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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.