Naturally Clear: Claudia Muehlenweg on Holistic Vision Healing

In this insightful episode, Denise welcomes Claudia Muehlenweg, founder of the Naturally Clear Vision Institute and holistic vision coach. Claudia shares her personal vision journey—from childhood strabismus and glasses at age three to clear, natural eyesight—and how those experiences inspired her to help others improve their vision without glasses, contacts, or surgery.

Together, Denise and Claudia dive deep into:

• Claudia’s early challenges with eyesight and how playing handball improved her vision
• Her disillusionment with glasses and the “aha” moment that reignited her natural healing path
• How emotional trauma, stress, and body alignment can contribute to vision issues
• The five components of Claudia’s Natural Vision Method
• Stories of real clients improving eyesight, even after decades of relying on lenses or facing serious diagnoses
• The surprising connection between mindset, body tension, light, and visual clarity
• Why imagination, memory, and brain function play a key role in vision

Whether you’ve worn glasses for years, are curious about natural approaches, or are supporting a child with vision challenges, this episode offers powerful insights and hope for healing.

Resources & Links:

🌐 Claudia's Website: naturallyclearvision.com

 📺 YouTube (Clear Vision Wednesday): Holistic Vision Coach on YouTube

 📷 Instagram: @holisticvisioncoach

🔗 Download Claudia's free Top 10 Vision Habits: [Available on her website]

 🆓 Free four-day class: See Better in Just Four Days (visit her site for details)

Click the link above to message me directly. It comes to me as FAN MAIL! How great is that? Just click on the place that says, "If you liked this episode CLICK HERE:"

Transcript

Denise: This is the Healing Our Sight podcast where we discuss vision issues and healing strategies from the patient perspective.

The goal of this podcast is to create an awareness of the diverse types of vision issues people experience, to highlight the types of help available, and to open a dialogue between patients to show we're not alone in our vision struggles.

As a patient who gained 3D vision at age 54 through vision therapy combined with strabismus surgery, I feel uniquely qualified to offer a hopeful, balanced perspective on the possibilities.

Please use the link in the show notes to send me a message and thanks for joining me today.

Today on the show I'm joined by Claudia Muhlenweg, also known as the Holistic Vision Coach. She's the founder of the Naturally Clear Vision Institute and a leading voice in the natural vision improvement movement.

Through her certification programs, courses and international workshops, Claudia helps people around the world improve their eyesight by addressing the root causes of blurry vision without relying on glasses, contacts or surgery.

She's also a best-selling co-author of A New World of Seeing and her own vision journey began at just three years old.

After initially struggling with strabismus and glasses for years, she now helps others see clearly, naturally, just as she has for over 20 years.

Denise: Welcome Claudia.

Claudia: Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

Denise: Oh, I'm. I am too. I've been looking forward to this for a while.

Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your personal journey and how you came to this practice or this calling really of vision improvement?

Claudia: I think similar to you, I had a squint, so my right eye was turning in and it wasn't to the point where I didn't have any depth perception, but I definitely was like the clumsy kid that ran into things.

And I was farsighted, and I got my first pair of glasses at the age of three. Now I'm born in the 60s, in the early 60s. And when I got to school at age six, I was the only girl. I think there was one other boy, but I see my first day of school picture, nobody wore glasses. I was bullied; I was teased. There was no Harry Potter, no nerds. It wasn't cool. And I remember just feeling super insecure and not confident. And again, I wasn't athletic.

I would trip over things. I was always that kid that had the bruises and all this stuff. And I remember when I was about 12, I lived in a small suburb in Hamburg, Germany, my hometown. And they needed kids for the handball team. They didn't have enough girls cause I'm like, why do they ask me?

I'm literally the worst. Throwing and catching a would probably hit my head. I was the worst. Like depth perception wasn't great. So, I think they just needed enough girls. And my mom said, why don't you just do that?

So in hindsight, three years into doing that, playing handball, being outside, sunlight, moving, peripheral vision, catching, throwing all the stuff, doing the actual games, I didn't get the ball that much.

But you know, in practice we did. My eye doctor said, you eyes are normal. I was like, what? I went from like being this four, you know, called be called all the names to like, you have pretty eyes.

And then a few years into that, like the freedom of good vision. I did my high school exams, and I was not a good student. I studied and studied, and I noticed my vision would get blurry really quick.

And at that point I was like, okay, never again do I want to be in glasses. So, I scoured all the bookshops back then, the library. I went everywhere. I found one book on natural vision improvement, and I started doing the things and it was all the relaxer size that you probably interviewed other people like yawning and blinking and all those things.

And I know notice how they helped me immediately. And I stayed out of glasses. My 20s, my mid-30s, I was like. And then mid-30s, difficult marriage ended in divorce, single mom, lots of crazy hours, no sleep. And I was back in glasses. And at that point I was like, okay. At that point I was 40, you know, kind of that decline.

I was like, okay, everybody, you know, I'm over 40, everybody gets glasses. You know, at this point it's too late. And I remember one night where I tried to go out and have fun and I got lost in the downtown Los Angeles.

And back then we didn't have Google, we had the maps. And I remember that little light in the car, you turn it on, it gets kind of really dim. And my glasses on and off and I could not read the map.

I was like, really? I knew I was not in a good part of town. And eventually I just turned, I just drove. And eventually I found the street and made it home.

And I remember taking off my glasses and my vision was so much blurrier than it was before I'd put them on. And that happened every time. But this time it was so extreme.

And I thought to myself, this is, I need to do something about this. And I remember that morning at 1am I was digging through all my stuff. I found that book.

And I went practiced those things Again. But at that point, I needed more help. Right. The book alone wasn't really cutting it. And I started working with a private vision coach and I saw improvements.

And then I. I kind of decided this is really what I want to do. I saw the improvements and being kind of disenfranchised with my work in advertising. I was like, I'm a visual person.

And so, I did the teacher training. Like, I don't even know what was it, 2009? And that's that. So basically, twice in my life did I go through these challenges, but really being bullied and teased, like, the driver of this was being, like, feeling like myself for the first time when I didn't wear glasses, when I didn't have that thing on my face really was the thing.

And other people, like, why do glasses bother you so much? I'm like, I don't know. I never. I just felt like the world was distorted. There was this barrier between me and the world, you know? So, yeah.

Denise: I think sometimes people put up that barrier on purpose. I've talked to my kids about that and they say, oh, I like it. It, like, protects me. And I'm thinking, no,

Claudia: I think you're absolutely right. I remember, actually, I remember being shy because I wore glasses and I didn't have the confidence. Right. And I didn't see myself as an attractive teenager. And I was very protected.

I grew up kind of naive about things, not really understanding things. But I remember what I did. Chrissy Hind, you know, the Pretenders. Like, I had those bangs that were really long.

And so basically I had these bangs and way, like, thicker hair back then. And it was basically. That was my way of kind of hiding a little bit. But I think you're absolutely right.

Some people like that. You know, my mom said when she had cataract surgery, oh, my God. Now I don't like it because I have the dark circles. She's in her late 80s, you know, the wrinkles.

And I think that's a whole different story when you kind of use the frames to kind of hide, you know, for vanity purposes, versus emotional, like, not feeling confident. Yeah, good points.

Denise: So, tell us a little bit about how you got to your own method, because you did training, what I'm assuming the book was a Bates book, is that right? And then you did training with a teacher that was a Bates teacher, maybe.

Claudia: I think the thing is with. I always believe. Yes, thank you for clarifying this. So, the Bates Method is really the foundation of all natural vision improvement because we have eye yoga.

Right. But A lot of things from the Bates Method are overlapping with that. For instance, the cupping or palming. Other things are not so much in a yoga that teach you staring at a candle versus we always teach blinking.

But yes, I'm trained in the Bates Method in kind of more original Bates Method. But when you think about yoga for instance, I think it's a good example because we have yoga which is a 5000-year-old ancient tradition.

But then there's all these different versions of yoga. And to me over the years I became a yoga teacher, I became a myofascial release therapist. So I started working with the body.

You know, being a visual, being a designer in my former career really also taught me more about wilt colors. And so, I kind of in contrast and how we experience the world.

So, I kind of always see it as like every teacher kind of puts, you know, their prior experience, their own vision. There are other things that learned over the years into this kind of method.

So, I could say I'm a Bates Method teacher because that's the foundation of my work. But then I've been, I had other mentors, other teachers. I, you know, so over the years we kind of create our own thing that works for us.

And I coined the natural vision method because that's what I found to be most effective. Other things that I'm putting in there and that is like Bates didn't really talk much about emotional things.

He talked about mental states a lot, but not so much about emotional things a little bit, you know, but not that much. And so, you know, adding all these things in that we now know also from science, I think that's really important to me.

So, I didn't want to be limiting myself to Bates method because there's the purest which is really amazing. But I wanted to have the freedom to kind of add in things as I learn and go along the way and what works with clients and not be so forced.

And one more thing I want to add in is the yoga. We don't really have an association, a global association. We have local country association. I'm a member of three different associations.

But like in Germany, they do it very differently. They see it more as a training. So at the end of the day, I always say this to especially my new future certification people that we're starting my certification. At the end of the day, whatever you do, you want to get your client's results.

You know, nobody cares if you do this breath work or that breath work. If it works and somebody sees better, that's what we want. Right. It's like, so, you know, that's how I see it basically.

Denise: Right. I think that your method is fascinating. And I've, I've been looking for people who talk more about the emotional side of it because we don't treat the body as a whole that like we're a whole person ever.

You know, we just go to the eye doctor, get glasses, be done. And it's. That's not what's behind the vision issue. Right. So, I've always been really interested in why do I have, you know, myopia and the strabismus that I was dealing with.

Claudia: Yeah. And I, you know, I initially didn't really learn much about the emotional aspects and I didn't really immerse myself so much in it. But then working with more and more clients and recognizing it and also working with other mentors and getting a better understanding of my own experience of the world.

And as a far-sighted person, I connected to that. You know, Martin Brofman was a big teacher in terms of this emotional aspect. And I was always outside of the bubble. I was always, always helping everybody else and not looking at myself.

And when I read that and when I kind of learned about this, I'm like, this makes so much sense. And then I'm finding that with more and more other people have felt the same way.

And when my own younger daughter experienced nearsightedness, I saw that kind of anxiety state, how that is connected to. So, I was putting this together over time. But I have to say I didn't start that way.

It was definitely not something I initially practiced. I was way more on that physical level when I first started teaching the Bates Method. And my first brand was the Bates Vision was my first website.

And I think the Bates Method is amazing and I think it's really the foundation of everything we do as natural vision improvement teachers. But over time, I just found that sometimes it was not clear enough for me or it didn't explain things enough for me, or it didn't work for some people.

And I had to figure out other ways of kind of working on my own vision and work and helping my clients see better.

Denise: Yeah. And that's how you came to your program that you teach now, right?

Claudia: Exactly. You learn things from vision therapy, and you know, which is a big field from behavioral optometry or neuro optometry. So you learn some of those techniques and yeah, I think everybody that's a good teacher is not like, has this kind of like, you know what I mean?

They let other things come into their life and kind of how does this land for me. And how. And try it out with clients. And sometimes you're like, wow, I didn't expect this to happen.

So, I'm always humbled by the experiences that my clients have, and I'm also humbled by what I'm learning from around the world. So, I think it's very important that we are open to other things.

Denise: Yeah, I love that. So, tell us a little bit about how your five-step process works with your method of vision improvement.

Claudia: Yeah, so there's different five steps. So, the five steps are basically the first thing is understanding your prescription. It's very important for everybody to like, what is my vision like? Because most people have no understanding.

Like, you know, they say I'm blind without my glasses. So, if they have an eyeglass prescription, what does it mean?

What is the astigmatism? Are you far outside near sight? How's your peripheral like really getting an idea what all this stuff means? Right. That's kind of really the first understanding. And then for most people the next step is really rest.

Everybody I feel, experiences this eye strain. And when it comes to rest and relaxation, I work both top down, which is more what we would think of palming. It's meditation.

Like you start with the brain and you, you, you have those thoughts and that helps you relax the body. And then I also do bottom up, which is for me the myofascial release.

So, a lot of times people have incredible tension, their breathing isn't optimal. So, we like for many clients, working with the body is quicker. Oh, I get it, I feel better.

Like versus the brain-based approaches. Sometimes. You know, I think before we recorded you talked about swinging. You didn't really, it didn't really work for you. That's more of a brain based saccadic eye movement approach, you know, versus just rolling on boards and getting massage.

And you just like, you immediately feel like you're in a better, more relaxed state. Right. And then, then it's really about light. Right. Light.  Eyes are light receivers. So how is our vision different at light at day versus at night?

The different cells in our eyes, how like looking into all those things and then the fourth step is really fusion. This is about how do the eyes work together. Because a lot of times we just look at one eye and the other eye.

And prescriptions are always just about visual acuity, how sharp you see 20/20, 20/30. But looking at how do the eyes work together? How do we create depth perception?

What is our peripheral field?

That's really this fourth step is looking into that. And then the fifth one, which is it's not really going step by step in order. So, some of these steps are interwoven.

But I always say 90% of the Bates method is really using brain-based memory and imagination. So, it's kind of woven into everything I do kind of from the beginning.

But in the end, we focus really a lot more on that mental state. And really. Because if you can't imagine it, if you can't see it in your mind, how can you physically see it? So, we have to work with what Oliver Sacks called the mind's eye. Or we have to use whether the idea of memory and imagination.

And so that is really the kind of overlaying piece. And then in the beginning we might do that by doing a technique with eyes open and eyes closed and using imagination to produce a desired effect.

But really, it's really the most important thing at the end is to really kind of put it all together. Right. So, the steps are not all sequential. So, some of these things happen like an overlap.

But these are the five, like factors, what I would say of five steps.

Denise: Okay, yeah. Five components of your program.

Claudia: Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to say it.

Denise: Yeah, I like that. I think that you have to be in a certain mindset to be open to even delving into it that way. Right. You can't be the person who wants the quick fix. You just want to go to the eye doctor and have a prescription and be done with it.

Claudia: Right, Yeah, I would say that's true, but I think really quick. I always say there is no quick fix. There's no hack in health. You know, it's like it's. Yes, you're addressing the symptom and at the end of the day it bites you.

You know, it will not last forever. But I also understand that not everybody is willing to do the work, you know, and looking at themselves and their habits and their beliefs and it's. I think it's okay. I don't think we can, you know, force everybody to do this, but it's. I feel like it should be an option. People need to be more aware of this exists and you know, at the end of the day, we can't function in a blurry world. So, I know in many third world countries, people see clearly for the first time by getting glasses.

So, I feel like, you know, I'm not somebody who says the glasses are just the devil. This is all bad stuff. But I think we need to understand better what their purpose is and when they can be useful and when they can be harmful.

Denise: Right. Well, I remember finding out about natural vision improvement when I was in my 20s and I was in graduate school and I had little babies, and my prescription was minus six, you know, so the idea of just throwing my glasses away was not even something I could consider. And there's other. I didn't find out till later there were other ways to go about it.

Claudia: You know, And I think it's talked a lot about this, throwing the glasses away. And I know some teachers that were really adamant, like, you can't improve your vision. You know, you have to throw your glass away.

But also, you know, you'll see people, like, literally with their nose at the screen, you know, And I'm like, that's not gonna be helpful. Like, so in a certain way, we need to function our daily world, right?

We need to function. We need to be safe. We have a way more demanding world nowadays. And I think stepping down in glasses, some people are okay not wearing their glasses, but if you have a minus six.

And I had clients that just walked around without glasses, but they didn't use central focus, which is something that you understand, or central fixation, like Bates called it. It's understanding where you look, you see things best, and everything was equally blurry for them.

And at this point, your brain is just checked out. You're not actually engaging. You're not. You're just like, you're in your inner world at this point. You're not actually looking.

You're not actually engaging with the world. And so, to me, that's not a benefit, you know, so some people use pinhole glasses, whatever it is, but we have to have a certain amount of clarity, especially if we need to be productive or do our tax returns or write an email. We can't just, like, you know, like hoping for the best, you know?

Denise: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's why I went the route of getting a reduced prescription, you know, And I'm looking now to go further with that because it's been a long process for me, you know, of just having slightly reduced prescription for years and years and years. After getting through the strabismus part of it, now I'm looking at the acuity part, you know.I mean, I have.

Claudia: A client who came to me after working for 15 years on her own and with a few other teachers, and she just. She used contacts and literally stepped down a quarter diopter at a time until she had 2020 vision again.

And then she would step down, and she started with a minus six. And when I met her, she was in a minus one and a half. And by the time she ended my program, the last thing I knew.

I don't always hear from everybody, was that she was basically able to do everything without glasses, only for, like, night driving or whatever. She'd sometimes put glasses on, but, you know, she took the slow route and doing it one step at a time.

And I think we need to also look at, like, whatever works for us, because if we put too much pressure on ourselves, then we do not relax. And if we're not relaxed, we won't see any progress.

Right. If we force ourselves to do four hours of eye exercises every day and put all this pressure. Today, I have to, you know, see a line lower on the eye chart. It's not gonna. Trust me. I've tried all this. I've tried, like, doing it, forcing myself. It's not working.

Denise: Yeah, I haven't been able to force myself to make it work either.

Can we talk a little bit about the emotional causes of these issues? Because I know you recognized as you went through your journey that there was emotional triggers, I guess, for blurry vision, or can we even talk about maybe the trigger for strabismus if you've identified?

Claudia: So, yeah, it's like, I personally, it's not like I've done all this work. I definitely had a lot of mentors, and I. My own understanding and working with a lot of clients.

I've come to understand that in farsightedness, there is definitely this. And again, this was me. It's definitely this pushing out like this. There's anger, there's frustration, impatience. You, like, get out of my way. And I was like.

I remember in my 20s, when that movie Nikita came out, you know, like Luc Besson, like that movie, I was like, just get, like. I was so angry. I was like, I wanted to be that kind of crazy hit woman. Like, you know, not that I wanted to really kill people, but I definitely. That kind of tendency.

And with nearsightness, I discovered there's more of this kind of. With being withdrawn. And I always think the nervous system always wants to protect us. And when I got to school, I already had glasses, so I was already in glasses,

kind of being forced to see clearly versus people or kids that might go to school. And school is a big, big trauma or adverse childhood event for many kids. You know, like, we might get bullied or teased with, like, maybe we are more introvert.

And all of A sudden there's all these kids and you have to navigate in your system and you don't know how anything works. And we kind of thrown into this world and then the world, the nervous system is like, this is all too scary.

Let's blur this out. And we are not really nearsight. It's like pseudomyopia. But then the teachers are required to report the, you know, you can't see the blackboard or whatever it is nowadays.

It's not the blackboard anymore, I think in most cases. But all of a sudden then the kids gets taken to the eye doctor. And I did talk to a medical doctor who did his residency with a pediatric ophthalmologist and he said they can't really measure their kids vision.

Like the kids are moving, you know, because it's so their refractive power is exactly 60 diopters. And it's really, really hard. And I've seen that with my neighbor here. Her daughter had some farsightness symptoms and she showed me two prescriptions from different doctors, radically different. But then they tell, the eye doctor says, oh, the kid has to wear these glasses.

So I think in that point it's like looking at like what is the kids like? When I work with kids, when I used to work with kids, they tell me all the things that upset them, that scared them. But then as parents, maybe they really hated the school or they really didn't feel safe there.

And then sometimes there's a lot of pressure. I mean, I was a single mom, so I know how it is. I couldn't just send my kids to like, you know, we had certain constraints financially and my time and everything, but I think really you're not nearsighted. It's just. And then you get the glasses and they kind of force you to be stuck, to have this clear vision. Like it's kind of like imposed on you.

And now what does your nervous system do? Either it makes your vision worse again and blurry again. You get stronger glasses, but really now you're locked into this state.

And in animal studies we now know that the physiology of the eyeball adjusts the glasses. So then of course you become actually nearsighted and with astigmatism, in which I had quite a lot in my right eye. And that sometimes flares up a little bit when I'm. It's that add, like, you know, difficulty focusing, that kind of doing 20 things at once, multitasking, having all these balls in the air.

And so that's something that I definitely like not even knowing who am I really, truly. That's what I told you in the beginning when I didn't have the glasses. I'm like, I thought I was this kind of weird kid that had like. And I had crazy internal rotation in my legs and I had to wear these things in my shoes, you know, So I felt like everything in my body wasn't really aligned correctly. And I was always told,I want.

Denise: To go with that because I have the same thing. I was born pigeon-toed. And so the way I treated that in the 60s was they put casts on your feet. So I had the cast and then I had the corrective shoes with the bar in between, you know, to push my feet out.

Claudia: Oh, I didn't have that extreme. I just had these things in my shoes. Oh, my God, that sounds really traumatizing.

Denise: Yeah, so I. That's what was happening to me when I was a child, very small, you know, and I think that was probably before I got glasses at age 3, you know, they were dealing with the pigeon toe thing. And my younger brother also had really bad strabismus at birth, but mine surfaced when I was three and it was, it would have been after all of this treatment for my pigeon toed feet,

you know, And I've always felt like there was a connection. And so hearing you say that is like so gratifying because nobody talks about it as our whole body being connected and our alignment affecting everything 100%.

Claudia: Now, I'm not an expert in all these things. I know I work a lot with the feet too, in my work with the myofascial release, because if we don't, if we have tension in the feet, we don't feel grounded and we are not balanced.

And that affects our vestibular system and our vision. And so I do feel it's all connected. But I know some people talk about the birth and the birth canal and the pregnancy.

And I think my mom was going through a lot of stress being a young pregnant woman and giving. I mean, when I was pregnant, I was going through a lot of stress.

So I feel like. But I don't know. I don't. Not the expert on these things, but I think instead of looking at the root cause, we got these contraptions, you know, again of strengthening the feet and maybe working on hip rotation.

And how can we, especially as a child, right. We still have those malleable bones, like, you know, we all have different femurs in the pelvis, you know. And so when I did my yoga teacher training, I'M like, well, like, what is the limit of increasing your flexibility or mobility?

Because I was always the stiff one, right? And they said, well, once it gets to bone on bone, you know, that's it. But the fascia and the muscles can all adjust.

But instead of getting. And I remember actually getting some kind of physical therapy as a kid too. But it was scary. I just remember there was this leather coated, scary devices.

And I just remember everything was really scary to me. I felt really like, what is this thing I have to hang there? And I was afraid of heights. And you know, as a kid I was, you know, you probably too. We were super, super sensitive or sensible? No.

Denise: Sensitive, yes.

Claudia: And, so we were like, a lot of this was just scary. And, and also the other thing is like, I'm not normal. I have to do all these things. But my sister doesn't, like, she was fine, you know.

Then you feel like, what's wrong with me? You know, and so you get into this whole thinking. And when I got rid of my glasses, I was like, yeah, I think the astigmatism, like it was like this, oh, now boys tell me I have beautiful eyes.

Wait me. Like, so to me, I went through this whole, like digging into Zen Buddhism. I was really into the spiritual path at some point because I was like, who am I?

Like, and I think we all do this as teenagers. But the glasses to me were like this part of me where I was not. Where I was bullied and teased and I wasn't valuable. Like, you know, people made fun of me and I didn't feel like in hindsight it's so crazy when I think about, like I always thought it was this introvert and then somebody said, you're not introverted.

I'm like, well, you know, but I had to right now I feel. And so I think a lot of these things come together and what is chicken and egg and what caused what and why were we pigeon toes and you know, and think with yoga and working with strength and mobility and all these things.

Now we know so much more, you know, about, you know, how we have to be squatting a lot more and you know, that we had the 60s when we grew up and you know, you know what I mean?

Like, we did a lot of things now we know better on some things and some things we're doing now is way worse than what we did back then. Right?

Denise: I mean, well, they don't, they don't treat pigeon toed children the way they did in the 60s anymore. You know, I know they're going to grow out of it. Okay, well, why don't we grow out of all of this? Right? And I was put in bifocals at age three for my strabismus.

Claudia: Oh, gosh. Really?

Denise: And I remember my prescription getting worse every single year until I hit puberty. And then my, then my prescription stayed stable after that.

Claudia: I think the bifocals in a way made sense if you were nearsighted because as a near sighted person and you're reading a lot and you're going to school. I'm not saying at age 3, but my point is, and bifocals have all. We can talk about all the problems I see with these bifocals or progressive glass because they create weird head postures. But generally speaking, as a nearsighted person, you should not, you know, the same dry up as you need for far vision is not what you need for close up.

In fact, you probably didn't need anything for closeup. So technically taking your glasses off would have been better. But yeah, it's so interesting, like looking at all the connections between stress about trauma, about not feeling seen or not wanting to be seen.

Denise: Yeah.

Claudia: Which was definitely big.

Denise: And I, I noticed you said that your mother was an anxious mother too. And my mother was super anxious because she had lost her first child. Her first baby was premature and had died a day after birth.

Right. So then she had me and she was very anxious about everything to do with the pregnancy and me as a, as a baby. And you know, and then my brother comes along 20 months later with strabismus and it's all kind of building, you know, and I feel like that waking up at age 3 with crossed eyes was nothing unusual based on my background, you know, and what can we do different moving forward? You know, what can we tell people that have children that are experiencing these things so that things can be different for them than it was for me. That's, that's what I'm, you know, that's what I'm about.

Claudia: I love that you're doing this. And I think also being a parent and you're being a parent and you know, if you ask my adult daughters now, they would probably tell you all the things that I did wrong. And I think we do our best as parents and, you know, we don't get in like, I, you know, I was really doing my best, but things change and we don't always know.

And I do, I did forgive my parents and they really tried their best and they you know, they also, I think the anxiety was even more financial concerns. Like we didn't have any money and my mom was a stay at home mom and all the things back then.

But overall, at least I always say we used to play till the street lights came on and we did all kinds of shenanigans. And when I look at kids lives now with the devices and the overstructured time, there's no more time for boredom.

Laying in the grass, looking at the clouds like, what does that cloud look like? Oh, that looks like a bunny. All the stuff that we used to do, you know, playing in the garden and you know, I mean, when I think about all that, that really overall I had a happy childhood, but those first years I really felt like I didn't, like something was wrong with me really, you know. So.

Denise: Yeah, and you're describing so much of what I experienced as a child too.

Claudia: That is. Yeah, I think we went through some other things and strabismo is what I understand from my mentor, Anat Axelrod. I don't know if you ever interviewed her, but she does a lot with the emotional levels and talked a lot about with children.

Denise: She is actually on my list of people to have on.

Claudia: Yeah, Anat is amazing. And yeah, I interviewed her and she told me because she works a lot with parents and kids and I don't anymore. I did it very briefly. And so she talked a lot about how disagreements in the family, you know, and my parents never really like I'd never saw them fight.

But we don't always know what happened behind closed doors. But there was so like if, you know, if there's a pull out, like there's some disharmony, it makes sense that the eyes also don't align.

So that could also be something like letting go and letting things happen and just trusting. And when my older daughter, my first daughter was born with strabismus, her eye went in and everybody said, take her to the eye doctor, take her to the eye doctor.

You know, And I was like, no, because I didn't want her to go through the same trauma. And then eventually she was eight and she had trouble reading. I took her to the eye doctor and the eye doctor said she has perfect vision and her squint was basically gone.

And all of a sudden it clicked and she was reading a lot, but she was, you know what I mean? And certain things we all develop differently. And as parents we get this kind of list by age, so and so they need to do this and this and of Course, there's good reason for these things, right? Because you also might figure out at some point there is a bigger problem if they don't do this by a certain age. But you know what I mean, this pressure that your kid is academically successful.

And now my older daughter has perfect vision. She's a cinematographer. I mean, this is all about vision. She's a focus puller. And she was the one where everybody told me, take her to the eye doctor.

And had I not gone through what I had gone through, I might have done this and maybe, who knows, she would have ended up in glasses. And she really didn't need that. Right? She didn't need that. She needed a lot more high and eye coordination. And you know, did I know why she had a strabismus in the right eye like me?

I don't really know. You know, sometimes, you know, I was really close to my dad and they always say in Chinese medicine the right side is the man on the male side. And I was, if anything, my eye would have been more in the left because I was closer to my dad than my mom. And so who knows when my right eye was turning in.

I really don't know, to be honest. So I don't want everybody listening to think that we always know exactly why this or that is happening. But something wasn't aligned and something felt challenging for me. And, you know, and who knows, maybe it was from in utero also. I don't know, to be honest.

Denise: Right. There's all kinds of things we can speculate that way. Mine was my left eye turning in and my youngest daughter was just like me and so had her left eye turning in. And so I think that there's some, I don't know, predisposition or triggers or whatever that are kind of inherited, you know, and then we get to figure out how we're going to heal those emotional wounds, you know, that have been in our families and passed down.

Claudia: Right. And I feel like what you just said, some of it could be genetics, but some of it could also be personalities and emotional states that could then, you know, be transferred to the baby.

So I feel like we don't really know, but yeah, there is a tendency. So that was the same. It's so interesting that you have the similar experience with your daughter and me with my daughter. And yes, she did grow out of it, so to speak. And of course I had it, I watched it, and it wasn't like I was ignorant about it, but I also didn't want to subject her.

An eye exam is scary, especially if you're a child. It's really scary. So I didn't want her to do this unless I would have found there was problems. Right. And she couldn't see things. And so. Yeah, but I, you know, so it's not about being ignorant, but it's also like being smart about what you like. Anytime that a kid goes to a doctor, it's stressful. It's stressful, right?

Denise: I mean, yeah, definitely.

Claudia: Yeah.

Denise: Do you want to tell us a little bit about some of the people that you've helped with different conditions that some of the listeners might be wondering about?

Claudia: Yeah, I mean, I've worked with so many scenarios. I'm trying to think. So I have one example of somebody who was near sight and she had a corrective restriction in her driver's license for 40 years.

And after doing my program, she told me, which is always so exciting, that her correction is no longer needed and she can drive without glasses.

So we had somebody farsight in her 70s, really high progressive prescription. And then we broke it down and she started wearing just the drugstore readers. And then eventually she didn't need anything for distance. She was like a plus 275 for distance. Somebody telling me the cataracts can no longer be seen by the eye doctor. Oh, and then another one that was just. Sometimes I'm so blown away.

So I had several people that had fuchs dystrophy. That's a corneal disease. The first round I ran my program, she decided to have the surgery. So she did the program and then she had the surgery, which is corneal transplants for macadamia. The second time was in 2020, and due to Covid, this was a different person.

She couldn't do the surgery. Right. So she just did my program instead. We were all locked down. Right. We are looking at. And now she just told me it's the fifth year where the eye doctor said, so the fuchs dystrophy is still there, but she doesn't need. Her corneas are healthy, so she still has the genetic, like, you know what I mean? It's still there, but it's the fifth year in a row where she doesn't need the corneal transplant. And they had already scheduled her for surgery. So to me, whatever we like, even if we prevent or keep our eye health longer and longer, or having somebody who had Lasik and she was black in glasses, as she was originally nearsighted and now being able to read you know, things at 70% reduction on the screen, seeing the distance clearly.

Oh, another one that was a good one. Was similar to you. So very, very farsighted. So truly hyperopic with like a plus 8 for reading, a plus 5 something for distance. Also amblyopia. So lazy eye. And had done vision therapy, which is what I usually recommend for people with more severe things. In addition to what I do. Sometimes we need that vision therapy.

And she had done that for a year and still wasn't able to read a book or do her photography because she was a photographer. She got these headaches, and after doing my program, she told me, I can read a book now for 20 minutes at a time. And it just gave me so much joy back. So she was still. We took the prisms out as far as I remember, which is something I always try to do because the prisms just make the. Do the, you know, the converging for you.

And so instead of making the eyes or helping the brain converge, but just even with all the vision therapy and the glass and the prisms, she still couldn't read. It immediately gave her headaches. And then she was able to do it for 15, 20 minutes at a time.

So it's not always about just getting rid of glasses. It's really getting your life back and doing the things that you love doing. And even if you still need glasses, you know, sometimes I think we need to differentiate that. Are we the glasses, or is it, like, really affecting our lifestyle, the things that we like to do?

Do you have to give up night driving? I had one client who said, I used to drive slow in the slow lane. Now I'm driving fast. Not over the fast, in the fast lane at night. Because at night vision, she really struggled. And if you live in the United States, everything is basically, you need a car. And if you can't drive anymore, you're basically, you know, handicapped.

Like you. You. Your freedom is really impacted if you're not able to drive somewhere at night, especially in the winter. So, I mean, there's so many amazing stories I could tell you.

Denise: It's like, is there any age restriction on your program?

Claudia: No, I think there's no age restriction. I. I'm assuming you're talking about the top level. We had somebody in the 90s with glaucoma and macular degeneration. And I always say you can always make improvements at a very minimum, you can keep the vision where it is at so that it doesn't get worse, because usually it gets worse and worse. You know, as we get older. So I would say not everybody can totally get out of glasses. It really depends on so many factors. You know, from toxic exposure to mold to heavy metals, to smoking to steroid use.

You know, how much the diet. Right. If you don't eat a good diet, like the retinal heart, I mean there's so many factors that impact our eye health. So yeah, you want to, we want to have all these things in check when it comes to like children. That's probably something. When you know, when we look at board games, it always says from like age 0 to 99 or something on board games, you know, like I think with children everything has to be.

And even with adults making it a game, making, making it fun when we do palming, like you know, resting the eyes and covering them up, you know, either parent could cover up the eyes, you know, tell the bedtime story or make it a little game where you both close your eyes or one person has them, you know, the kid has them open, you palm them and then, and then you. And then they have to do it. And so basically make it a fun, like fun game and really play games with children. Like roll ball games are great catch and throw games.

So my online programs are not designed for children and I always would say I had a person one taking my course with a 13 year old daughter. I'm like, wow, my 13 year old daughters wouldn't do nothing that I would recommend for the teenage years between like 12 and like 18.

Forget about it. Right. But they have to wanted to do it themselves like I did back then. And we were curious about these things. But you know, as a, as a, as a parent or as a caregiver, like look at like do they always do it with this hand? Are they always trying to like observe them, notice things and then all the techniques that we're doing make them turn them into some kind of games. That's really important with kids.

Denise: Okay, awesome. What do you think the most common misconceptions about eyesight are that you wish people would understand?

Claudia: I think one of them is that vision can only get worse is in that glasses surgery. And you know, contacts are the only solution. I think those are the big ones that people think about and not understanding that we actually don't see in the eyeball, that we see in the brain and that Dr. Bates always called it about what we see is not the impression on the retina, but it's our interpretation of the impression on the retina. So that's why, you know, I always like to bring up this 10 year old. I had to look up how the 10 year old thing.

And I don't know if you remember there was this photo of this black and blue striped dress that was taken on the cell phone. There was this Internet wide debate and war like no, this is white and gold. No, it's like. And they finally figured out it was a low res photo. You didn't see much of the background. But you make assumptions. And we know this from visual illusions, right?

How easily do we fall? Which gray is darker? And then the gray on white looks darker than the gray. The same gray on black. Because we look, we compare contrast with that photo. It was like, is it outside? Is it inside, is it daytime, is it nighttime? Is this in the shadow? So when we make all these assumptions, this is how we perceive. That's why people can argue about the same thing with our experience, our memory, our awareness, you know, our vision. Like we, we, we basically create an interpretation of what we see. And I don't know if you've talked about this study they did with people that have those dissociative identity disorder. Have you ever talked about that one?

So they did studies, people that. These are people that have multiple Personas or alters, right. It's a mental illness. And I remember there was a great show called the United States of Terror. Toni Collette played the main character. It was like 2009, 2010, right? When I did my teacher training and I noticed in one of her six Personas she was Bud. And Bud was a guy and he wore jeans, overalls and glasses and she didn't wear glasses.

And then back then I was like, maybe it's just the style as Bud, she feels like. And then I learned in these studies that people actually had, they could be minus 3 diabetus nearsight in one Persona and have perfect eagle vision in another. The color perception, the intraocular eye pressure was different, the pupil size was different. So now thinking this is the same physical body, this is just your brain, you know, believing that you're these different. So when you, when you look at that, I'm like, why are we not talking about this? Right? How, much more is this brain based really driven by how do we see ourselves? Like all these factors that's really, you know. And you have some blind people that have almost like real vision, you know, so.

And then we have some people that have eagle eye vision and don't see anything really, you know, so, so that's why I like the word vision better than eyesight. Because eyesight just talks about visual acuity, which is important. Yeah, but, you know, blind people have 8,000 photoreceptor cells. I forgot exactly what they're called. But as long as you have eyeballs, you know, they know if it's day or nighttime because they have these blue light receptors in their retina which don't are not seeing cells, but they notice the light, the frequency.

I think it's much more complicated of visual sense than what we, what we are led to believe when we go to the eye doctor and we look at like, here's the eye, and they only look, I always say they focus 100% on the 10%, which is the eyeball. And yes, we want the eyeball to be healthy. But even if your eyeball isn't healthy, like Jacob Lieberman talks about this, you know, how if he goes to the doctor, he would still show up as a minus 2 or 3 myopia if you, if you put them in the machine, because his eyeball is still a little bit elongated, but yet he can see perfectly clear. So why do we have people with the same prescription being able to read different?

You know what I mean? Like, so, yes, a good eyeball is helpful, but it doesn't mean that's the whole thing. There's so much more to seeing, right?

Denise: Yes. I am totally on board with all of that. And I was thinking as you were talking about the color perception thing, about something I saw recently where they tested, at what point do people see blue versus green?

And it was this whole big spectrum of, you know, it had to be a certain level of green before someone thought it was green or a certain level of blue, you know, and everything in between was where someone thought it was actually blue versus green.

And it was compare things, right?

Claudia: We compare. If you ever like, oh, I'm going to paint my walls white, and then you go to the paint store and there's like a hundred swatches white, and you're like, oh.

And then you hold them, oh, this is more red, this is more yellow. Because we always end up with vision. We always end up comparing contrast. And the Highest contrast is 21 to 1 is white and black.

It's the highest level of contrast. And so as we get older, sometimes those contrast tests, right, where we reduce the contest, where it's higher, more difficult to see. But we can also practice these things like night vision. If we always turn on our flashlight, if we never actually walk in the dark, how are we supposed to have great night vision? We, first of all, don't have great night vision.

Our broad cells are very light sensitive, but they're not like. That's why FBI agents always wear those goggles. Because our night vision isn't that great. As long as there's some light. Yeah, but if it's like if we are in a cave, if you've ever been in a cave, we literally can't see the hand in front of our eyes.

So, you know, we're not bats. We're not like predators who hunt at nights like cats. So we. But we also have to practice this. If we never expose our rod cells to darkness, how. How are we supposed to even be able to. You know what I mean?

Denise: Yeah, yeah.

Claudia: So that the junk light that we exposed to, I mean, there's some. We don't. And I live in Los Angeles. I mean, there's so much light pollution. Without a mask, I would never even have a dark bedroom.

Which is important for eye health. Right. We want for circadian clock and sleep. I have to wear an eye mask. There's no way I could actually get sleep otherwise. It's like.

Denise: Yeah, yeah, that's true in most cities, I would say. And this city that I live in now has like 10 million people in it.

Claudia: Oh, wow. Yeah. I don't even know how many of us into this house, but it's probably similar. So it's.

Denise: It's way less, actually. I looked up the most populated cities just out of curiosity, and I think about a dozen of the top 50 were in China and the only one that was in the top 50 in the United States was New York.

Claudia: Wow. I have no idea.

Denise: Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Why don't you tell my listeners how they can find your programs and what's starting next?

Claudia: So I have. I don't know when this is coming out, but my website is naturally clearvision.com if you're on Instagram. I'm holistic vision coach on Instagram and YouTube. I do a weekly live show every Wednesday on YouTube that I call it Clear Vision Wednesday just because it's on Wednesdays.

Denise: Which I love.  I love that. Thank you. So good.

Claudia: So I interview other experts because I'm always curious, too. Today we talked about cancer and I had no idea. Like, I'd like to learn more things. Also how all the dots are connected.

So Instagram is one of the places I'm hanging out at. And then I have sometimes once a year, sometimes this year we're going to do it three times, two more times.

I have a free training called "See Better in Just Four Days." It's like some people call these things challenges. I have a free download that you can download with some of my top 10 vision habits.

So yeah, I do, I do master classes. I really try to do a lot of things for free so that people can get a sense of be like, kind of start being interested in this journey but just like you did, eventually I need help.

You need help, right? You can only get so far with do it yourself. I've seen this with so many of my clients that I even had a client who got her eye doctor to reduce her prescription. But she was so tense, so tense. So we did a lot of the myofascial work first and they reduced their glasses by two. It was way too much. From minus 4.75 to 2.75, it was too much.

So she was straining against the blur, really had insomnia. We had to really work with the nervous system regulation, calming her down and then working with the vision. So sometimes we need to do like grounding, breath work, relaxing the body before we even get into the work.

And so I always say when I do my four day training, see better, just four days. I always say, don't believe me, don't believe Denise, don't believe your eye doctor either. But see for yourself because we can show in four days that improvement that you have a big impact on how your vision looks like.

And once you understand that, it's easier to connect the dots. And I always say without a coach, I have a coach for everything in my life. It doesn't matter if it's money management, building my business for my own health.

I'm detoxing from mold and heavy metals, you know, which we all exposed to. So  I'm not trying to figure this out myself because I would go down all kinds of rabbit holes.

And so finding somebody that you can trust, but really understanding a little bit more how much impact you have on your vision versus just blaming it on agent genetics, which do have a play. They play some part in it, but it's actually the smaller part in how your vision looks like as you get older. So it's up to you.

Denise: Great. I love it. What's your final tip that you want to give today for people as they're trying to navigate this vision improvement?

Claudia: I think being really mindful of your vision, what we talked about, the strains and gains, noticing when your vision is better, when it's worse, really understanding that how your vision varies, just like your nervous system, your heart Rate your pulse, your blood pressure, your blood sugar, all these things.

I have an aura ring. We look at all these things, how they changed. And just like that, your vision changes. And how your choices, your daily habits, your nervous system, regulations, everything has an impact on your vision. And while it's easier to just blame it on genetics and be like, I'm at that age and leave it all up to the hands of the doctors taking over control over your health.

Because at the end of the day, nobody cares about your vision as much as you do. And one thing I want to add to this is like, what is your vision for your life? Why do we get cataracts in the mid-60s? Louise Hay even talked about it. She said, dark future, no joy in life. Like, we don't see ourselves like, you know, empty nester, retired, like, looking at, what is your purpose? What is your path? What are you here to do in the world?

I love this Japanese concept of ikigai, right? And maybe you don't have to make money with your. Maybe you can just do what you love. But when I look at the blue zones, which, sorry, I'm now getting on a longer final thought, but when you look at the blue zones where they interviewed Dan Buettner, interviewed all these centenarians, right, they all had this sense of purpose. They all had this community, they had this joy of getting up in the morning. It's not like, oh, it's another day, it's another Monday, you know, which is.

So what is your thing that gets you excited? You know, really it's so important where we see ourselves, our vision, because if we, you know, where do we put. What do we want to do in the our future self vision is.

I think what I would say is like, you know, I see so many people retiring and then their health falls apart and their vision falls apart, because they really don't see. They don't. Like, they feel kind of useless. Like how we felt as kids when we didn't feel useless, but we felt like we were weird and, you know, we weren't.

Like, nobody would miss us if we weren't there, to be honest. And how about you, as you get into your 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, you know what? Like, you know, we don't respect elders like we used to. But if you are like that cool cat, like, you know, have you ever interviewed Ray Gottlieb?

Denise: I haven't, but that would be awesome.

Claudia: Oh, my God, he's in his 80s. And I'm always like, he is so. He's such a cool cat where I'm like, oh my God, you're just so cool. Nobody would be like, oh, you're 80. You know, you're like, you're old.

Who do you want to be when you're in your 70s, 80s, 90s? Right? Like, I think that's important to think about. But it's just this body that's kind of looking more wrinkly and kind of declining. We have a lot of choices. So that was a long final thought.

Denise: No, I love it. Thank you so much for that. I think this is going to be really impactful for people. I appreciate your time today.

Claudia: Thank you for having me.

Denise: Thank you for listening to the Healing Our Sight podcast. I'd love to hear from you. If you like this episode, please share it. And please join our Facebook community at Healing Our Sight to leave suggestions or comments.

Have a great day.