November 9, 2025 - EyeClarity Podcast
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“Your eyes are more than visual organs. They are emotional and neurological pathways that reflect your **life history**, your **nervous system**, your **relationships**, and the ways you’ve learned to protect yourself.
In this presentation, Dr. Sam Berne shares his personal journey of healing his own vision, and what he discovered about the connection between **trauma, grief, stress, and visual function**. You’ll learn how the eyes adapt to emotional overwhelm, how vision changes during loss and transition, and why restoring visual clarity often begins with restoring **safety** in the body and nervous system.
We will also explore the rapidly emerging world of **virtual and augmented reality**, how these technologies influence the visual brain, and how you can stay grounded in your natural vision system as digital environments become more immersive.
This is a conversation about **healing**, **self-connection**, and reclaiming your **innate ability to see clearly**—inside and out.
Opening Remarks
“Welcome everyone. I’m really grateful that you’re here today.
The theme of this retreat is *The Eyes Never Lie,* and that comes directly from my own experience healing my own vision. When I was younger, I had significant myopia and astigmatism. I was told that my eyes were defective—that I was simply born this way, and there was nothing I could do except wear stronger glasses over time.
But that didn’t feel true. Something in me sensed that my eyes were responding to my **life**—to stress, to pressure, to trying to see more than I felt safe to see, or sometimes, not wanting to see what was in front of me.
As I began to study the eyes—not just anatomically, but emotionally—I learned that **vision is not just optical. It’s neurological. It’s systemic. It’s somatic. And it’s deeply connected to our lived experience.**
Trauma, grief, chronic stress, early attachment patterns—these don’t just affect our posture or our mood. They reorganize how the **visual system** functions. The eyes tighten. The focus narrows. The world becomes harder to take in.
And when we soften the eyes, when we reconnect them to breath, to safety, to the body—our perception expands again. Light returns. Color returns. Presence returns.
Today we are living in a world where our vision is being challenged in new ways. Virtual and augmented reality are asking the brain to process space, depth, and meaning in environments that don’t exist physically. And while these technologies are powerful, they can also disconnect the eyes from the body—and the body from the world.
So today, we’re going to explore:
* How **your emotional life shows up in your vision**
* How I personally reversed my own prescription by working with the **nervous system**, not just the eyeball
* How to gently unwind the visual patterns that come from grief, stress, or past trauma
* And how to stay **centered and embodied** in a world increasingly mediated by screens and simulation.
Your eyes are not broken.
They are **communicating.**
They are telling your story.
And today, we begin to listen.”
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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.
Sam Berne (00:00.335)
When I was eight years old, I was diagnosed with a learning disability. I couldn’t read. And my mom took me to a lot of different places. And I ended up at an eye doctor’s office. And I did get a pair of glasses that didn’t really help. But it made me nearsighted. And as I progressed through school, the way I got through school was by memorizing. That’s how I got through. But my eyes got progressively worse and worse. And I left the eye chart in here.
I couldn’t see the big E on the eye chart. I was really disabled. And I got through optometry school and I met a, what do they call it, optometrist, holistic optometrist. I grew up on the East Coast. And his name was Dr. Schenkman. And I went to him and he said two things. He said, first of all, your left eye wanders out and that’s why you always have double vision. And then second of all, he said, your nearsightedness is due basically because of tension.
that you put into your eyes to get through school. So I went through his program and within six months my learning disability went away and I didn’t need my glasses and I haven’t worn lenses in 40 years. So it was a really huge epiphany and then I went back to my optometry school and I told my professors what happened and they respected me but they said, you know, we can’t invest into what you changed. You’re basically on your own.
And so I knew that I wasn’t going to get support from the allopathic people. So I decided to devote my career to helping people improve their vision because I was able to do it. And one of the things I would say is that, you know, from a genetic standpoint, the medical community really says it’s all genetics, like your nephew.
And there is a field called epigenetics, which I know you all know of. Bruce Lipton is one of those people. And basically with that, it’s saying that we’re more than our genes and that we can actually…
Sam Berne (02:15.874)
We can actually change our genetics if we do that. I’ve made some notes. you ever come across the Bates method or eye exercises, put it out of your head because it’s just quackery. And my friend and I were in the back going, that’s what we want to go into because I was a radical back then. And so, you know, this whole thing around
You can’t improve your vision. And it’s like, I think more people would come to see me if they could penetrate the intense obstacle that’s been created in eye care saying you can’t improve your eyes. Basically, eye care is about symptom management. You you’ve got a certain condition, needles, drugs and surgery, you know, pays for their Mercedes, you know, everything is a new, you know, a new procedure and
You know, in this state now, it’s laser surgery and optometry laser surgery. They want to have us do that and Botox injections because that’s where the money is. And you know, I would I go to the meetings. I got I don’t want any of that. What about the functional parts of a vision? Because most eye exams are pretty incomplete, you know, we’re going to do a test in a minute to see why you’re not focusing and why you’re getting blur. I’ve done this test on.
everybody else, but anyway. So I want to start and I want to speak about trauma and you know, everybody that comes into the body in this lifetime is going to be dealing with trauma, whether it’s birth trauma, whether it’s prenatal, whether it’s postnatal, we’re all dealing with trauma and what trauma does to our brain is it sets up a certain track, like a certain programming.
And since the eyes originate from the brain, the eyes are the only part of the brain that sit outside the cranial vault. So the eyes are really brain tissue. And so when we start absorbing trauma in our body at whatever age, it really impacts our nervous system. And there’s a wonderful theory that was created by a neuroscientist named Stephen Porges, and it’s called the Polyvagal Theory. Have you ever heard of it?
Sam Berne (04:42.862)
You could certainly Google it. Dr. Porges now lives in Florida. He went he’s from Chicago. Actually, that’s where he taught and he has a a whole theory on trauma and the evolution of trauma and the idea that we start off in the reptilian phase.
But we’re mammals. we’re meant to be empathic. We’re meant to have eye contact. But the vagus nerve, which connects that, you know, the head area with the, you know, the body that there’s a interference in our evolution moving from reptilian to mammalian and it has to do with trauma and he calls it the fight-flight-freeze response and vision.
Because we’ve got so many nerves in our eyes and around our eyes, cranial nerve three, four, and six from the craniosacral, Melinda is a craniosacral therapist too, that that impacts our visual system. And what happens is that we start blurring things out into the distance as a way to pull our world in and protect us. That’s what myopia is. But what we do is we create this hard shell and
We go to the doctor because we can’t see in the distance. He or she is reinforcing the trauma when we get a pair of nearsighted glasses. That’s kind of the kind of the setup. And so then you just start hardening more and more and more. And this is where the traumatic experiences come in. And the higher the number of the myopia, the earlier the trauma happens.
And that’s just in the myopia part. But we we sometimes equate eyesight and glasses and 2020 as everything but that’s not vision. Vision is how the eyes and the brain and the body work together and the 2020 reading is one aspect of vision. It’s not the entire aspect of vision and what
Sam Berne (07:05.334)
What I find is that there’s certain emotional kind of patterns like in farsightedness. It’s more about liver and anger and pushing the world away and astigmatism. It’s about confusion and twisting the world and creating a warping and in myopia. It’s fear. I’m being caught in the past and I have the perfect.
prescription for Ava that we’re going to do in a few minutes. So each of you is going to kind of be interacting with the programming that your eyes are dealing with right now and a lot of it is kind of unconscious. But the thing I can say about trauma is there’s hypervigilance. There’s freeze. So I’m freezing. become paralyzed. There can be social withdrawal.
And there’s difficulty trusting oneself in the environment. Those are kind of the four things in the eye muscles respond by tightening and it isn’t just the six eye muscles that hold the eye in the eye socket, but it’s the tiny ligament muscles that are in the lens of the eye. And so there are targeted exercises that can work on releasing the tension in both of those. Now cataracts.
Is a hardening of the lens when we develop a cataract. We’re saying to ourselves unconsciously. I don’t want to look out and I don’t want people to look in so I’m going to harden up and create enough of pacification to stop that. Now. There are also some, you know, antioxidants that that can help reverse cataracts, but that’s basically the thing. So
Not only is the trauma piece psychological, but it’s also neurological and it’s physical. So you have to work on all these different levels. You know, when I work with kids and I work with a lot of special needs kids, a lot of them are caught in that fight, flight, freeze response. So doing something called the primitive survival reflex exercises.
Sam Berne (09:27.669)
helps release the nervous system from that hypervigilant state, which can turn into myopia. It really can. And, you know, like, for example, myopia, and I’m speaking firsthand, I wanted to stay small. I wanted to be invisible. I didn’t want to be seen. That was my near sighted programming that created that. Taking my glasses off was a very scary thing for me.
I didn’t feel safe in the world. I didn’t understand what was going on. So my coping strategy was I’ll just become nearsighted. so can you heal it? Yes. And the deal is introducing in small steps the support of saying, okay, I don’t need to be as fearful. I don’t have to stay in paralysis. I can.
really open up my peripheral vision and be empowered about it because again, for all the trauma, we want to tunnel our peripheral. But when we tunnel our peripheral, our proprioception shuts off and our vestibular, our balance mechanism goes away. That’s why when all we do is stay at our phone, we actually are inducing this peripheral tunneling and our balance and orientation gets thrown off.
And our proprioceptive relationships to our body tend to change. So what I’m going to be introducing today is ways that you can feel safe to practice coming out with your vision. So that’s kind of the trauma piece. I think breathing comes into it. So doing this somatic work with sound is a way to penetrate the
paralysis in the tissues. That’s why I use sound and you know, one of my trainings was in a practice called continual movement. Emily Conrad was the founder of it and in that particular modality, which I still, you know, reference is using different sounds into the body and especially into the eyes and that can create a real release.
Sam Berne (11:52.925)
because sound penetrates the defense strategies in a way where certain things like color and light vibration also penetrates the defense strategies. so it’s, you know, I remember reading is it Vander Kolk Vander Kolk’s book on the body doesn’t lie. Yeah, cat body keeps the score and I remember
We were in a Continuum Movement Retreat and all of us as teachers, we were going through this traumatic release around, wow, the body is really telling us, it’s informing us. And my part was being able to translate what the eyes are saying, because the eyes are a way that I can interpret the scroll of energy and history.
That’s kind of, you know, my take on trauma. Now, the thing with mast cell, is it called mast cell degeneration? That’s what it is. This came up a lot with people who either got the vaccine for COVID or got COVID. So, that’s where I saw it more. But it’s a dysregulation on a cellular level. It’s like you’re not…
completely unified in cellular communication. And of course the eyes, since they require such a high degree of nutrient support, you know, one of my teachers used to say 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 goes to this, you know, very intensive area. So when you have mast cell degeneration, there’s a dysregulation on cellular communication.
And you know, it could be. Yeah, it could be. Yeah, it could be either over activation or activation or degeneration, you know, and a lot of these are labels that quite honestly, I don’t think the doctors really know because it comes in where you could be exposed to mold. It could be environmental overwhelm. could be toxicities. So when we do aerodology, I’m going to look closely.
Sam Berne (14:18.893)
at your iris patterns, the pigments and that’s going to tell me about a genetic blueprint where you might have some weaknesses and what we would say is that these are nurture points like a liver cleanse or you need to watch your pancreas or you need to, you know, support your kidneys more or thyroid. So when we get to that, we’ll talk about, you know, a lot of times what I see with with your situation.
Is there’s a gut dysbiosis something is going on in the gut area. And again, I can see a lot of things in your digestive system through the iridology. So hang in there with that. The other thing I want to talk about is grief because that’s another thing that we’re all dealing with grief and loss and what we tend to do with that in our vision is again, it’s another narrowing of our peripheral. It’s about overusing the macula.
So the macula makes up less than 1 % of the real estate of our eyes, but it’s the most fundamental part of our being able to see detail. Without the macula, everything is going to be distorted or blurred. Now, the macula is the left brain because that’s the rational detail oriented and everything else the peripheral is the right brain. What’s happened in our society over the last?
hundred years at least due to the industrial revolution and you know the fact that we’re on digital screens is that the maculas tend to get overused. So myopia is a place where there’s overuse of macula. You know we think about more information coming to us. You know we can go to chat GPT now the AI has come in. The new thing that’s coming is virtual reality glasses and I’m involved in some research.
around the negative effects of VR because we’re going to stop using our phone. We’re just going to wear the glasses. We’re going to be able to scroll through our emails and we’re going to be able to I mean, it’s just getting so insane and the the split in our vision by having these VR glasses and having a whole other alternate reality is kind of hard for the brain. It’s hard for our nervous system. It’s hard for our systemic and metabolic health.
Sam Berne (16:46.032)
So, you know, VR is coming and the other thing I want to say about grief is that cataracts one of the words where it comes from is waterfall. So it’s a frozen waterfall like the water is out of balance in a cataract and whether our eyes are dry or we have overacting tears. could be either of those things. So that’s that’s kind of the grief.
situation and again, I’ll talk about ways through your ideology that maybe you can work through the grief. All right, let’s see. I want to talk just a bit about the spiritual part of vision. So the eyes have been called the organ of light. We need light in order to see and light is a food and it affects our endocrine system, our nervous system and our eyes 25%.
of the pathways in the eyes go to non-visual pathways like our hypothalamus, the pineal gland, and there’s been talk about something called the calcification of the pineal gland. So fluoride in the water, EMF exposure, these are hardening the pineal, but the pineal is the part of our body partly that helps us connect to the Schumann resonance, which is that slow wave in nature.
And what I’m seeing is that more and more people have no idea about the Schumann resonance. And we’re going to connect to that today. So there’s the physical eyes using them together, but there’s the third eye and how well that part of our chakra system is allowing light in like if our hypersensitive if we’re afraid of the light and then there’s the red light the photo biomodulation.
which helps us improve our mitochondria function. And there was a study done in 2021 at the University College of London, which said that if you use red light every day, it can actually reduce macular degeneration. It improved the visual acuity by almost 17 % over a 12 week period. Some people are now even including something called methylene blue, which is a…
Sam Berne (19:09.32)
an enhancer of being able to absorb the red light. And so if you’re really into the mitochondria conversation, using the red light is kind of essential. You want to do it in the morning, but I have some IT people who work on a computer all day. They’re doing a morning red light session and doing an end of the day red light session, which helps release
The oxidative stress and inflammation that that comes from using computers. Let’s see if there’s anything else. want to say. Yeah, I think that the other thing I would say about the spiritual part is that this morning or in a little bit we’re going to work with this the yoke prisms. These are special prism glasses. Some of you maybe Melinda used them. I’m not sure Ava used them.
And these change how the light enters the eyes. Like I had a lady the other day with myopia and I gave her one of the yolk prisms and she said, my God, I’m feeling happy. It was amazing. It had nothing to do with her sight. It just changed how the energy was coming into the eyes and she had like minus 10. She was even
people and so I gave her the base up since she’s emailing me every day and she’s saying this is like, you know a way that I can be like an antidepressant because it changes the light into the eyes. So the lenses are powerful, especially if you use a lens that is challenging to you, you know, when you use a lens that you get from the 2020 eye chart, all that does is weaken your eyes.
It doesn’t strengthen it, but there are vision exercise glasses and lenses and patches and things that you know, I can introduce to you today, especially in the setting that that might create a switch a flick of like, habitually. I was seeing this way. You’ve given me a whole new perspective and that creates a cascading effect of you know, improving not only the eyesight but the vision.
Sam Berne (21:29.357)
So that’s a lot of words. I’m going to end my rant and just see if this has triggered anything either in a comment or a question before we move more to the practical exercises.
Well, I guess the digest…
Sam Berne (21:54.222)
Yeah. So the the gut is directly related to the eyes. You know, when I was studying functional medicine, they would talk about the brain, but then I would go, what about the eyes and they go, yeah, yeah, the eyes. Yeah, it’s the similar thing. So, you know, inflammation, oxidative stress, toxicities, all of those things will create deteriorating eyesight for sure.
Sam Berne (22:28.719)
big time in Chinese medicine. There is that and then also the liver and the gallbladder are the organs that help us absorb our eye nutrients better because they’re fat soluble. So like I’ve had hundreds of people come to me with dry eye syndrome and they go, I’m taking all these supplements and I’m doing this and that and the other and I look at their liver through the iridology and they go,
You’ve got some liver signs that you’re eating it, but your liver is not helping you absorb the healthy fats. So this is where then a liver cleanse comes in or doing some, you know, beet juice kind of a cleanse to help the liver be able to absorb those fat soluble vitamins like vitamin A or lutein and zeaxanthin which are essential for the macula and once the liver starts absorbing better
the eye problems go away. So they’re eating everything well, but they’re not absorbing it. So the liver cleanse is the key, the secret that allows them. Now in your case, what I’m curious about is the functional part, like how your brain and eyes are wired up. And there’s a very simple test that we’re going to do in a minute that will help you.
Anybody else have anything that’s of resonance? Otherwise we’ll move more into the practical side. Okay. Yeah, go ahead. Fire away.
Sam Berne (24:14.725)
Well, let’s just see. Let’s just see if a handout is going to do it or maybe your personal experience.
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