgia, can include the immune system. This is systemically.

And more and more functional medicine doctors, more and more naturopaths are using red light as a way to create more vitality and resiliency in the body. And remember, this is done without pharmaceutical drugs. This is done without surgery. And I bring this into the circle here today because I want you to understand the therapeutic value

of natural sunlight, using different types of color therapy, and understanding what we call photobiomodulation, which is the red light.

So there’s a lot to unpack here and I think we’re gonna end here. Maybe if there’s a question or two, you can take that. But this is a lot of information for you to digest. And I wanna leave you with three things. The first is number one, and this is for the children. You don’t have to live out of diagnosis.

So even if you are diagnosed with ADD or autism or Asperger’s or whatever it is, that that is a diagnosis. can be advantageous in terms of an insurance reimbursement, but we don’t want you to live out that labor. You don’t have to do that. Number two, that understanding the

importance of nutrition as the building block that if you can create more energy in a person they are going to absorb the therapy much better much faster and You’re gonna get much fun Okay, and number three Understand find a practitioner that can help you unlock the code of

Where can we start with this child? Where is the opening? And it’s so interesting with Yi, when I first meet a child, when they get on the forum with them, and I chat with them, and I’m scanning and tuning intuitively, where is there an opening? What is their hot button? What is it that where I can create some kind

commonality and within that it’s going to start to create a trust and a relationship where then they’re going to feel safe in their vulnerability and then they’re going to start to buy in. And I think that’s so important to establish that bond of trust and not come with such an agenda or

a prejudice or a preconceived idea. I mean, obviously there’s a certain direction we want to go. But I know in my case, what these kids have taught me is the places where I have let all that go. And can I just meet them, meet them as a human being? And when we do that and we create a resonance, the magic happens. And

That’s really important and it’s less about the technique and it’s more about how we’re showing up.

to that child in a way that creates safety. Because I can tell you when I have observed my colleagues and they go to these very sterile offices, they’ve lost the child before they come in. And it’s interesting when they come and see me for the first few minutes, we have to kind of get rid of the trauma of what’s happened with these other offices. Because they think, my goodness, this is the same thing.

So we start our eye exam getting a ball or playing with some blogs or whatever it is just to take that trauma piece off so that then they can follow. So any questions here is not taking the end or we’ll be open a lot of questions. If you want to, can always email me hello at DrSanBurn.com and

My team and I will definitely answer your questions. can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, pretty active on those. yeah, so thank you very much for your attention. It’s been a while to be able to speak to you today.

That’s a meatball sandwich, huh?

Keep Up with Dr. Sam
Website: https://www.drsamberne.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SamBerneOD/?fref=ts
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samberneod/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/drsamberne
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drsamberne/

Dr. Sam Berne has been in private practice in New Mexico for over 25 years and where he works with patients to improve their vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Pennsylvania State University, Doctor of Optometry from Pennsylvania College, and did his postdoctoral work at the Gesell Institute in collaboration with Yale University. He has been awarded The Special Awards for Service from the Behavioral Optometrists in Mexico for his innovative and holistic work with children.

His protocols take a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to health and wellness. He understands and treats the body as one integrated system rather than a collection of independent organs in order to identify and address the root causes of disease. His whole health protocols improve vision and wellness by healing the mind-body-spirit through nutritional protocols, vision therapy, and self-care techniques. This views each person as genetically and biochemically unique and enables the individual to make lifelong improvements to their well-being.

For even more from Dr. Sam, check out his new exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars: https://drsambernesmembership.com/

Please check out Dr. Berne’s Practitioner’s Training Program: https://www.drsamberne.com/practitioners-training/

Keywords

astronaut training, sensory integration, visual skills, functional vision, visual tracking, binocular vision, cognitive skills, visual memory
Summary

In this conversation, Sam Berne discusses various techniques and methods used in occupational therapy, particularly focusing on astronaut training and its components, including vestibular activation, ocular motor skills, and auditory processing. He emphasizes the importance of visual skills in functional vision, including visual tracking, accommodation, and binocular vision, and how these skills are essential for reading and spatial awareness. The conversation also covers cognitive skills such as visual memory, form perception, and spatial orientation, highlighting their significance in learning and everyday activities.
Takeaways

Astronaut training incorporates sensory motor integration techniques.
Vestibular activation is crucial for spatial awareness.
Visual tracking is essential for reading and learning.
Binocular vision enhances depth perception and spatial IQ.
Visual accommodation is important in sports and daily activities.
The cover test helps assess visual coordination.
Visual memory plays a key role in learning processes.
Form perception is vital for recognizing objects in different contexts.
Spatial orientation aids in understanding relationships in space.
Visual closure is important for problem-solving and comprehension.

Sound Bites

“It’s a wonderful sensory motor integration.”
“Visual tracking is so important with reading.”
“Binocular vision is super important.”
“The cover test is a way to do this.”
“Visual memory is essential for learning.”
Chapters

00:00 Understanding Astronaut Training Techniques
05:53 Exploring Visual Skills and Functional Vision
11:49 Enhancing Visual Tracking and Accommodation
18:10 The Importance of Binocular Vision
24:06 Cognitive Skills and Visual Memory

 

Sam Berne (00:00.236)
All right. So in the astronaut training, this is an occupational therapy technique where they’re working with sensory motor integration and there’s three components. There’s the vestibular activation. So that’s where when you rotate them around you’re stimulating that inner ear number two, it’s ocular motor meaning it’s visual. So it’s eye tracking and gaze stabilization.

So getting me to be able to focus and hold my gaze that improves my visual motor integration like hand-eye coordination or copying from the board stuff like that. And then the third component and the astronaut training is auditory processing integration. So you can use sound and rhythm to help the brain process spatial awareness. So

I find I like to do this with every kid, but especially with autism, developmental delays, autism spectrum, Asperger’s, brain injury, people with dizziness, vertigo, balance. So what you’re doing is either using a rotating board or you can use a chair, something you can spin and you’re monitoring the direction speed and duration.

To over stimulate. some of these kids if you try to do too much of the astronaut training it over stimulates them. Now you can use a pen light or moving objects or visual tracking tools and then also they’re listening something sometimes you can pair it with you know, by by urinal beats or you know some like in here.

We use the so cord. Now, the reason why we call it astronaut training is because in NASA and astronaut training protocols, they would work a lot with the vestibular system, especially in different gravity environments. So just as astronauts have to adapt to movements in space individuals and people with sensory challenges.

Sam Berne (02:23.085)
They they have challenges with gravity and moving their body as it relates to Spatial awareness now the actual go ahead Okay, let me let me give you the actual directions There

There’s different kinds of movements you can make. You can go forwards and backwards with the chair. You can go side to side with the chair and you can even go up and down. Okay, so each one of those is helping them with gravity awareness, postural control and muscle tone. So you’re working with what we call the postural reflexes.

They come after the primitive reflexes. So if you’re going to do the spinning, can do I like to do clockwise first then counterclockwise and

Sam Berne (03:40.383)
I also can do diagonal movement as well.

Sam Berne (03:53.525)
now the the sequence of this is that

When you do this standard rotation, I like to do between three and five in one direction and then I pause for a few seconds. To let the person process it and then I’ll do three to five rotations in the other direction and I’m really monitoring the over stimulation. Like if they start saying,

I’m dizzy. I’m nauseous. I’m disoriented. I will do less on the next round. I do it slow. So it needs to be smooth. So you don’t want to jerk it. And what I also will have them do is focus on a target a visual target as they’re moving around.

I might have multiple targets in my room. Okay, look here and then they move now. Look at this target over here and then look at this over here. So you can add that but if again, if they start getting dizzy, sometimes I’ll just have them stop will stop and just do breathing because you’re going to find like with this child probably he’s going to get overstimulated pretty quickly.

so you may only get going around once or twice in each, you know, in each, direction and then you stop and that’s it. Now I tend to do the astronaut training for about a month and we just incorporated into our, you know, primitive reflex work, our gross and fine motor therapies, those kinds of things. So.

Sam Berne (05:53.245)
It’s a wonderful sensory motor integration that really takes in the vestibular the visual and the auditory especially if you’re adding kind of a an auditory processing stimulant as well as the visual to you. We’re going to talk today about visual skills and we’re going to talk about fine motor cognitive vision connection. So this is part of our

Functional vision, but we’re really talking about the visual skills. So what are What what does this mean? So developing functional vision in in it means enhancing visual skills and perceptual abilities. So we’re working more with advanced things. Okay, as opposed to say staying with you know, balance and primitive reflexes.

We’re now working with specific eye muscle skills and how those eye muscles are helping the person process information. Okay. Now as an example, one of the primary visual skills is visual tracking the ability to smoothly and accurately follow a moving object with one’s eyes. This visual tracking is so important with reading. So some of the behaviors will see

If there’s a visual tracking problem, if you’re, you know, tracking their their eyes, do they have to move their head or their body to track their eyes? That tells you something that tells you that reading is probably going to be difficult. And I when I’m testing, I don’t tend to correct or suppress the person. I’m just watching to see hey, follow this target.

Do I need to move my body? Do I need to move my head or can I just do it with my eyes? Ultimately, we’d want you to do it with the eyes and we have the pursuit movement. That’s the smooth movement and the saccadic movement jumping from one object back and forth. So both of them are important in the visual tracking. Now there are different ways to assess visual tracking. There’s a there’s a test.

Sam Berne (08:19.223)
That’s very

paper and pencil oriented that gives you a lot of results based on age and it’s called the King Devic test. Kin G is the first word. D E V I C K and sometimes if I need to do kind of a test where we’ve got norms for certain ages because you’re basically reading digits on this.

cardboard book in this book and At first there’s lines that connect the numbers Okay, and then the next page there’s no lines and then the last page the numbers are really spread out Eradically and that’s harder to do so you can measure how many times they miss reading the numbers You know based on their age and so on

So you could do the King Devic test if you’re if you’re looking for that that level of accuracy. What I like to do is I actually just have to move an object. So I move the object I’m moving so it could be a pan light. It could be a ball with a metal rod with a metal ball on it called a wolf ball could be a kind of a tongue depressor with a

a sticker on it. And so you can use one or two of them if you’re doing saccades or pursuits. We do them in all the directions, you know, circular and you know, diagonal. And we’re looking for the accuracy of being able to hold on to the ball or hold on to the target while they’re fixating on the target. You’ll see kids sometimes do this will the overshoot

Sam Berne (10:21.953)
So they’re looking at something in their eyes actually go beyond the target. call that overshooting or they might be under shooting. let’s say they’re following the target this way and the eyes kind of are moving in that direction. So you’re going to see a lot of weird movements and the eye tracking is a fundamental skill that’s connected with especially in the horizontal movements.

with the primitive reflex called the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex. So if I see an ocular motor tracking problem, I’m going to go back and test the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex because a lot of times that reflex is inhibiting the tracking to work well. visual tracking is really essential in terms of reading. Now, one of the fun exercises I like to do

physical vision therapy functional vision exercises called the alphabet ball exercise. So what I do is I write letters on a ball or even a balloon. That’s even more fun and I toss it to the individual and I have them call out the last letter they see before catching it. So again, you could do this with a Marsden ball. We have a Marsden ball with different letters and numbers on it. So while they’re hitting the ball

I might have them spell a word or I might have them, you know, just call out the letters or the numbers. Again, if you’re doing balloon volleyball, you can put letters on the balloon and they can call out the first or last letter. So there’s different ways you can also work with the visual tracking using a heart chart, which I think you know about with an eye patch and a metronome. I like doing auditory.

processing along with that as well.

Sam Berne (12:22.741)
So they have to say the leg leg. I’ll put the letters in different triangle points on the dome and I’ll also have them do like a vestibular thing as well like jumping on the physio ball or doing the rotation board or the balance board. These are more high level kids or we’ll do prisms, you know, while there I was doing that with the last client. So yeah, in any way in any way you’re really boosting the tracking either where you do it with each eye separately or you

do with both eyes together. kind of just mix it up and that’s what we do. All right. Now the second skill that we talk about is called visual accommodation. This means that the eye, the lens of the eye is able to change its focus between near and far distance objects.

And so one of the tests I use in that is have the individual switch their focus from an object like a 10 inches away, like a small chart of letters to one that’s 20, 10 to 20 feet away and noting any delay or difficulty in the adjustment of.

the visual accommodation. You know, there’s less of that today because kids are on the tablet a lot and they’re not using their desk and looking at the board. They’re just kind of at their tablet but visual accommodation comes into play a lot in sports.

It comes into play a lot with bike riding, you things where you have to kind of shift your focus. Now we’re in ski season. So with the borders, can they board and kind of do that near far focusing while they’re keeping their balance. So in terms of vision therapy, the fun, my functional vision exercise, you can do it with a thumb.

Sam Berne (14:14.675)
shifting it from, you know, thumb up close and then looking out in the distance. I can do it with each eye separately.

I like to repeat it for about five times to improve the accommodative flexibility. Sometimes I’ll use two heart charts on closer one farther away different sizes different setups of the heart chart with the letters. I also like to use the vestibular system as a challenge. So we might again be on some kind of a rotation or balance board. And then the other thing is the

The metronome I like the metronome at a slow speed like 40 beats a minute and we’re just you know, shifting our focus back and forth. All right. Now the third visual skill that I like to work with is what we call binocular vision. This has to do with both eyes working together and

I am really interested in the coordination between the two eyes. I’m going to stop here for a second. The coordination between the two eyes is critically important as it relates to depth perception judging things in space. You know, it’s such an important skill in terms of the

the spatial IQ, the spatial IQ of the person. And there were, there was some work done by some optometrists, developmental optometrists, where they actually measured IQ and then they did vision therapy on them and their, there’s their depth perception improved.

Sam Berne (16:16.085)
And their IQ went up because they could see in the problems more they could see into Solutions better. So binocular vision is super important. Now we haven’t gone over this test. This is called the cover test. And so the way you set this up is you sit across from the person about a foot away. Okay, so they’re looking at you. You’re looking at them.

And what you’re doing is you’re having them look at a target, maybe about 14 inches from their face. So they’re focusing on the target and you’re covering an eye. Now, when you, as soon as you cover an eye, you want to watch the movement of the eye that’s uncovered. Does it move away from the target? Does it drift away out or away in? That’s going to tell you whether or not there’s strabismus.

and if there’s a lack of visual coordination. Now, the other thing you want to look at is when you take the cover away, what happens to the eye that was covered? Does it come back to look at the target? Does it drift away from the target? So we do both eyes. We have you cover the right eye. We say look at the left and then we go in the other direction and then we say cover the other eye. So we’re covering the right eye.

And we’re covering the left and we’re looking at the movement of the eye behind the cover. If the eye goes in then we know we’re in an exo response. If the eye goes out under the cover when you take the cover away, then that’s an ESO response up and down. Also, you might see an eye like you take the cover away. Whoop the eye is going up or the eye is going down. So the

The cover test is a way to do this. Another way to do it is with the red green test. We have them look at the red green bars and this test is going to show more general binocular vision possibilities or suppression. Because when there’s a binocular vision problem, two things can happen, double vision or suppression. So on the red green test,

Sam Berne (18:34.765)
You’re going to be able to ascertain are they suppressing or are they using both eyes together? Now you could even get a 3d picture book with Polaroid glasses. The Brunel Corporation sells this and so basically it’s a it’s a 3d book. The picture on it you wear the 3d glasses and you go. Oh my God, I can see depth in the picture. I can pinch the insects wings as an example.

Or the person might say, geez, the picture looks really flat to me. I can’t really see it. So that’s where I might do the red green test to see if they’re suppressing one eye or another. Now, one of the best exercises to develop binocular vision is the Brock string, which you are doing. You folks are doing these. And again, you attach one end.

of the string to a stationary object. And then the other end you hold it up to your nose and you spread the beads out equidistantly and you focus on each bead and you’re just converging at each bead and that’s a way for you to develop the binocular vision situation. So it’s such an important skill. Okay, we got it. We got a few more things. We want to talk about hand-eye coordination.

So this is how the eyes follow the hand reaching and grasping. There’s a primitive reflex called the grasp reflex. You probably know it. And so we want to observe the person’s ability to reach and grab grass grasp objects of various sizes distances and textures. And again, we’re doing the alphabet ball exercise.

to improve eye-hand coordination, keeping the ball, hitting it up at the balloon, for example, is a good eye-hand coordination. Catching a ball, Marsden ball, know, those kinds of things. Juggling with scarves, throwing the scarf over here on the right and then throwing it here on the left. So anything you can develop that eye-to-hand coordination is really helpful.

Sam Berne (20:56.919)
So now we’re going to move into some of the cognitive skills like visual memory. There’s a test called the Monroe visual three, which is a good memory test, but it’s paper and pencil visual integration visual motor integration. So another way to do it is to do the test is to show the individual series of images or patterns and for them to then recall or reproduce from memory. That’s another way to

Test the memory and then their memory games matching card games. Concentration is a game. all use anything. You can locate specific images in a pair enhances visual memory. There’s also a whole body of work. I learned from a doctor wax Harry wax who was a developmental optometrist. He has a whole program working with parketry blocks.

and visual memory.

All right, the next is form perception, recognizing objects despite changes in size, position or context.

So how do you assess form constancy you present objects in various orientations and ask the individual to identify them? No noting any difficulties in the identification. I like doing tangram puzzles as a way to enhance form perception or form constancy where you engage the individual and assembling the tangram pieces to match specific shapes.

Sam Berne (22:38.317)
Improving their ability to recognize forms in different configurations. This is going to come into play in high level mathematics calculus differential equations even geometry So this is very supported in math All right. The next skill is called figure ground being able to see the forest from the trees to see the the details from the whole picture one of the

Techniques we use is utilizing puzzles where the individual must find objects hidden within a busy scene or enhancing visual figure ground discrimination by doing parts to whole relationship type parketry designs. And then the last one is visual closure and spatial orientation. This is important because spatial orientation tells us about being able to

understand where we are in space and where we’re going and understanding relationships is a key point. Now, this could be in sports. It could be just socially, but the key in spatial orientation is that what we want to do is we want to utilize different puzzles and worksheets where you must find hidden objects in a busy scene.

Okay. Now, we also talk about something called visual closure. This would be like doing dot to dot drawings. It could be doing something like we call the incomplete man test where we have a diagram of a man with like one arm, his face, maybe one leg. And so we give it to the child and it’s a

 

-If you are a practitioner, consider joining my training. Contact me here to set up a free discovery call: https://bit.ly/4jSn293

For even more from Dr. Sam, check out his new exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars: https://drsambernesmembership.com/

Keywords

eye health, lymphatic system, vision, detox, relaxation, vagus nerve, eye exercises, digital strain, inflammation, self-care
Summary

In this podcast, Sam Berne discusses the importance of the eye-limb connection and offers practical exercises to improve eye health. He emphasizes the role of hydration, movement, and the vagus nerve in maintaining clear eyesight and reducing symptoms like puffiness and strain. Techniques such as humming and eye massage are highlighted as effective methods for enhancing relaxation and lymphatic flow, ultimately leading to better vision and overall well-being.
Takeaways

For most of us, digital devices cause eye strain.
The eyes rely on movement and hydration for health.
Systemic inflammation can lead to eye brain inflammation.
Eye massage can stimulate the vagus nerve.
Humming is a powerful technique for relaxation.
Palming helps in reducing stress and enhancing vision.
Regular practice can lead to clearer eyesight.
The ocular cardiac reflex slows the heart rate.
Humming sends vibrations that activate the vagus nerve.
Consistency in these techniques yields better eye health.
Takeaways

For most of us, digital devices cause eye strain.
The eyes rely on movement and hydration for health.
Systemic inflammation can lead to eye brain inflammation.
Eye massage can stimulate the vagus nerve.
Humming is a powerful technique for relaxation.
Palming helps in reducing stress and enhancing vision.
Regular practice can lead to clearer eyesight.
The ocular cardiac reflex slows the heart rate.
Humming sends vibrations that activate the vagus nerve.
Consistency in these techniques yields better eye health.
Sound Bites

“Humming calms the nervous system.”
Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Eye-Limb Connection
01:28 Understanding Eye Health and Lymphatic Function
02:57 Techniques for Eye Relaxation and Vagus Nerve Stimulation
06:19 Benefits of Humming and Eye Massage

Sam Berne (00:01.634)
Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. It’s great to be here. So we’re going to talk a bit about the eye-limb connection how to drain and detox clear eyesight and vision. So the one thing I want to say to start off with is that you know, for most of us we spend our day on digital devices and I don’t know how many listeners out there followers.

have things like puffy eyes strain redness and you’re concerned because you’re staring at a screen all day. Well in this podcast, what I want to do is I want to give you some exercises. Just a very simple approach on how to boost your eye lymph body connection because you see the eyes don’t have a direct lymphatic system and so they rely on movement.

The eyes rely on movement hydration and proper circulation to get rid of inflammation and oxidative stress. So if you have any of those things like blurry vision puffy eyes, then stay tuned. So let’s talk a little bit about the lymph and since the eyes have no direct lymphatic connection.

They do rely on hydration and movement and the eyelids are key player in this because they house the glands that produce the tears that keep our eyes from getting dry. So it’s very easy to get inflammation. In fact, a lot of systemic inflammation can lead to eye brain inflammation. Obviously what we eat gluten, dairy and sugar.

our big factors, but also how we stare at our screen actually locks down our lymphatic function and this can cause these symptoms that I’ve spoken about. So the role of eye massage and I’ll talk a little bit of what I mean by eye massage. I’m also going to bring in what we call the Vegas nerve because the Vegas nerve is very important.

Sam Berne (02:27.438)
in our connection to our parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve runs from the brainstem to the face throat chest and into the gut. Now, one of the best ways to stimulate and balance your vagus nerve is by doing a simple process called humming and the power of humming and I palming

is so critical for balancing the nervous system, increasing the lymph, increasing our vagus nerve and reducing our stress. So while we’re massaging and placing our hands on different parts of the body, this is a very powerful self-regulating technique that stimulates the vagus nerve. It calms the nervous system.

It enhances lymphatic flow and it reduces our stress. So the way we do this is that you’re going to place first of all, you’re going to wash your hands. Hopefully your hands are clean. You’re going to place your fingertips over the eyelids. See how I’m doing the eyes are closed and I’m just making some circles. See how I’m doing this very lightly and I’m humming. So we’re going to do about 10 homes.

Sam Berne (04:09.633)
Also add the temples.

Sam Berne (04:24.568)
Now let’s move down to the jaws.

Sam Berne (04:38.808)
forward to go. Now we’re going to work on our vagus nerve which runs along the side of our neck and we’re going to be going down like this two hums.

Sam Berne (05:01.974)
In the last two, remain closed. You’re going to do the palming and the humming.

Sam Berne (05:23.04)
You can drop your hands and just connect in with your body. There should be some tingling brightness lightness, and then you can open your eyes and look around and I know for me when I hum like this, it actually relaxes me. It can actually reduce cortisol, increase oxytocin and serotonin those natural calming biochemicals.

In the brain also humming can slow the heart rate lower the blood pressure and increase digestion and relaxation. The other thing that when you cup your eyes over the palms over your eyes, you’re you’re gently stimulating something called the ocular ocular cardiac reflex and this naturally slows the heart rate.

I’ve done studies on heart rate variability doing this technique and I actually see the heart rate come down. Also, the other thing that the humming does is it sends vibrations through the skull and the sinuses and this further activates the vagus nerve, which which again is going to just create more relaxation. So this is a great technique for being able to reset

your eye brain body connection. It’s definitely going to relax your nervous system and it’s going to rejuvenate your eyes. So give it a try. I’d love to hear your comments. Let me know how you’re doing. My suggestion would be to do these 10 homes like we did three times a day do it for a week and you will start to see more.

resiliency in your eyes, less redness, less puffiness, less strain, more clarity. So let me know what you think about that. That’s our show for today. I want to thank you so much for tuning in. Take care.

 

 

 

-For even more from Dr. Sam, check out his new exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars: https://drsambernesmembership.com/

Are you a practitioner? Join his practitioner’s training today. Book a free discovery call with Dr. Berne https://calendly.com/drsamberne/retre…

Keywords to the podcast today:

myopia, eye health, computer use, prescription lenses, vision improvement, blue light protection, eye fatigue, relaxation, peripheral vision, eye doctor

Summary

In this episode, Dr. Sam Berne discusses the implications of myopia, particularly in relation to computer use. He emphasizes the importance of having the correct prescription for computer work to avoid worsening eye conditions. Dr. Berne suggests that individuals should request a second prescription tailored for computer use, which can help reduce eye strain and improve comfort. He also highlights the benefits of using blue light protection lenses and the importance of taking breaks from lenses to promote eye health.

Takeaways

• Myopia means seeing well up close but struggling with distance.
• Using a distance prescription for computer work can worsen myopia.
• Request a second prescription specifically for computer use.
• Comfort and clarity are both crucial when choosing lenses.
• A reduced prescription can help relax the eyes and improve peripheral vision.
• Wearing a lower power lens can enhance eye health and circulation.
• Taking breaks from lenses can reduce their reinforcing influence.
• Blue light protection is essential for screen use.
• Over time, a reduced prescription can become the new distance prescription.
• Regular eye exams are important for maintaining eye health.
Sound Bites
• “This is a recipe for disaster.”
• “You have to know how far away your laptop is.”
• “Clarity is important, but comfort is just as important.”

Chapters
00:00Understanding Myopia and Its Implications
02:57The Importance of Correct Prescription for Computer Use

Sam Berne (00:00.568)
Hey everyone, welcome to the program today. I’m going to be giving some advice on how to reduce myopia. People ask me questions whether or not you can actually improve myopia. Well, of course you can. In fact, you can improve your vision at any age. Hope you enjoy the show. Here we go. You could do to be proactive is you can download.

A Snellen acuity chart. It’s free and print it out and put it somewhere 20 feet away. And that could be a measuring stick for you to see, you know, how close you are to passing the driver, the vision part of the driver’s test. In most states, you need 2040 and so you don’t need 2020.

And 2020 means seeing a 1 third inch letter at 20 feet. So you’re you’re looking at a fairly sizable letter and as long as you can pass it with both eyes somewhere with a correction. There’s no problem. And now I’m going to deconstruct this a little bit for you and it may or may not make sense. It may not resonate.

But here’s the pattern I see in you. Here’s the pattern.

Growing up, you began to tense your eyes. And when you tense your eyes, you give up the distance to keep your world close to you. That’s the successful part of your seeing up close. Now what goes along with that tension sometimes is you feel

Sam Berne (02:02.978)
Like you have to defend yourself. Like you’re on a constant alert. Yeah, yeah, looking for threats looking for threats. Now that mental energy, whether it’s conscious or unconscious that you’re putting into your eyes because your eyes are the bodyguards for you.

They’re like the advanced sentry, you know, that sits outside where you live and is watching. When’s the next fire? Do I smell smoke? What’s that siren? So your prescription in your eye is everywhere in your body. It’s not just in the eye. So the cataracts, you’re allegedly

forming and I can give you what symptoms are. What a cataract is on a kind of a very deep level is I’m blocking what is coming at me and I’m blocking looking out. So it’s kind of like a boundary that you’re creating. It’s a hardening. You’re getting more fixed.

And then with a floater, that’s like shocking, shocking transformation. Like there’s always this it’s like a pinball machine, a pinball that’s going all over the back of your eye and it’s got some congestion. It’s got the tissue is partly consolidated. It’s it’s very hard to predict. And again, it’s it’s related.

To being really fixed and tight and locked in and You know, there are I exercises. I want to show you but the psychology of this is that You are mentally operating in a way where you’re on high alert all the time

Sam Berne (04:20.746)
And you’re you’re putting that through your sensory systems, especially your eyes and your ears. And what it’s doing is it’s beginning to affect the healthy tissue and the structures of the anatomy. Like it can’t even absorb the good nutrients that you’re feeding it. Thank God you’re, you know, conscious to do that because if you weren’t game over, you know.

So, you know.

I want to revisit for a second the that blurry vision exercise. I’m not going to make you go back and do that necessarily. But my point in that was to take away your habit of being used to having things a certain way, which is clear. Well, when you put them on, there’s no way for you to get

clarity. You cannot focus through it and get the same level of resolution as you can with your glasses. And so what that what that lens is doing is an it’s an energy transformer. So think of your eye as a doorway of light that comes in and projects out.

So the eye is one of the is one of the windows where light can get in. And when you wear a lens like from the optometrist, it’s a very specific window that concentrates and tunnels and tightens you up. It reinforces

Sam Berne (06:23.35)
your mental habit of protecting yourself hypervigilance stress. Yeah on high alert and what the blurry glasses do is it invites you to go into the other part of your nervous system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system.

And you know, there’s a saying that what you don’t like or what you’re not really attracted to is probably the very thing you need to bring you into more balance.

And that’s a tricky thing because you know, I don’t like spinach. So do I have to eat spinach to get into balance? No, there might be another way for me to do that. But your eyes have been eating a certain diet and the diet is a certain experience that you have been reinforcing when you wear those

corrective lenses. It’s a whole body consciousness mind body emotional psychological even spiritual change.

Sam Berne (07:48.502)
Now, when you take the lenses off, the light pattern changes into the eyes and it’s more equally distributed. And then when you wear the blurry glasses, what it’s doing is it’s spreading the light into the dark areas of your retina that you cannot get to because it’s been lost. You know, you you spend this time tunneling and narrowing and tightening and making it

resolved so you can see clearly because you can feel safer that way. There is a connection somewhere between safety and security and clarity. Again, you may not be aware. Those are the issues that I would suggest you explore and that’s why

Like when you put on the plus lens, it’s like going to a whole new country. It’s very weird. And one of the things you could do with that is forget the patch for now. Put them on and see if you can walk around for a few minutes. Now, I wouldn’t walk up and down stairs. I wouldn’t walk out on the street, but

Here’s the game that I’m inviting you to play. This is a game and the game is how many different experiences can you give your eyeballs?

Sam Berne (09:35.694)
You just want to make it more broadband. know, be like if you were in high school and I was your teacher and I said, you know, You look like you got some artistic abilities. Let’s send you to Paris. Go study for six months. And you don’t know French, you know, you’re like, well, I don’t know anybody there. This is like a big thing for me, but you go and you do it.

And it gives you something that broadens you gives you more access to resource so that maybe 20 years later you’re applying for an advertising job or something and that creativity that you tapped into in Paris you can you that’s imprinted in you and you can use it. So the parallel is that when you wear the blurry glasses it

forces you out of your habitual way of seeing and it’s really easy. When we do our workshops, it’s amazing. It’s it’s it’s incredible. So we’ll do a workshop, right? And we’ll do a process and I’ll ask people. Okay, what’s changed? Nothing. No, no, you got to come up with one thing that’s changed by doing the process.

I’m telling you nothing is changed. I don’t like it. don’t know. So what what we talk about is when you see no change or there’s you you’re not like I’m not really into this. You’re probably going to stay in the same track. The track and for you to reverse cataracts.

and floaters, you must come out of the track that you’re in. I mean, I like the idea of you going outside without your glasses being in the sunshine grounding yourself. I probably do that long swing exercise.

Sam Berne (11:54.774)
Yeah, I would do that and I would be super mindful of what are what are differences for you when you’re without your lenses and I’d write them down like I’ve started keeping a journal notebook. Okay, when I did dr. Burns blurry vision exercise today, what were three things that I noticed it could be?

You know, I felt a lot more dizzy through those blurry glasses when I was moving. Well, that would make sense because it’s stimulating a lot more of your peripheral vision than you’re normally used to. It could make you very angry. It could make you very frustrated. It could give you a sense of relief like, I don’t have to worry about details.

Sam Berne (12:54.188)
I don’t know, but there is a deep, deep well of information that you’ve internalized into your eyeballs.

It goes all the way back when you weren’t treated right. And I was done. Now I’m going to speak as a clinician. Got some data here. The higher the number in the prescription. The more well trauma. Yes, the more because of your sensitivity. You’re highly sensitive.

You have this trauma that is energy in your eyes that’s now beginning to turn into floaters and cataracts.

So how do you get out of this? Well, I’m creating an awakening like, okay. These could be and I’m sure this isn’t really new information. But the cause of your myopia is the incredible defense strategy and hypervigilance that you are still operating on.

That was back then, but you’re still in that news cycle.

Sam Berne (14:22.424)
So.

connecting your psychological and emotional perceptions to doing different things with your eyes is a way for you to begin to release it.

Sam Berne (14:43.362)
Like I’ve had people who’ve had emotional releases, right? I’ll have an emotional release, happens and we’re doing a process and it’s like, whoa. And after that emotional release, they can see the eye chart better.

So energy that’s been internalized.

blocks the function.

Sam Berne (15:10.402)
And it’s like we have a lid on the eyes. We open the lid. We open up the cap. There’s a lot of internalized energy that you’ve swallowed over the years. Especially when you were young.

Sam Berne (15:32.13)
So.

There’s the blurry vision experience with just do both eyes, but I want you moving when you do it. Okay, walking, but I don’t want you to give up and if you’re so the the question the two questions you want to ask yourself. What do I see and how does it feel?

Sam Berne (16:02.582)
If I said to you off the top of your head, what does blurry vision mean to you? Okay, blur is danger. Love it. Blur is danger. Okay, so you’re going to do everything in your power to avoid experiencing blur. You’re going to avoid it. But do know what it’s going to give you clear eyesight?

Sam Berne (16:28.994)
And you’ve got a lot on the line here because now it’s starting to affect your independence, your driving. It’s like, I got his attention now.

Sam Berne (16:41.996)
We talk about embracing your blur.

Going into the blur is the way you get clear eyesight. So what’s supposed to happen is if you wear those blurry glasses for a few minutes and you process through yeah, blur is danger blur is scary blur is fear blur is whatever it is and just say can I can I go into it a little more? I learn about my reaction to it?

Can I be with it?

Sam Berne (17:23.522)
When you take those glasses off, what should happen is that your eyesight should now be clearer.

Sam Berne (17:38.892)
That’s what’s supposed to happen.

Sam Berne (17:43.406)
But the more resistance you have to that idea, again, you’re in a track, you’re fixed, right? It’s comfortable. But even I’m losing control of that because now my distance glasses aren’t working as well. So damn, my strategy isn’t working very well.

Sam Berne (18:09.838)
Does that make sense? Your eyes are five years old. There’s a saying that when you wear less prescription your eyes get to be a little older.

When you wear more prescription that reverts you back to earlier time.

That’s why in my view, you should be celebrating being able to wear the computer glasses because it’s taking you a little bit out of the danger zone mentality. But then one of the rules is if I’m not feeling safe in the circumstance, I’m in I’m always able to put my stronger glasses on.

You always have that default because what I want you to do is make choices about what you want to look through so that you can see more clearly when you need to. I mean, it could be very simple. I don’t want to necessarily do this right now, but probably we could increase the distance prescription enough for you to be able to go take the test and pass it.

They would be glasses you would never wear, but I’m sure that we could increase the prescription to the point where you’d have no problem walking in there and taking the test. The floater is the floater and the cataracts are symptoms. They’re not the problem. And I mean, I could give you the answer for the floater tomorrow. Doctors in Beverly Hills. He’s

Sam Berne (19:58.574)
a floater doctor that zaps floaters with a laser. If you don’t want to go to him, I know another guy in Dallas who does it. It’s called the floater’s doctor. So you play like a video game and he zaps your floaters.

So that’s always there for you. One needs to be careful about laser on the eye because I had one case where it made the eye unseeable just created a cloud afterwards with another guy. It helped him. So he was, know, the he tried all the detox things and nothing worked and he was frustrated. So there you go. So you have those options available to you at any time.

I know it’s not really where you want to go. And I think that what needs to really happen here is you need to do a bit of a reprogramming and then updating in your eye experience instead of being back at that five-year-old situation. So your homework

will be a couple things if you choose to accept it. The first is even if you did it two or three days a week.

Even one day a week put on those blurry vision glasses. And let your psyche come up around. Well, how’s this making me feel? What am I thinking and look how strong that safety response is in you that hypervigilant response and see if you can.

Sam Berne (21:54.686)
Embrace or surrender into the blur. What the blur is asking you to do is relax. Let go.

It doesn’t have to be your way.

So you’re doing that in a therapeutic circumstance, right? And you do some kind of a before and after measurement. Look out a window. Look look across the room. Look at that clock and even if it’s clear for a millisecond after you do the exercise that begins to prove to the mind that you can actually

get clarity by going into the blur because right now I get it. You why would you want to trust that go into the blur? I want to try to get away from the blur. I got this these cataracts and floaters that you know, they’re strangling me.

Sam Berne (23:01.432)
So that would be the first one to do.

The second one to do if this at all appeals to you, I’m not sure we did it. It’s called the eye dialogue.

So in eye dialogue, let’s rewind a little in Chinese medicine. The right eye is the father and the left eye is the mother. It’s the same same in urology. So what you do is you cover you could use a bandana or a patch whatever, you know, you cover the left without glasses on and by the way when you when your glasses are off.

You’re going to be more vulnerable, more internal and more real. When you put your glasses on, first of all, your eyes are way ahead of your body. And second of all, you are now in a persona.

You are not authentic. You’re in something else be more critical. You’re going to be more judgmental because your vision is such where you’ve got that acute artificially created but that acuteness. So you’re going to pick up stuff. But it’s it’s a drug you’re on.

Sam Berne (24:31.352)
Glasses are a drug and they’re side effects. They make you hyper. They make you tighter. They make it’s like Ritalin.

So you patch the left eye and I’ll send you some questions that you can ask your right eye wonder what the left eyes experience. Let’s ask the left eye. So cover the right eye that’s working on your inner vision. That’s part of the internalized energy that you

swallowed because you couldn’t really do anything with

Now, I don’t know whether this is true in your case, so I can’t say, but when I evaluate a child, I can tell exactly what the parent’s marriage is. The eyes are really just a mirror of what we see, what we’re taking in.

Sam Berne (25:29.464)
You know, I’m digesting what I’m seeing with my parents on a daily basis. I don’t know how to process this. I mean, I have clinical experience with evidence because I’ve seen so many kids. The problem is the parents, not the kid. You know, the father is over on one corner and the mother’s over in the other corner. I recently had

an autistic kid. The father is a cardiologist. The mother is an artist. She says I want my kid to be treated by you. And I met with a cardiologist in my office and he railed me out left and right and he said that they would never stand for for this for me that I’m a quack and all that. So what ended up happening is she divorced him.

I mean, they had a bad marriage and they were married and the guy was a jerk had no connection to anything except his rational science mind, which was very narrow. It was really hurting his kid. So, I mean, this is like this is our eyes are our our scroll of history at least for me. I can read somebody’s eyes and I can tell a lot about their life, you know.

because I learned the patterns. And so what I’m saying about your pattern is your cataracts and floater you manifested it as a way to block things more and create more congestion and being fixed in. So what I want you to do is have different net have now have different experiences with your eyes. It’ll give you a new lease on life. It’ll it’ll allow you whatever happens.

It will allow you to have a broader range of what’s possible. And so the blurry vision is the invitation. Can I relax into this blur? What can I learn about myself? What are my reactions to the blur? Write it down every day when you do it. Like you said blur danger. Everybody’s got that that’s nearsighted. I hate the blur. I’m out of control.

Sam Berne (27:57.266)
I hate the blur. could be shamed. I hate the blur because I could get it wrong. My teacher shamed me when I was in school. I mean the stories go on and on. had a lady. She’s an artist now. She said first grade. got a D in art. How do you get a D in art in first grade? She became myopic.

So.

The blurry vision glasses, the eye dialogue, and the third exercise is I’m going to send you a picture of some jelly beans.

Okay, you’re to print it out. It can be black and white or color. If you got a color printer, you do that. All right. So this picture of jelly beans is what we call a soft focus 3D exercise. And you’re going to wear your computer glasses for this. This is the only time you wear the glasses. Wear the computer glasses. You take the jelly beans and you hold it up to your nose. So it’s touching your nose. Okay, touching your nose.

You mentally look through it. So pretend you’re at Venice Beach and you’re looking out at the ocean. All right, but the jelly beans is here, but I’m seeing out in the ocean. You start pushing it away from your face and you start to look at the spaces between the jelly beans. You keep pushing it out pushing it out. The picture pops and you see 3d meaning that your two eyes are now synchronizing.

Sam Berne (29:34.92)
So some of the floaters look close. Some of the jelly beans look closer. Some of them look farther away that opens up the circulation in the lens of the eye and the vitreous where the floater is. I’d like you to do that exercise three times a day for like a minute or two. I you go on that computer all day. I’d love to see you. That’s a break from your you’re focusing. So that’s more of a physical therapy.

exercise the other two the blurry vision glasses and the the eye dialogue are more of the internal vision and your your habits and conditioning and patterns.

Sam Berne (30:22.53)
Yeah, it’s it’s huge. I mean, I can’t underestimate it because if we don’t at least interface with that a little bit, you’re not going to make the changes just doing the physical exercises. Booming when you go to psychotherapy, you take your lenses off. If you don’t you should.

You know, I guess, you know, it depends if you need to see the person but here’s the thing that I can say to you. When you take your lenses off, you don’t have the same obstacles and blocks. In defense. Remember your energy is going to be more equally distributed. Like I have a lot of massage therapists over the years. I’ve worked with.

And I’ve said to them take your lenses off when you’re doing your treatments. And they’ll all come back and say to me, you know, when I have my lenses off, I’m much more intuitive. I’m much more connected.

Sam Berne (31:25.847)
And I want you to make that that crossover so that you get that.

Sam Berne (31:34.066)
I mean, I’m not saying do this right now. This would be your vision quest. Take a Sunday when you have no demands. Maybe Sunday isn’t the day Saturday or whatever day go on a vision retreat meaning don’t wear any of your glasses for four hours and notice what comes up for you.

There’s going to be a detox. And energetic detox.

Sam Berne (32:10.494)
because we’re taking away the drug that you’ve been made dependent upon.

Sam Berne (32:19.812)
Exactly. It numbs you. Thank you. Yes, it does. It sure does numb you out. It disassociates you. That’s what it’s really doing. Part of you is out there your eyes. Maybe most of you is out there. You’re not in your body. When you take your lenses off, you are going to be more in your body because it’s so blurry out there.

your fixation and your attention comes in.

You develop the habit of being outside of yourself because of the danger.

Sam Berne (33:02.804)
You don’t have to do that anymore, but it’s going to take time for you to get your eyesight clear and wear less prescription. There’s because it’s split again. It’s a dissociated pattern, right? Yeah. So, you know, keep taking the supplements that feel good to you.

that you feel like, okay, this is I like this and the ones you don’t put off to the side you to be much more mindful energetically what you’re putting into your body. What you’re seeing the difference when you take your your your lenses off.

I want you to get more mindful. Mindfulness will heal you.

Sam Berne (34:03.9)
It will make you more connected to yourself and you’ll know what’s working in what’s not right now. I’m helping you, but I want you to get that and the floaters in the cataracts are symptoms. want you to start thinking of them as symptoms and not the diagnosis. The diagnosis is hypermental vigilance. That’s the diagnosis. So

wear the blurry glasses and soften your attitude. Embrace the blur and do it in a circumstance where you feel a hundred percent safe be in the safest environment you can and nurture yourself. And this is a this is a loving act what you’re doing. You’re taking back your vision under the deepest healing things in your life.

You know, that’s why you were able to meet me and do that. Everybody going in there. They’re not thinking like you. They’re not. They just say, give me the contacts. Give me the glasses. Give me the lasik surgery, you know, so very few escape the insanity.

But you did.

 

 

Join Dr. Berne’s membership: https://drsambernesmembership.com

Join Dr. Berne’s Practitioner’s Program: https://www.drsamberne.com/practitioners-training/

 

Keywords

holistic eye care, traditional eye care, vision therapy, eyesight improvement, eye health, diet and vision, glaucoma reversal, brain-eye connection, vision exercises, iridology

Summary

In this enlightening conversation, Dr. Sam Berne discusses the differences between holistic and traditional eye care, emphasizing the importance of treating the root causes of vision problems rather than just the symptoms. He shares his personal journey of overcoming severe nearsightedness through holistic methods and explains how vision therapy can benefit individuals of all ages. The discussion also covers the critical stages of visual development in infants, the distinction between eyesight and vision, and the impact of diet and lifestyle on eye health. Dr. Berne highlights the potential to reverse conditions like glaucoma and cataracts through holistic practices and emphasizes the deep connection between eye health and overall brain
function.

Takeaways

Holistic eye care focuses on treating the cause, not just symptoms.
Vision therapy can improve eyesight at any age.
Early development stages significantly impact visual health.
Eyesight is a static measurement; vision is dynamic.
Diet and lifestyle choices directly affect eye health.
Cataracts and glaucoma can potentially be reversed.
The liver plays a crucial role in eye health.
Craniosacral therapy can improve vision by enhancing circulation.
Emotional and psychological factors influence vision.
The eyes are an extension of the brain, reflecting overall health.

Sound Bites

“We treat the cause instead of the symptom.”
“We can improve our eyesight anytime.”
“I was seeing 2400 on the eye chart.”
“Vision is how the eyes and brain work together.”
“Eyesight is a static measurement.”
“Cataracts can be slowed down or reversed.”
“The liver is critical for absorbing nutrients.”
“The eyes are the brain.”
Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Holistic Eye Care
02:03 Understanding Holistic vs Traditional Eye Care
03:58 Personal Journey to Improved Vision
12:17 The Importance of Early Development in Vision
18:19 Distinguishing Eyesight from Vision
22:32 The Role of Diet and Lifestyle in Eye Health
28:20 Reversing Glaucoma and Liver Health
33:05 The Connection Between Eyes and Brain Health

 

Sam Berne (00:01)
Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast today. So I’m being interviewed by Ashley Dealey and she is a wellness practitioner. She’s got a big following on Instagram. So I’ve agreed to be on her show and I thought I would do a recording and share it with you. So enjoy this it’s new information and here we go.

Why don’t you call me Dr. Sam? Okay, Dr. Sam. then this is also when I remind my guests this is not a live podcast. Okay, so if something’s on the tip of your tongue or maybe your alarm goes off, don’t worry. I’ll edit it out. Okay. And then this is usually when I ask my guests to make sure to put their phone on do not disturb or airplane mode. Yep. That’s good too.

We’re good to go. I would say, well, let’s just see how it goes. I don’t have a hard stop. yeah, we’re good.

Yes. So I am just so excited that you’re here. If at any point you need to take a break, just let me know. Okay. edit this. So I’m going to go ahead and get started. Like I always do. Okay. Dr. Sam. Welcome to the show. It’s great to be here. Thank you, Ashley, for having me so excited. I feel like

matches mine and I’m just thrilled to have someone so open-minded here.

is to get a good understanding of what’s the difference between holistic eye care and traditional eye care. It’s pretty simple because in holistic eye care, what I’m doing is looking for the cause instead of treating the symptom. Also, I would say number two that I’m looking at the eyes as it relates to our metabolic systemic

and psychological, emotional, spiritual health. And number three, the eyes are interrelated and interconnected to our awareness, our diet, our lifestyle, our stress. So it’s not just genetics. Yes, there’s epigenetics, but there are many factors that influence how we see and it actually starts very early in our life. And so when I

figure out, okay, what are the causes? We treat those. Lots of times the symptoms actually just go away.

So are you saying we could improve our eyesight anytime? Yes, we can from infants to elders. That’s the scope of my population, my community. I did it on myself very early on in my career. I was very nearsighted and I met a holistic eye doctor and I went through his physical vision therapy program.

And in a period about six months, my eyesight improved to 2020 and I didn’t need my lenses anymore. And so I am firsthand experience of people being able to improve their vision at any age. Yes.

That’s a fascinating story that I really want to dive into because I feel like in a regular optometrist office, you’re going to read an eye chart, be fitted for glasses or contacts, and then buy your prescription for glasses or contacts. So can you please tell me, how did you find this doctor and how did you change your vision?

Hmm. Well, I was in a study group in the Northeast. That’s where I went to school. That’s where I grew up and I had heard about this doctor. He was in the 70s. His name was Dr. Albert A. Shankman and he wrote a book called Vision Enhancement Training. So he was a physical therapy type optometrist who practiced in Connecticut and he was, you know, on the shady side of the mountain of his career.

And he was inviting certain young optometrists to year-long training on teaching us his methods of holistic vision care. And so I resonated with it because I had always been really open-minded. You know, even as a child growing up, there was a there was an openness that I had and a curiosity. So even though I went to a very conventional

Optometry School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania College of Optometry, which I’m really grateful I graduated there because it was a very disease focused, eye disease focused type practice school. And I had done some experiences in internships where I worked in holistic optometry practices. One was in California, one was in the East Coast. And I also had just finished a

program learning how to treat children on the spectrum disorders. And this was called the Gazelle Institute in New Haven, Connecticut. So I was already primed to practice this way. And then when Dr. Shankman set that invitation, I jumped on it and I started to become a student of his. And then I went to him as a patient and started doing physical vision therapy. And that’s how I transformed

the habits and patterns in my eyes. So that’s the short story.

Well, I feel like I’m on the edge of my seat because now I want the long story. What was the physical vision therapy that you did to change your eyes and a two-part question? What was your eyesight before you saw him? So before I saw him, I was seeing 2400 on the eye chart. So that’s the biggie. I needed a really strong nearsighted prescription in order to function. And what?

What he offered was a mind body approach. So he was a yoga teacher and he also taught meditation. you know, there there are I exercise programs out there that are very mechanical. So if you do certain amount of exercises every day, your eyesight gets better. But as soon as you stop doing the exercises, your eyes get worse.

What he did was he really focused on what our belief systems were around our vision our attitudes and he worked a lot with our movements our body movement and different lens prescriptions that we would use as exercise prescriptions. He worked a lot with each eye separately and we delved into what were some of the psycho-emotional patterns around why we developed our vision.

I was nearsighted. That was my diagnosis. Nearsighted is I pull the world in, I tighten up, I get very defensive and you know, I was a memorizer. I always had a hard time learning to read. My mom took me to a lot of different educational tutors and we could never figure out why I wasn’t a good reader. And so I became a memorizer and I went to an eye doctor and he gave me nearsighted glasses when I was about eight years old. at 10.

up my eyes, but it didn’t really treat the problem, which was Dr. Shankman diagnosed me as having

my two eyes not working together and my left eye wandering out. And that’s why I saw double vision and I had poor attention. So through his vision therapy techniques, I was able to learn to coordinate both eyes together. So my double vision went away and my reading took off. And so then I didn’t need the tension in my eye muscles to do the work, the schoolwork that I was asked to do. And so since I didn’t need that tension anymore, I methodically started to reduce

my prescription and with each prescription reduction I

I felt more relaxation in my nervous system and more openness. remember I had started a practice in Philadelphia and one day my staff said to me, know, you’re really different. What what’s happening? You seem more relaxed and I said, well, I’m going through vision therapy and my my eyes are more relaxed. Therefore, I’m more relaxed and they said, yeah, you don’t have your edge. You’re not as intense. So that’s that was a real breakthrough moment for me to really

I

how strongly my vision affected my affect my behavior my reactions and when I got to the point where I didn’t need my prescription anymore. was able to see possibilities in a different way and that’s what inspired me to move out to New Mexico because I didn’t have the fear anymore. I could see possibilities and so I sold my Pennsylvania interests and moved to Santa Fe. This was in 1990 and

up a holistic practice there. But that moment of wow, I could actually do it and you know that that permission, know, most eye doctors you go to their offices and you know, bless their heart. Their whole thing is let’s measure and give you the strongest prescription. But what they’re actually doing is perpetuating the same problem. They’re not really treating the problem. They’re treating the symptom and that’s why people get strong.

stronger and stronger glasses like you referenced. Yeah, you get new glasses every year because the doctor keeps increasing your prescription and that’s a formula for making your eyes even worse by wearing that super strong prescription that he or she is giving you. And of course, there’s the the feedback that you get this strong prescription to go. Wow, I’m dizzy. I’m nauseous. I don’t like it. It’s making me sick and you go back and the doctor says well, don’t worry. You’ll you’ll get used to it.

And you don’t want to get used to something that’s making you dizzy or nauseous, but that’s what we do. We internalize a lot of our visual experiences through our eyes, but we have no place to express it except, know, swallow it. Just, you know, this is how it is kid.

So I’ve really over the years have helped thousands and thousands of people get free of just the programming that has been put into them by going to the eye doctor’s offices.

with that story, especially about being a bad.

reader because I have a cousin who has a nine year old and he doesn’t like to read. And so now I’m wondering, does he need to see a holistic eye doctor? And I also really like what you say about treating the whole person because I feel like in the mainstream conventional medical structure that we have, it’s a sick care system and the eyes are separate. Why would anybody look at anything else when you could just look at the eyes? So I would love

to hear how you help treat infants all the way to elderly people. So with infants, first of all, one of the most there are three really important stages. One is in utero.

That’s when our sensory systems really start developing. We’re floating in our mom’s waters. And so that’s developing our peripheral vision, our vestibular system. And then the second…

milestone is when we actually are born and that imprint of when we come out of the birth canal or if it’s a c-section or There’s the forceps delivery or there’s been some stress birth trauma really impacts our sensory motor systems And then number three is the bonding period, know what we go through like initially when you’re born and you’re laying on your mom and there’s this oxytocin flowing through and all this love, you know kids that are put in incubators or

or, know, preemie babies or, you know, all kinds of weird things that happen that affects our sensory motor development as well. I’m including the eyes in that because our eyes originate from the brain very early on after conception. So every structure of the eyeball is brain. In fact, the eyes are the only part of the brain that sit out of what we call the cranial vault, the skull, but the eyes are such a an intimate part of our brain.

And that’s why we can improve our vision because there’s a neuroplasticity capability in our vision if we’re shown the way and so in infants a lot of times they may be diagnosed with crossed eyes or lazy eyes. Well, the last thing you want to do is put glasses on a child or do eye muscle surgery at that age. There are stimulating activities that can help improve an infant’s vision very early on and we call it visual stimuli.

because their world is mostly

you know here and so there are definitely prescribed activities that you can do to help an infant then we go into a toddler and then you know we go into a you know a child the the the things of learning how to hop and skip and swing on a swing and go down a slide and you know spin these are all things that help develop our vision and our sensory motor program.

So I want to make a distinction here between eyesight and vision. Eyesight is reading the eye chart at 20 feet. That’s a static measurement and that’s eyeballs and glasses. Vision is how the eyes and the brain and the body work together. So it’s very much brain centered. Most eye exams are eyesight based and then they check for disease. They’re not testing for vision.

And vision is a skill that you start developing in utero. These three experiences that I’ve named have a strong influence on our visual coordination, our visual tracking, our visual focus, even though it’s very early in the nonverbal time.

And then as a child develops and they’re learning to read, they need to have those visual skills to be able to read. I I certainly didn’t have those skills and sounds like the nine-year-old you referenced maybe has a deficit in the visual skills. So it affects our visual processing, our visual thinking, our visual moving. All of those things can be repaired through vision therapy, which is a reeducation.

process of relearning of how the eyes, brain, and body work together. Now if we fast forward to adults, when we hit age 40 we start needing reading glasses, our arms aren’t long enough.

Well, when you start wearing magnifying glasses that actually weakens the eye muscles and so then you get addicted to these magnifiers and they only make your eyes worse. So there are exercises that you can use to repattern the eye muscles in the brain. So you don’t need those magnifying glasses. All right. Now let’s move to age 60 870. This is when people start developing conditions like cataracts like over 90 % of the population.

is going to develop cataracts. Well, cataract is really oxidative stress that accumulates in the protein of the lens and in early stage cataracts and or if you’re proactive, you can actually slow down the progression of cataracts and even reverse cataracts.

Macular degeneration is the number one leading cause of blindness today. Why is that? Well, it’s related related somewhat to our diet, our stress, our screen time. And so there are protocols that you can do to slow down or even reverse macular degeneration. And the third big died disease is glaucoma, which is a problem with eye pressure and it affects our peripheral vision. Well, there are things that you can do to slow

that degradation down and in some cases even reverse glaucoma. So now you’ve seen the spectrum from infants to elders that you know, these are the people that I work with.

my goodness, you just gave me so much information. I’m going to, excuse me, I’m going to unpack some of what you said bit by bit. And where I wanted to start was.

You said that eyesight isn’t the same as vision and there’s exercises that we can do to strengthen our eyes. So Dr. Sam, can you walk me through the shape of the eye, the muscles and what we can do to strengthen our eyes? Okay, so the eyes sit in an eye socket.

This bony orbit and there’s six eye muscles two on the top two on the bottom one on the outside one on the inside. Those are called extraocular muscles. So they help us track and move and rotate our eyes very important for eye movement. So the brain has got to be really connected to controlling those six muscles and then inside the eye. There’s a tiny little lens like maybe a third of the way back from the front.

of the eye and that lens has little ligaments or ciliary muscles we call them to change the shape of the lens. know, and based on that, that helps us with our focus, our ability to see clearly. Now what happens is when we start develop blurry vision, we go to the eye doctor and there’s a deficit. We don’t see the eye chart as well. And then there’s the whole question of which lens is clear number one or number two and let’s

Let’s say you’re having a bad day. Let’s say you’re a mom and your your child is sick and you’re worried about her and you’re going to this exam and it’s a high-pressured situation to begin with and he’s flipping the lenses, which is clear one or two one or two. Come on. You got to pick one. So you pick number two and you’re you’re stressed out to begin with that lens fixes your vision in that particular position based on that bad day that you were having. So then for the next year.

to you’re looking through this lens this reality based on a decision you made and most likely it’s going to be too strong for you. And again, we’re just treating the symptoms here. There are

relaxation exercises, their eye movement exercises. There are awareness exercises that can help release the tension which then gets rid of the blur. So that’s one thing. Then the other aspect is what do you eat? You know, what’s your diet like?

And one of the modalities that I use is I analyze the colored part of the eye. The colored part of the eye is called the iris and the

process is called uredology and the iris is a map to the entire body. And so I take really good pictures of the irises and I look for patterns and those patterns can tell me genetic tendencies like what has been passed down through the genes. The right eye is the father eye. The left eye is the mother eye or the grandfather grandmother.

And then you could look at things like your liver health liver gallbladder health because the liver is rules the eyes in Chinese medicine.

We can look at the pancreas and what your blood sugar levels is. So sugar is really poisonous for your eyes. We can look at your thyroid health. We can look at, your respiratory health, your heart health. So iridology and it’s been around for a long time. It was actually really fathered in by a doctor named Bernard Jensen. You could Google him and I became certified in iridology. I’ve taken all the tests and studied it. And so it’s well part of my

If somebody is having an unusual vision problem, I will do an iridology analysis and that tells me a lot about what they should be eating, what supplements, what herbs, what essential oils, flower essences, lots of things. And based on that, it’s a roadmap to bring people’s vision back to health. So it’s that two-pronged. One is more functional and the second is more on the biochemical.

said about the liver. I’ve heard you mention that before, but I also want to go back to where we were going to unpack that first lot of information. So I was also curious to learn.

little bit more about, let’s say you put on those glasses and you say they weaken your muscles around around your eyes. So what can we do then, and maybe this is a bit redundant from what you already said, but what can we do to wean ourselves off of wearing glasses?

Well, I think finding a doctor who does physical therapy, vision therapy because it’s going to be a combination of what habits created the blurry vision that that’s kind of what happened in my case. What were the habits that created?

The prescription so in nearsightedness my habit was I pulled the world in and farsightedness people tend to push the world away in astigmatism. They twist the world. So when the doctor is testing the eyesight the doctor also needs to test. Well, what are the visual habits? What are the visual skills that have created the blurry eyesight?

And then based on that, maybe giving 60 or 70 % of the prescription so that you can function, so you can pass the driver’s test and you can drive and you can read, but then starting to do physical vision therapy and it’s very individualized based on what your deficits are.

And then you can start wearing a reduced prescription. That’s what I did. That was what I shared when I was in my office. I had a prescription for driving and I had a reduced prescription that I wore indoors. And the more I wore that reduced prescription, my eyes flexed into that reduced prescription. And then eventually it became my distance prescription. So I incrementally started to reduce that first prescription that the doctor gave me.

You know, another thing that works really well is in non demanding and non threatening situations start taking your glasses or contacts off. There’s a practice I recommend called going on a vision retreat. It’s called a vision quest and if you wear lenses, you take four hours on a weekend like a Saturday or a Sunday and you don’t put your lenses in at all and you

function without the lenses and you use the experience to learn about your reactions without having the lenses in what is your relationship with blur? Are you totally dependent on your lenses or can you function what comes up for you emotionally spiritually energetically when you don’t go without these lenses? It’s kind of like a vision detox.

I saw you do detox stuff. Well, this is a vision detox where you take the lenses off and you don’t wear them. Remember the lenses are approved by the FDA. They’re a drug and they have side effects. And so when you start

Weaning yourself off a drug, you’re going to have side effects and the toxicities that have been created from this prescription are going to start to show up. And so in this vision quest or vision retreat where you sequester yourself in an environment where there’s no demands on you and you can start to really notice what your patterns are. So this is a question for all your listeners who wear glasses or

Context take them off and give me three belief systems that you feel around blurry vision.

And just to kind of cue people a little bit give them a context most people in blurry vision a feel out of control be are afraid they’re going to get hurt and see they’re afraid they may get criticized. So all of those things creates a fear and a hypervigilance in their attitude. So when I have a hypervigilant attitude, I got to be on, you know, fight or flight all the time. I’m going to put that that

fear through my eyeballs. That’s one of the main causes of why people need glasses because of that, that early programming in the hypervigilance that they’re having to deal with. So it’s a, it’s a very interesting way of healing from the inside out, looking at your thoughts and belief systems and attitudes of what created the blur to begin with.

It reminds me of a book that I read about 10 years ago that I found completely fascinating where this person had multiple personality disorder. And in one of her personalities, she needed reading glasses. And in the other personality, she had perfect vision. And that was the first time that I think the light had kind of…

peeked open for me or at least peeked my interest and I couldn’t believe someone could change their eyesight. I found it so fascinating. So I really resonate with what you’re saying about people’s habits and lifestyles and what are their environments like. I also wanted to go back to where you said you could potentially reverse glaucoma and talking about the liver in Chinese medicine. So can you walk me through how can we possibly reverse glaucoma?

Okay. Well, I’m to start off with when I first moved to Santa Fe and Santa Fe is a pretty alternative community, even though an eye doctor’s there. There was no alternative eye doctors, but there were, I think at the time to acupuncture schools. And so I enrolled in one of them because I wanted to learn the relationship between the eyes and acupuncture. And I remember one of the very early lectures.

And the professor knew I was a practicing licensed eye doctor. He looked at me and he said, did you know that the liver and the gallbladder are critical for our ability to absorb fat soluble nutrients? And did you also know that some of the most famous fat soluble nutrients are really important for the eyes like vitamin A lutein?

and zeaxanthin and moat and he said most people have a congested liver and gallbladder because of the toxicities we’re living in and we could go into you know variety of reasons it could be dental health mercury amalgams it could be trauma in the head it could be being exposed to

mold or you know those kinds of toxins parasites yeast infections in any case the liver the meridians go right to the eyes and that if you clean up the liver and the gallbladder your eyesight is going to get better and I remember studying herbs and milk thistle and burdock root and yellow dock. I would give those to people that had you know eye diseases for example, like you mentioned glaucoma.

And lo and behold, their eye pressure would come back to normal or their cataracts would would reduce or their macular degeneration would get better. I call macular degeneration by the way, macular regeneration so that you know that that mindset is like, you know, we hear that diagnosis and it’s just like game over not really. So in any case the

That the liver gallbladder is so important in doing some kind of cleansing or supporting and I’ve seen it thousands of times where people’s eyesight gets better. The glasses reduce their their eye disease goes away and in doing acupuncture you’re redistributing the energy. let’s say you have a puffy or you have swollen this around the eyes. If you start doing acupuncture either around the eyes, but you can also

do it, know, distally in other places. It actually redistributes the energy and by redistributing the energy those symptoms go away. So the liver and the gallbladder and I’m going to also add our digestive health, our spleen, our

pancreas our thyroid, you know, all those endocrine glands have a very strong influence on our visual system and part of it is because this is such a blood vessel rich area, you know, and we require a lot of oxygenation and hydration to keep those oxidative stress molecules away. And one of the issues that I see with most people is they have a lot of oxidative stress. They have low

and the killer is inflammation. And so when they’ve got that inflammation and their lymph system isn’t working well.

You know, for example, in iridology, if you’ve got blue eyes, you’re what we call lymphatic. You need to take really good care of your lymph system or you’re going to have all kinds of health issues and eye issues. And the other thing is you need you need to stay away from gluten, dairy, sugar, because as a blue-eyed person, the lymphatic system, it’s very easy for you to get inflammation and that’s going to be a killer for you. So, you know, there’s all these connections. I think you want to

say something so I’m gonna turn it over to you what you

Eye health is so important and it seems like one of those things that isn’t quite moving in the medical field. Everyone takes their kids to the eye doctor. Everyone has the same vision test. And I’ve heard you say, I’ve done a lot of research on you before and I’ve heard you say the eyes are an extension of the brain all the way from in utero. So knowing that.

and what you mentioned about taking care of ourselves, no sugar, no gluten. What can you tell me about the relationship with the eyes and the brain?

Well, the eyes are the brain. They’re, you know, an outer representation. Some of the latest research is showing that we can actually see amyloid plaques in the retina or the optic nerve. And that could be the early stages of Alzheimer’s or dementia by looking at the eyes.

Another thing that we can say is that if you can improve the cerebral spinal fluid from the brain to the eyes and the eyes to the brain, you can lower eye pressure, which is the glaucoma situation.

So another modality that I studied when I moved to Santa Fe was I was working with kids with birth trauma. I work a lot with occupational therapists and physical therapists and teachers and all these kids had birth trauma and some of them had strabismus, the eyes were crossing, they had learning issues and it was mentioned to me, I think you need to learn craniosacral therapy. So I enrolled in the massage school. Well, first I went to the upledger.

Institute and I took a lot of their courses, which I really liked and that was more muscular skeletal level and then at the massage school I learned the biodynamic craniosacral so that was more of the fluid part of the body and I began doing craniosacral on my patients and this is a really interesting story. So people would come in and I’d measure their eyesight at distance and I’d measure their prescription and then my massage table was right next to my eye exam equipment. So I’d say lay down and I’ll

do an hour of craniosacral and then after the craniosacral session, I put them back in the exam chair and invariably their prescription was 30 to 50 % less and that’s what I would give them and they would love those prescriptions because their system was relaxed. It was the nervous system was balanced. They weren’t in that, you know, one or two or in that machine the foropter. So it taught me that craniosacral has a very strong effect.

on the cranial nerves and the muscles and the fascia and the connective tissue around the eyes. And as I got more into traumatic brain injury patients, that was another thing that I researched and that was back in Philadelphia.

It’s funny because when I first opened, I opened a practice up with a holistic eye doctor whose name is Dr. Ellis Edelman and he was like one of my great mentors and we became partners and he passed away about 10 years ago, but.

One of the things that happened was I couldn’t get any patients to come see me. It was really difficult because Philadelphia at that time was very medically oriented. So I went to the local hospitals and I volunteered with the physiatrist there that hey, I can work with your brain injury patients. They all have double vision. They can’t walk there, you know, they can’t read their memory is off. And so I began applying a lot of these physical therapy.

exercises and color therapy and you know some of the other techniques I learned and they all got better and so from that experience I began to start to get patients word-of-mouth because I was doing this great work and with the TBI population. The other thing I did in Philadelphia and I still do this today I work with special needs kids. So these are kids that have been written off Down syndrome, minimal brain dysfunction, severe developmental delays, severe autism. So I started

working with these kids and they got better. And so that was another way that I word of mouth. was like, hey, this guy’s working with special needs. He’s working with TBIs. The regular eye doctors don’t have the time or interest to work with these populations. fast forward when I moved to Santa Fe, I affiliated with a clinic in Albuquerque called Kid Power. You could look it up, Kid Power Associates. And I began consulting there and I still do to

This day I go down a couple times a year from Santa Fe.

This population is amazing because these kids are been written off and they’re doing primitive reflex therapy and vision therapy and sound therapy and craniosacral and nutrition stuff and I’ve kind of helped them in certain areas. And so it’s a great match to do that. But the craniosacral is so important around the brain health because it just improving the circulation. You think about a newborn that there’s a forceps delivery. Well, what they

want to do is put a helmet on a kid and try to force the skull to go back into alignment. I mean, it’s Neanderthal stuff. But if you do craniosacral, then this starts to breathe more the cranial rhythm and this is going to affect not only the eyes, but the ears and the body and the whole situation. It’s pretty obvious how interrelated the eyes and the brain are. So here’s a statistic. The eyes in the brain make up 2 % of the body weight.

and use 25 % of the food intake. So 25 % of what we eat is needed in this metabolically needed area. And that’s why what we eat has such a strong effect.

on our eyesight and vision. And when I started to study functional medicine, I could see the relationship in this eye brain health and then the gut, you know how the gut and the eyes and the brain come together. I’ll say one more thing because this is another really nice story. So when I was writing my first book in Santa Fe, it’s called creating your personal vision. I wrote that book in 1994. You can still get it in their new editions out now. I think you can get it on Amazon.

but

I was interviewing a woman who was a master nutritionist and her name was Dr. Hazel Parcells and Dr. Parcells was 103 when I met her and she was just starting a retreat center in northern New Mexico. And so I became a student of hers for three years. She died at 106 and taught me a lot about energy healing and other things that are a little more esoteric that we could get into if you want to. But

Dr. amazing around nutrition. knew food combining, what to cook with, and we had a good run together. There’s a book about her called Live Better Longer. The author’s name is Dispensas. So your listeners out there, they want to learn about Dr. Parcells. What an amazing woman.

But she was really focused on the brain, the eyes, the nutrition, and it kind of all came together for me when I moved to Santa Fe. I met some extraordinary people that kind of pushed me in different directions.

 

 

 

 

 

To learn more about Dr. Berne’s Practitioner Program go to: https://www.drsamberne.com/practitioners-training/

For exclusive content go to his membership: https://drsambernesmembership.com

Keywords

functional vision, dynamic vision, static vision, visual regard, pupil testing, eye alignment, tracking skills, convergence, divergence, primitive reflexes, near-far fixation, suppression, visual midline, vestibular ocular reflex, Harmon distance
Summary

In this podcast episode, Dr. Sam Berne discusses the concept of functional vision screening, emphasizing the difference between dynamic and static vision. He explores various assessments and exercises that can help improve visual skills, coordination, and overall learning abilities in children. Key topics include the importance of visual regard, pupil testing, tracking skills, convergence and divergence, primitive reflexes, and the significance of the Harmon distance in reading. The episode provides valuable insights for parents, educators, and therapists working with children who may have visual processing challenges.
Takeaways

Functional vision is dynamic and involves the brain and body.
Head posture can significantly influence visual problems.
Visual regard is essential for effective motor planning.
Pupil response can indicate stress and visual issues.
Convergence is crucial for reading and visual tracking.
Primitive reflexes play a key role in visual development.
Near-far fixation exercises enhance copying and reading skills.
Suppression of one eye can indicate underlying vision problems.
Visual midline assessments help understand spatial awareness.
The Harmon distance is critical for optimal reading posture.

Sound Bites

“Functional vision is dynamic, not just eyesight.”
“Head posture can influence vision problems.”
“Pupil response can indicate stress levels.”
“Convergence is crucial for reading skills.”
“Primitive reflexes affect visual skills.”
“Near-far fixation improves copying skills.”
“Suppression can indicate a vision problem.”
“Visual midline affects spatial awareness.”
“The Harmon distance is vital for reading.”
Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Functional Vision Screening
03:07 Understanding Dynamic vs Static Vision
05:56 Assessing Coordination and Posture
09:13 The Importance of Visual Regard
11:59 Pupil Testing and Eye Alignment
15:11 Tracking Skills: Pursuits and Saccades
18:11 Convergence and Divergence in Vision
21:14 The Role of Primitive Reflexes
23:47 Near-Far Fixation Exercises
26:54 Understanding Suppression in Vision
30:12 Visual Midline and Balance
33:12 Vestibular Ocular Reflex (VOR) Testing
35:49 The Harmon Distance and Its Importance
38:51 Conclusion and Future Considerations

Sam Berne (00:00.066)
Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast today. So I’m doing a little more teaching in what we call functional vision screening. So the difference between functional vision, which is dynamic and static vision, which is eyesight is huge. And when we start talking about how to use these two eyes in relationship to the brain and body.

We can do a number of tests that can help us determine what’s the best course of action and being able to help a person improve their vision. So again, I’m going to invite you in and part of the lecture today that we did with our class. I think you’ll find it to be very interesting. Again, if you have any questions, you can send me an email appointments at dr. Sam burn.com. Enjoy the show everyone. So this is called assessing functional vision.

And this is a this is a an assessment that I have developed over the years and I’ve given it to many occupational therapists physical therapists teachers people like yourself. And so I will give you a worksheet that you can use to actually take the notes when you actually do the testing but for today today.

We’re just going to start in on the ideas of it. So here we have a person who’s on a Boza ball and we’re working with the inner ear, the vestibular system, which is very tight into vision. And I’ll talk more about that in a few minutes.

Sam Berne (01:53.174)
So what I did here is I made a list of things that relate to each other. Like for example, if you have a child who tilts their head.

They usually have what we call a stigmatism, which means that the eye is shaped more like an egg instead of being round like a ball. And a stigmatism effect is influenced by our posture head posture neck posture. So there’s that relationship head tail a stigmatism now double vision meaning I see two of something that could be related to

something called stimming coordination problems. So that could either be body coordination problems or visual coordination. So it could either be gross motor or fine motor or both a lot of times there is a gross motor coordination problem and they can even relate to some of the primitive reflex primitive reflexes that aren’t integrated and we’ll save the primitive reflexes for another lecture, but

You know, you can ask your your client. Do you ever see two of things and a lot of times they’ll say, yeah, I do and the parents are like, I never heard that. So if you don’t ask the question then you know, the child just thinks double vision is normal. Another behavior that you might see in the double vision is they like to cover or close an eye, especially when they read.

Or you can look at their eyes and their eyelids and the eyelid droops. gets heavy. Another thing you can notice is that the pupils which is the control of the light. It’s the black circle is always dilated. And if you see a child that’s always got dilated pupils, they’re under a lot of stress. There’s a there’s a big stress response in their system. So

Sam Berne (04:01.354)
In general head position and posture. One of the things that I like to do is really observe how the child is writing and reading watch the child while he or she is hopping skipping or galloping and one clinic that I work in. We actually observe the child walking on a

either a two by four or a piece of tape that was like a masking tape that we put along the floor and they have to walk on that forwards and backwards and we observe the arms the hands the legs the feet and then there’s an exercise called the duck walk pigeon walk and this is where you ask the child to turn their feet out like a duck and start walking.

And with most of the kids that I’ve worked with when they do the duck walk or the pigeon walk is when the feet are turned in like a pigeon. You will see the upper part of the body kind of turning in or turning out as a way to try to help the feet stay in the position. You’re asking them to stay on.

You can also look at their arms and their hands while they’re walking and it’s going to clue you in that they’ve got some kind of motor developmental delay and many times it’s related to again, the primitive reflexes not being integrated if they’re in a therapy situation and I see this behavior on the pigeon walk or the duck walk.

I’ll do something called Socratic guidance, meaning that I’ll start asking them questions. Hey, Johnny, is there another way you can hold your arm or hold your hand?

Sam Berne (05:56.801)
And so that they are in a discovery mode of going. well, my hand was turned in. What if I turn my hand out as just as an example? So Socratic guidance is a technique where instead of saying, you’re doing it wrong or correcting them, which really is a missed opportunity for them to become better at problem solving because that’s this whole this whole process is teaching them to be

experts of problem solving first with their body coordination and then thinking and then eventually they can transfer that to school. So when you’re doing the Socratic guidance, you’re artfully you’re skillfully asking them questions and guiding them to a place where they try something else and they’ve got the confidence because they’re not afraid that you’re going to correct them.

They’re going to be in an open space of just well, can I explore it a different way? And then when they come to the right answer you go. Well, what do you think of that? And they might go. Yeah, that makes sense. So then you’re validating their experience in solving the problem. And I see this a lot with parents where especially the mom she’s always like trying to correct her son and I have to say, okay.

Please be quiet, step back because we don’t want you to correct your son because he’s going to get this complex where he’s going to be afraid to try things. And so we teach the parents ask questions to guide the child so that they have the discovery of the answer.

Okay, another thing that you can look at while they’re walking is their eye fixation. Are they walking with their eyes pointing downward like at the ground or upward like at the sky or off to the one side or the other? It’s going to give you information perhaps on what side of the the body they they

Sam Berne (08:03.691)
have a preference towards and ultimately we want them to have a wider peripheral vision so that they can go down. can look up. They can look to the side, but they also have a centering point because the next thing this is a not talked about very much. It’s called visual regard and the definition of visual regard is

It refers to the act of using your vision to locate focus on and attend to an object in the environment. It is a foundational skill in motor planning.

Okay, so I see where I need to go first and then I move my body based on the decision where I’m looking. This is so important in sports. For example, kicking a soccer ball playing basketball playing baseball tennis golf any of these when you look ahead and you know where you’re looking then you’re planning your body to move through that and there are there are exercises that you can do to improve motor plan.

Using visual regard because it’s going to affect coordination. It’s going to affect how the person is relating to themselves and objects out there and it also visually guides the hands and body. We call this

proprioception. I know where my arms and my legs are as I’m using my vision. This gets a little more interesting when we start putting them in gravity situations where they’re jumping say on a rebounder while they’re reading a heart chart as an example so that there is a visually guided movement and their body follows that particular movement.

Sam Berne (09:56.553)
So visual regard is something not a lot of therapists talk about, but it’s really really important. So what are some functional examples of that eye hand coordination or visual regard? Well, one is reaching for a cup.

You know, one of questions I ask moms a lot is does your child spill their milk? Do they spill their juice? And that tells me that their visual visual regard is not accurate. So they have difficulty judging location guiding their hands towards an object because their eye is tracking it or not tracking it. Another place will see it is in reading. So skipping words being able to follow

letters words on a page and then finally playing sports, which I talked about tracking a ball in motion calculating its

trajectory and preparing to catch it involves visual regard. And when you get really good with visual regard, you’re great at anticipating where the teammate is where the ball is and this is where the the athletes really take off when they start being able to plan ahead and they can almost tell where things are going to be before they get there.

Kids they bend over when they’re bouncing the ball, especially if I’m adding a metronome and they think by bending over they can be faster with catching the ball and throwing the ball. And so we’re always in this correcting mode of asking them the question. Well, hey Johnny, what would it be like bouncing the ball? If you just stood up straight up? What would that be like? And then he goes, wow, it’s actually easier on my muscles, but it’s the vision that’s leading the body here. It’s not the

Sam Berne (11:50.007)
muscles leading the vision. It’s vision leading the body and in the physical therapy that you and I are talking about.

I feel that the more we can get the vision into the body and the more we can get the body into the vision that really solves the issue for the kids around their learning disabilities and their reading problems because it’s not just the eyeball experience as one of my teachers used to say a vision problem is more than in the eye. It’s in the whole child and

going on to this next slide. When you look at the pupil and when you come here, we’re going to do some pupil testing. You have a pen light and you shine the light towards the eye and the the pupil should actually get smaller when the light comes to the eye with a lot of these kids. What happens is the pupil

doesn’t constrict it stays really big really dilated and then there’s the issue where one pupil is big.

With one eye say the right eye and the left eye, the pupil is small and that’s called anisocoria and that could be a neurological problem. It could be a stress problem. It could be a trauma or toxicity issue. But the pupils are there to kind of show us what’s happening on the nervous system level. And also when a child is reading a book and starts to bring it close, the pupil should get smaller as the person brings the book closer to their face.

Sam Berne (13:29.761)
Just as like when they move the book farther away or at this point is probably the tablet. The pupils should get slightly larger. So we will do some testing in the area of having a pen light and being able to test the pupils so you can see the movement again when it’s light when there’s a lot of light the pupil should get smaller when there’s dim light the pupil should get bigger or more dilated.

And one of the tests I’m going to teach you is something called the Hirschberg test. And this is a test where you have a pen light and we’re going to talk about the Harmon distance in a little bit. That’s the distance that is about 12 to 14 inches from a person’s face. And what you do is you shine the light towards the the the person’s eyes and you look at where the pupils

The light is reflecting off the pupils. So it’s a way for you to see alignment. So you probably have worked with kids where when you look at them one of their eyes might be wandering in.

One of their eyes might be wandering out. One of their eyes might be going up. One of their eyes might be going down. So in this Hirschberg test, they’re looking at the pen light. You’re right in front of them and you want to make sure they have alignment. If they have misalignment, two things could be going on. One is double vision and two is suppression, meaning the brain is shutting off the eye to avoid double. So we have in this slide, the technical term, esotropia.

is when the eye is crossing exotropia is mean one eye is looking outward. So you’ll see the reflection of the light on the inside part of the pupil and then you’ve got the hypertropia where one eye is up and hypotropia where one eye is deviated down. So you can have a vertical split. You can have a horizontal split. I’m going to tell you this most of these kids have one of these four issues.

Sam Berne (15:39.453)
esotropia, exotropia, hypertropia or hypotropia and for you to know that before you start the pursuit eye movements, which is the smooth movement. This is being able to smoothly move your eyes from horizontal left to right or up and down pursuits is one of those

visual tracking skills that’s really important for reading. The other one is called Cicade movements and this is the jumping from one.

Position to another like like focusing from near to far focusing from the left side to the right side. So when you’re testing you can test both the pursuits and the saccades and one of the things you’re looking for is is the child able to move the eye muscles smoothly or is there jerkiness in the movement or are they having to move their head and or their body to move their eyes?

I’ve done so many, you know, kindergarten eye screenings where we we test the saccades and the pursuits and we go. Wow, they’ve got to move their head to move the tiny eye muscles. So can you imagine trying to teach them how to read? It’s going to be really stressful for them because they don’t have accurate eye movements at this point. And then we talk about something called convergence.

This is what you’re working with right now with the Brock string. Basically, it’s three beads on the string and the first bead is about 12 inches from your face and the child is holding the string on the tip of their nose.

Sam Berne (17:24.105)
in the middle of the eye level and we spread the beads out equally 12 inches 24 inches 36 inches and we have them look at each bead and they should see an X at whatever bead they’re looking at. This is a skill called convergence. Convergence is a very important skill at aiming the eyes, especially when you read.

When you watch the child’s eyes to see if both eyes are tracking the target or you can actually start to see one of the eyes moving out and you can ask them is this a double vision? Do you see two? We call this near point of convergence where how closely can you move the target where they’re able to keep converging and hopefully they’re able to converge.

well within the range of where they’re holding their their books when they read because if the convergence breaks down right at their reading, then they’re going to get the diagnosis convergence insufficiency. And then we’ve got divergence, which is more like the magic eye you’re doing like the jelly beans where the eyes are looking parallel. And in this particular way, this is more of a distance type coordination pattern.

So divergence is more distance and convergence is more near and you want to be able to again watch the clients child’s eyes as you’re moving the target towards their nose and away from their nose and you can start to see. Okay, what is their convergence divergence abilities build a house you start by building the basement and you build the you know, the foundation and the basement and the foundation would be the primitive reflex.

It would be working with their balance. It’d be working with their gross motor coordination.

Sam Berne (19:18.741)
You probably wouldn’t want to introduce the convergence divergence or tracking exercises. That metaphor would be like the bedrooms upstairs. So absolutely because they don’t have them. They don’t have the gross motor connections. They’re in a developmental delay. So you couldn’t really introduce the, you know, ocular motor exercises like this divergence convergence until their primitive reflexes their

balance the bilateral coordination skills are foundationally more solid. It’s absolutely that’s why there’s a certain sequence in when you introduce these certain activities. This is a mistake that most behavioral optometry and vision therapy practices make. I’m sorry to say this, but I see the mistakes. I’ll have people come to see me.

I say I’ve worked in vision therapy for two years and I have not seen any improvement. And within four to six sessions of working with me in this particular method, the child’s reading they’re playing sports their problem is solved. So one of the issues is that the the vision therapy exercises they start too high up in the

motor development and the child is not ready. So they learn a splinter skill, you know, they can cross their eyes or move their eyes, but they’re not really working with, you know, fixing the developmental delay which started way back more in the preverbal period. So you are right and not introducing convergence divergence until you think they can have some success at it. You need to stay more

with the basic things and actually you’ll get a lot more benefits by doing that than trying to force them into

Sam Berne (21:24.971)
doing some things before they’re ready. So in the divergence going back to that, there’s something called, you know, blur break and recovery. So when there’s a target and you bring it in you ask him go, where do you see double and hopefully they see it like three to four inches from their face. Some kids will say, I see double at 12 inches or 14 inches. Well, that’s a red flag right there because they’re probably in double vision when they’re reading or writing. So you need to note that.

The other thing is the recovery of the double vision because you want them to be able to recover from the double vision pretty quickly with a lot of kids. Their recovery is very low. In other words, you have to push away or push away away from them.

or pull it way away from them before the two goes back to single and what that tells you is they’re depleted. They don’t have enough in their energy reserves to be able to turn the two into single and this is where then you can start doing some muscle testing educational kinesiology, which will come later and maybe testing the child where they need either change in their diet or supplements.

And again, in one of the clinics I work with the occupational therapist does educational kinesiology to find out what are the targeted supplements that will give that child more energy. So their recovery is better. Their developmental growth is going to be faster because they have more energy on the cellular level to make the changes that we’re asking them to make.

Now, another thing we like to look at is something called near far fixations. This would be like sitting at your desk, looking at the board and being able to copy what you see at the board. Now, the way we simulate that is through a small printed heart chart, which is at 12 inches and a large printed heart chart.

Sam Berne (23:34.293)
which is say three to six feet away. And so the exercise is done where they look at one letter on the small printed chart up close and then one letter.

at the distance chart and they’d be able to go back and forth with it. When they get good at it, you can bounce a ball and do it. You can even do it with the eye patch. But this near far fixation exercise is really great for getting them to improve their copying. Now, just as an aside, and I didn’t write this in one of the primitive reflexes that most effects

The near far fixation is the symmetrical tonic neck reflex and we’ve done studies where we kids have difficulty copying. So instead of doing the near far fixation exercise, we do the symmetrical tonic neck reflex and that reflex.

Allows the brain to move more into the frontal part of the brain. And so the near far fixations automatically get better without having to do any exercises in the near far fixations. That’s how potent the primitive reflexes are and being able to change the visual skills and

In this near far fixation procedure, we’re asking the child to shift their focus from the near chart to the far chart. And sometimes you can add a metronome. Sometimes you can put them on one of those Boza balls or a trampoline or so you can bring in a vestibular component to it while they have to jump their eyes back and forth. It’s a form of what we call saccades. Cicades. Remember we talked about eye movements that are jumping from one

Sam Berne (25:22.381)
Position to another and as the child gets older the saccadic movement is more important for them, especially sports processing information faster being able to you know motor in the world faster making decisions better. So that’s a catech near far fixation probably would be great for like a normal 12 13 14 15 year old, you know for the young ones like 5

six, we probably wouldn’t do a lot of near far fixations except maybe the Marsden ball, which is the swinging ball and they’re just hitting it and they’re tracking it. That would be a gentle way to start the near far fixations. But once you get into the heart charts, that’s where they’re already in a language based situation. And so they’re ready for that.

Sam Berne (26:18.217)
Okay, suppression and I know you know about suppression because when you were here and you got tested what what suppression does is it test the person to see whether or not either they’ve got number one double vision because there’s a misalignment of the eyes or instead of double vision the brain says, I’m just going to shut off the weaker. I it’s going to go dark.

and then the right eye has to do all the work.

So in the bottom of the slide is something that I know you’re very aware of and that is the red green charts and the red green glass for sure because in the special needs world, if you go to a conventional doctor, they’re just going to say, well, you’ve got this condition live with it and there’s no there’s no help whatsoever. There’s no understanding that the person has some level of neuroplasticity to learn and

know, even in this suppression, if we go to the next slide where you have the child wear the red green glasses and just look around the room.

Just the awareness of then being able to see the different colors, the red, the green. This is a really great way to start. But what I like to do is just to put the red green glasses on and just see what their response is. Number of kids will say, I just see the red or I just see the green and that tells me right away that there’s probably a very good deal of suppression and as they progress.

Sam Berne (28:02.197)
In fact, you could try this to wear the red green glasses while you’re doing the Brock string. It’s a very interesting thing when you are doing the Brock string and you’ve got a red string and a green string. What’s more dominant? Does the green string shut off? Sometimes it’s a way we do add-ons where we add like the red green glasses to the exercise and it kind of gives them more information on this binocular vision.

Another way that you can do this the red greens is by using heart charts with strips.

vertically alternating red and green and red and green and again, they’re at that Harmon distance, which is about 12 to 14 inches and you ask them to read across the row and I know you’ve done that because we’ve done it with you and it’s a really great I think even we did with your kids and so this is another great way, especially when they get into reading and language. Can they have that alternating situation?

And then we move to something called visual midline. I was working with this today with a client and the purpose of this is to see if the child is actually. Balanced between the right eye and their left eye because in a lot of cases if a child is right-handed.

On a visual midline, if we think of that as our steering wheel, our GPS system, a lot of times the steering wheel will start sliding more towards the left.

Sam Berne (29:42.281)
left eye would meaning that the right eye is now coming over and it’s it’s now taking over where the left eye is. So it’s pushing the left eye out of the way. So the way you do this is this is a screening where they can either track visually track a target and you bring it into their midline. You can have them touch it and where they report

now.

That’s going to tell you where their visual midline or visual midline shift is. Now, there’s a vertical right to left where you’re standing on the right side of the child’s peripheral vision and you hold the pencil or the pen oriented vertically and move the target slowly through the midline from the child’s right side towards the left side and ask the child to say now when the target is in front of their nose. So a lot of times they will

miscalculate you’ll see it as my goodness the pencils way over on their left side, but they’ll interpret it as yeah, the pencils in the middle of my face. Well, it’s actually not so the

The vertical right to left is good to do the vertical left to right is good to do where you stand on their left side and you move that vertical pencil from left to right to where they think it’s a in front of their nose. can also do horizontal vertical.

Sam Berne (31:21.993)
So sometimes what we have found is that when a person is looking their horizon line. when you look out at the horizon, okay, a lot of times kids will think that the horizon is lower than it really is. This happens a lot like in Down syndrome. That’s where I mostly see it. And when that happens, there are always their visual spatial world is actually pushed downward.

And so I’ll give them a prism that lifts their vision up and there have been life changes when they they start to have that horizon line match where the true horizon is and at a later session. We’ll talk about prisms and and those kinds of things. But for now.

The midline whether it’s horizontal or vertical is something that you could start to play around with and cognitive ability and you know on the testing side of it is you certainly could try it and if you’re not getting an accurate response, then you just say this. This isn’t the right test to do now, but with some of your kids.

something called the vestibular ocular reflex VOR and the VOR is a test to see how much is the vestibular system meaning the inner ears helping a person with their balance. So we’ve got two sensory systems that help us with balance really three we have the eyes.

For balance. have the ears for balance and we have the feet for balance. It’s like a triangle and what happens with most people is that if they have an under sensitivity of the vestibular system, meaning the ears are not helping the eyes in balancing.

Sam Berne (33:33.301)
The subjective behaviors that you will see the child may be clumsy bumping into things. If there’s an oversensitivity in the reflex the child might get dizzy easily or report motion sickness. So an under acting vestibular system is bumping into things and over reacting vestibular system is getting dizzy or seasickness.

So in terms of testing the vor because that will give you an indicator on whether the the ears and the eyes are balanced or one system is overworking the other. So you have the child sitting in a comfortable. They’re in a comfortable standing position and you’re in front of them. And what you do is you hold up a target vertically at midline in front of the child and you instruct

the child to focus both eyes on the target and slowly turn the head to one side as far so they’re turning their head while they’re tracking the target and they go as far as they can with their head on one side and on the other side and you have them do that total of 10 times five on each side. So you count one one two two.

all the time. They’re maintaining the focus on the target. And so you do this five on each side and then you can also do it vertically. Okay, up and down same thing where they’re moving their head up moving their head down five five in each each direction. So now once once you do that.

What you’re looking for is a movement called nystagmus. That’s where the eyes oscillate back and forth. And if you see no oscillation, okay, no oscillation or the oscillation is less than five seconds, then they have an under acting vestibular system. Okay.

Sam Berne (35:49.425)
If that oscillation goes beyond 10 seconds, then they have an overacting vestibular system. So somewhere between the five and 10 seconds, that’s a normal response. Like you should see a little bit of ocular nystagmus for five to 10 seconds. That’s normal. So at that point and in most cases, most cases

The vestibular system is under acting. So you need to do some vestibular stimulating things. We’ll get into this in a later session, but it could be something as simple where you’re you’re having them swing. They’re swinging. They’re rolling. Sometimes we’ll do

jumping like on a rebounder. Sometimes we’ll roll them on a physio ball. So we get a big physio ball and we’ll roll them. We’ll use a Boza ball and they can either sit on it or stand on it. So in other words, what we start doing in the therapy is we bring in vestibular stimulating things while they have to do visual focusing things. So it teaches them to bring in the ears to the eyes with the feet. That’s the proprioception.

And it’s a very important connection, especially when a child learns to read.

Because in reading when they’re tracking there is a little bit of vestibular connection. There is a little bit of proprioceptive connection and it’s also very tied in to the moro reflex. So if somebody has not integrated the moro reflex a lot of times their vor the vestibular ocular reflex will show a very underacting vestibular system and this can be related to birth trauma. So either

Sam Berne (37:47.279)
serine section forceps suction or just you know, the cord is wrapped around the neck. There’s some birth trauma that’s happened. It’s triggered the more reflex which they can’t get out of and this starts to shut down the vestibular system because they’re getting overwhelmed in this fight or flight freeze response. It’s a trauma response. So they have to start shutting down their sensory systems and it’s very easy for them to shut down their

deceptive and their inner ears. And so then the visual is overworking and this creates situations where then they might need some glasses like they need a prescription because their eyes get so fatigued from over focusing so they might become farsighted. may become nearsighted. So that’s the kind of the the progression of why kids start to need glasses, especially early on or another reason why they start developing

developing an I turn crossing in or crossing out.

So again, the way I’m teaching this is you’re noting these signals and symptoms and putting it together in the history, but you’re trying to treat the cause and not the symptoms and what I doctors do is they want to fix the symptoms. Well, guess what you fix the symptom and you drive the cause further in this is why when you start doing the physical therapy and you treat the cause the symptom goes away and it never comes back.

but it also creates a better processing of information and learning and it’s just a very exciting transformation. So I’ll have more to say about the vor but this is basically just getting, know, your feet wet with it. Then the last thing I want to talk about today is something called the Harmon distance. So

Sam Berne (39:46.507)
Back in I would say the the 40s 1940s 1950s. There was a a scientist his name was Darrell Boyd Harmon and he was working with some of the more well-respected developmental optometrists about posture and working distance.

and Harmon did a series of studies. I believe in Ohio State where they took a look at what is the optimal distance you should be holding your books.

Now your tablets when you read and what kind of angle should it be at? So how far away should it be from your face? And what’s the angle and what he found in this diagram shows it is that if you are propping up the reading material at about 22 degrees in a slant board, what that does is it creates a

90 degree angle in a way where the child or the adult has the optimum potential to learn and read better. And so this 22 degree incline, it could be just propping their, you know, their tablet up on a some books so that they’re at a 22 degree angle. Approximately what this does is this is going to

take the stress off their posture and allow them to learn better. Now, there’s a little picture up here, which is a picture of this arm. Okay, there’s a fist. There’s an arm and it’s like an L and what Harmon proposed is you take that fist and you put it under the chin and that measurement from the end of the the knuckle to the elbow, which is now under the chin.

Sam Berne (41:42.693)
Is your specific Harman distance measurement. So for example, a four-year-old has a Harman distance that might be 10 inches because they have a smaller forearm. You could take a 22 year old person. Their Harman distance is going to be farther away.

And that’s based on how long the knuckle to the elbow is and it’s placed under the chin and then you kind of look at okay, that’s my Harman distance. One of the problems that happens with kids and you’ve probably observed this is you give them something to read and you watch where they habitually like to hold it and when kids hold their reading material closer than the Harman distance.

You can bet there’s going to be a vision problem. Again, vision is tracking focusing visual coordination. It’s the brain. Eye brain body connection. It’s not eyesight. It’s vision. When they bring that in closer than the Harmon distance, that is a great screening device. That’s going to tell you right away. they have a vision problem focusing problem coordination problem. And so you want to instruct them.

to have that 22 degree angle and get into the Harmon distance. And this is something I tell every parent that they have to do this. Okay. Now sometimes they might need some low plus learning lenses to help them stay at that Harmon distance or if they’re wearing a distance prescription, we might have to reduce the prescription or increase the prescription to allow them to have the clarity that they need at the Harmon distance. But

With all your clients, you should be talking to them about the importance of the Harmon distance. You could actually Google Harmon distance, Darrell Boyd Harmon, and you get a whole page of different things that Harmon did about as a pioneer to create this this idea and it’s you know, even today because we’re talking it’s you know, almost 80 years 90 years.

Sam Berne (43:58.365)
It still really holds water and I still see it. I still work with the Harmon distance today and especially with electronics phones tablets computers. The Harmon distance is more important than ever.

So focusing closer than your Harmon distance, I guarantee you in six months, you’re going to become near sighted because you’re in a visually constricted spatial situation and it’s the worst thing the kids can do. They start pulling it in because they think, you know, if I pull it in, I’m stressed. I can learn better. I can focus better. But what it’s doing is it’s tensing the eye muscles and it creates that visual confinement which creates myopia.

And so and then you got the kids that are farsighted and they’re pushing the world away and you know, that’s a whole other thing. So functional vision screening.

You know, I wish more school nurses and different institutions included functional vision in their eyesight screenings because most eyesight screenings only measure the optics of the eye at distance. And this is an uphill, you know, battle because very few professionals even think about vision, which is the brain.

Okay. Well, that’s our show for today. I want to thank you so much for tuning in until next time. Take care.

 

To contact our guest directly, go to: www.earthwalks.org or e-mail Doug: earthwalks1@yahoo.com
Keywords

Earthwalks, Geomancy, Ecotourism, Indigenous Cultures, Chaco Canyon, Land Acknowledgment, Nature Connection, Community Engagement, Spiritual Wisdom, Environmental Education

Summary

In this engaging conversation, Doug Conwell, founder of Earthwalks, shares his journey to Santa Fe, his connection to the earth, and the principles of geomancy. He discusses the importance of ecotourism, the mysteries of Chaco Canyon, and the significance of land acknowledgment in addressing social injustices. Doug also highlights upcoming workshops and the essence of giving back to the community through service and respect for indigenous cultures.

Takeaways

Doug Conwell emphasizes the importance of connecting with the earth.
Geomancy involves understanding earth energies and their impact on our lives.
Ecotourism should focus on reciprocal relationships with nature and communities.
Chaco Canyon is a site of astronomical significance and ancient wisdom.
Land acknowledgment is crucial for recognizing historical injustices.
Listening to nature can enhance our awareness and connection to the environment.
Service projects are a way to give back to indigenous communities.
Earthwalks promotes a journey of personal and communal growth.
Understanding indigenous education can inform modern environmental education.
The essence of Earthwalks is about our life’s journey and connection to the earth.

Sound Bites

“You have to desire.”
“Thank you for coming.”
“There is a star map.”

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Earthwalks and Community Engagement
03:01 The Journey to Santa Fe and Connection to the Earth
05:50 Understanding Geomancy and Earth Energies
09:01 The Principles of Ecotourism and Respect for Nature
11:54 Exploring Chaco Canyon and Its Mysteries
15:02 Land Acknowledgment and Social Justice
17:49 Upcoming Workshops and Closing Thoughts

 

Sam Berne (00:00.248)
Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast today. So we have a very special guest, my good friend, Doug Conwell. And Doug does amazing things here in the community. He’s also founder of Earthwalks, which he will talk about. So Doug, I would love for you to introduce yourself, tell us who you are, and we want to know about you. Thank you, Sam. Thanks for inviting me to be here. I really appreciate that.

And I really want to give thanks to the Tehuah people and Carah’s people on whose land that we are living and where we’re working right now, which is called Santa Fe, New Mexico now. And I want to read the acknowledgement that I make on my website for that. Acknowledging the deep connections of indigenous peoples to the land and their significant contributions of past, present, and future.

In acknowledging these connections, we express our gratitude for the opportunity to live, work, and learn on this land. And I have to say that Earthwalks is committed to helping reconcile the injustices, restoring voices, and realizing the well-being of all members of our community, and especially those whose land this really was, the first peoples who were here. So yes.

Where do we go from here? Well, tell us a little bit about how you came to Santa Fe, where you came from and what inspired you to move here. Well, guess I was it was almost 50 years ago. It’s hard to believe, but in 1979, I kind of heard a calling. I was living in Colorado, my home state, Sam, and I was feeling disconnection from the earth, from myself. I didn’t feel like I had any real

connection to my own family or history. And I used to live on the border in El Paso when I would come through Santa Fe and back and forth from Colorado and always loved this area, this part of the world, New Mexico. And I thought, well, I’m going to try this out. I’m going to, I’m going to live in Santa Fe and see. I was hearing in my head and also reading and finding out more about indigenous traditional cultures and their spiritual wisdom.

Sam Berne (02:27.6)
and how they are connected so much to the land, to the earth, to the ecology, and how that’s a part of the essential part of our well-being. So I wanted to know more about that if I could, and that was my main reason initially for moving here. And I know we’ve talked about this a lot, but the subject of geomancy. How did you get into that? And that’s kind of a precursor before your Earthwalks. I would think so, yeah. Well, along the way,

I learned something about…

globally in cultures around the world called geomancy which deals with earth energies and has to do with how do you listen? How do you understand what those energies are that we are all a part of and how does that kind of inform you in terms of who you are and your own individual personality and maybe goals and values but it’s values that are in sync with in harmony with earth energies.

there’s a whole field of geomancy that includes ley lines and divining with earth energies and labyrinths and standing stones in Europe and other places. But they have their relationship too, I found, in native cultures in this country very much so. And then I discovered, my goodness, my own Celtic background. I am Scottish and Irish and guess what? Those similar traditions and you might say it’s a

Earth science and it’s a science of the soul really exists in my own culture as well as in Native America. So I started learning more about that and then as I learned more I started offering some group gatherings and sharing what I was learning. I ultimately ended up teaching out at Ghost Ranch New Mexico which is a retreat center northwest of Santa Fe out in the Georgia O’Keeffe area for quite a few years and part of that

Sam Berne (04:30.848)
teaching had to do with geomancy itself. One of the things we’ve talked about and I’ve experienced it and you know when I

on your Earthwalks is listening, feeling and seeing the Earth energies. could you elaborate? I know one of the quotes you have is you have to desire. You said that to me. So people want to know about that. What’s all that about? Yeah, I guess that would be probably the most important first step. know, you you.

You think that, this is possible. So maybe I want to understand, I want to experience. And I think a lot of us, most of us probably have.

Maybe it was more when we were children, younger, playing outside or even in the parking lot, wherever it might be, that we were, you know, looking at things more closely as little kids, right? We were looking at the earth, you know, the small things that were maybe the bugs, the insects, maybe it was how the sand was blowing across our yard or wherever we were, if we were in an urban environment or a rural environment. So, yeah, that’s the first step is kind of in a way

Sam Berne (05:50.017)
being open to that fresh way of looking at things with innocence like you did when you were a child most likely. So it’s being aware, having that consciousness. And then I remember one class I was teaching in Albuquerque and you know, in the middle of a city and we had a break for lunch and I gave them an assignment which was to wherever they were to go for lunch was to find some aspect of nature that was calling them that they could absorb.

of whether it was popping out of the asphalt or where it was. And yes, you can find that no matter where you are. You don’t have to be in pristine environment like Chaco Canyon, where you and I have been before several times.

Yeah, I think that listening, looking, you know, that inner that inner sense of knowing is an essential part of it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, know, I know in my own case, we’ve talked about this. My power spot is Hawaii. And I’ve led a lot of retreats there. And of course, the energies there are very different in some ways than New Mexico. But it is that listening, feeling and seeing and all the elements coming together. And

I love how you orchestrate that on your workshops here. So which brings me to the next question. Can you talk about ecotourism? Absolutely. In fact, not only talk about I’d like to read something from Dr. Greg Kehete, who is a Pueblo, a Native American Pueblo from the southwest here in the Santa Fe area scholar. And this is what he says about related to ecotourism. Traditional systems of Indian

education represent ways of learning and doing through a nature-centered philosophy. This gets back to geomancy. They are among the oldest continuing expressions of quote, environmental education in the world. Taken as a whole, they represent an environmental education process with profound meaning for modern education as it faces the challenges of living in the 21st century. So he has a book,

Sam Berne (08:05.771)
which is called Look to the Mountain, an ecology of indigenous education that I would really recommend to your viewers, Sam. But related to that are principles of ecotourism. I think more important now than at any time in our life. But a lot of people, I think, approach tours and tourism as something that you extract.

you go somewhere and you’re going to get something as opposed to giving something. And ecotourism really is a reciprocal relationship between you and the place and the people that you are visiting. But there are some basic principles Sam that I think are real important to talk about. One is if you’re going to be, you know, visiting somewhere, try and minimize your impact. And that has a lot to do with environmental impact, but also your

presence, how big of a presence do you want to make as a tourist, as a visitor, and then building environmental and cultural awareness and respect.

So what does that mean? Well, it means you’re not just going to take pictures and then run away and then put that on your Instagram and share it with everybody else. You’re going to spend time listening like we were talking about with Geomancy, listening to people and really respecting the traditions and the people who you’re visiting and the place that you’re visiting. So that provides positive experiences for not only you, but the people who are you are visiting. In fact, with Earthwalks, what we’ve experienced

lots of times the indigenous folks who are really our leaders have said thank you for coming.

Sam Berne (09:50.091)
because we were listening to them. We were participating in whether it was arts and crafts or whether it was a sweat lodge or whatever it might have been. But we were there to learn, to respect, and to really gain an understanding that we could give back in some way, whatever that might mean. That might mean direct financial contributions if you’re visiting an area that is in need of that. It’s just basically raising your own sensitivity

to the issues that are there before you go. One thing I wanted to say Sam is that if any of your viewers want me to send them a list of my bibliography that includes videos and websites and books that relate to everything we’re talking about, just get in touch. I’ll send that out to you as right away. So we’re here with Doug Conwell. He’s founder of Earthwalks and just a wonderful person who

loves New Mexico and has a very deep connection with the indigenous cultures here and

So I guess my curiosity is what should people know about Chaco Canyon? Wow, that’s such an amazing place, isn’t it? It is. Wow. Well, Chaco is from Santa Fe. It’s about four and a half hours away from here by car. But it’s located in a really wide open empty space. In a lot of ways, people would say empty. Like why here? This huge World Heritage site with enormous

ancient buildings that were in astronomical alignment, sun, stars, moon, it’s a pretty amazing place where you visit and we say, why there? And there are questions about that. Why? Because there’s not any water that really runs, that sustains the people. But there’s something there that really called the people and they created this huge center which reached out to the vast

Sam Berne (11:54.625)
region with straight roads that they built up and down the cliffs and there was trading with South America going on and there’s no real, I’ve heard anyway, real reason for establishing this huge community and then these network of outlying communities. So we may not know about that. I sort of think in my own mind that there is a star map.

You’re the star man, Sam. He’s an amazing astronomer, folks. You ought to be with him in Chaco Canyon when he pulls out these gigantic telescopes and then takes us to the stars. Well, I think the Chaco people did that. know, without the aid of a telescope, somehow they went out there because they aligned their buildings, amazing sites, with such precision, mathematical and astronomical and mathematical precision,

But beyond that, I’ve always found Chaco to have a certain powerful beneficial energy. Now I know there’s a history that may not be so benevolent in Chaco’s history like there is in every culture around the world, but overall that’s been my experience, a real healing environment.

Talk about land acknowledgement. Well, I said something about that earlier on, but I think why it’s so important maybe is what you’re asking. it so important? Even in major cities, large cities, let’s take New York City as an example, where I just was this last summer.

people may not have the history and understanding of who were the first peoples on this land, what the history of that place was. And of course, we look at the social injustices that have occurred in our country, colonialism, settler mentality, the westward expansion, the coming of the railroad. This was after the Spanish invasion, colonial invasion in our part of the world

Sam Berne (14:12.047)
here and what happened to people who were living on the land for centuries peacefully. I mean, they had their own personal conflicts, but they were basically peacefully here. In the Pueblo world, it was farming, more than any kind of nomadic relationship. But those lands were invaded, taken over, and people pushed back and oftentimes mistreated, starved, whatever it might be.

And here we sit on those lands now, and most of us without an awareness of the history of that social injustice and colonialism. I think it’s important wherever you are to be able to have that awareness, not to just feel guilty about it all.

or anger or resentment, but to say, yes, this is the way it was, and I am here as a result of that, and how can I give back? Here’s a good way that we can do it here. They’ve done it in Oakland. It’s a pretty urban area, Oakland. The indigenous people of Oakland reached out to the community and said, you’re living on native land, Oakland. We would like you to voluntarily, if you would, consider don’t

donating, based on maybe the value of the land that you’re on right now, certain amount of money, and we’re going to build an indigenous center for our community, which includes social services and medical services and clinics and that kind of thing. They did it. People voluntarily from their hearts donated and said, I am here because of you. And there’s an effort in Santa Fe to do the very same thing. So that’s just one way to give back. And be aware.

Well, we’re coming down to the end of our show today. how can people get in touch with you where they can see your offerings this year? can share about what you’re going to be doing if you want to in terms of workshops and so give us your contact info, your website and maybe what you’re doing this year. Sure. Well, thank you, Sam. Well, the best way to reach me is through earth walks dot org earth walks dot org and you’ll find a way to contact me.

Sam Berne (16:26.747)
find a real archive of all the things that we’ve been doing over the years with pictures and description and people’s reactions to them and then that way if you want more information I can certainly you know provide that. This year we’re planning to go to Canyon de Chey in the latter part of May. Canyon de Chey is this beautiful amazing deep canyon in the middle of Diné or Navajo country which is across the border between

of New Mexico and Arizona. We’ll be there about for three or four days, participating in Sweat Lodge right on the edge of the canyon, and doing service work. This is an element of Earthwalks I didn’t mention, but it’s important to know that one of the ways we give back as participants is to do service projects helping people. In Canyon de Chey in the past, we’ve been out there in the field pulling weeds, whatever it might be, feeding the sheep with the weeds, that kind

of a thing and then sharing a meal together whatever it might be with folks from that area. Excellent. And then how about your Chaco trip? Chaco will be in the fall. I don’t have a date for that. But Chaco Canyon in the fall, that is a camping trip. The Canyon de Shea one is a lodging, indoor lodging based but that’s the difference between the two.

But yeah, and there is walking involved, but Earthwalks, the name refers to our own life’s journey, our Earthwalk in this life. Well, I will make sure to put all the contact information on the podcast notes, and we’re going to end the show with Doug playing a little bit of flute. And thank you so much for sharing today and.

more fun. Thank you Sam. Looking forward to more of the Starman in our lives here too. Stay tuned. This is a Native American flute that a friend of mine gave me many years ago.

Sam Berne (18:31.017)
offering this our blessings and thanks and gratitude to all the directions.