Somatic Yoga and Vision Therapy with Dr. Elisa Beth Haransky-Beck

Elisa Beth Haransky-Beck is a SomaticNeuroDevelopmental optometrist. She shares her take on integrating vision through whole body movement using her own brand of yoga, which she calls EmbodyVision Yoga. This episode includes a yummy visualization.

Recommended book: Somatics  by Thomas Hanna

Website: https://www.enliveningconsciousness.com/

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Transcript

Denise:  Welcome today to the Healing Our Sight podcast. I have with me today Eliza Beth Haranski-Beck, who I met at the COVD annual meeting that I went to. Those of you who've been following me heard about that exciting adventure that we had, and we connected in a class and just found a lot of common ground. And I wanted to let you hear her take on what she does with developmental or has done with developmental optometry, but really moving more into, I would say, her work in somatic yoga, embody yoga, and just the holistic view of vision, which I think is missing for most of us. Hi, Alyssa.

Dr. Elisa: Hi, Denise. Thank you for the invitation and the introduction.

Denise: I think that our listeners would like to hear a little bit about your journey into why you became an optometrist, first off, and then how that's in kind of branched out or evolved into what you're doing, what your work is now in this kind of whole body view of our vision and our whole body wellness, really. Would that be accurate?

Dr. Elisa: Sure. So, I became interested in professional school, meaning optometry school, really as an undergrad. So, my undergrad degree was in biology with an emphasis in ecology. And I tried to get a job. And the only jobs that were available back in 1982 in that domain were, were in the area of like,

you know, cleaning up trash or, you know, sewage treatment plants. And I couldn't get the job as a forest ranger right out of school. And so, I thought, okay. And my parents encouraged me to go on to professional school. And I didn't want to do what my perception was of an MD, a medical doctor, because I thought that's too much time, energy and effort and I don't want to be on call 24/7. And then I followed the lead of a friend of my fathers who was an optometrist. I thought, this looks really good. You know, I can do this like during the day and then I don't have to take it home with me. And I learned, you know, it's a good profession for a woman at the time when I graduated in 1987 from the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, which Salus University, my class was the first class with 51% women and 49% men. And so, you know, still where my practice is kind of centered in southwestern Pennsylvania, there are more men in practice than women in here we are in 2023. And then how did I evolve into becoming a holistic practitioner? Well, I've always had an interest in movement and dance. I wanted to be a ballerina when I was young.  I took ballet classes from the time I was like, you know, nursery school or pre-nursery school all the way through my first year of college. And, you know, I auditioned for the American Ballet Theater and the school of the American Ballet called Joffrey back in ninth grade. And at the American Ballet Theater, there was a sign up on the wall that said, if you're over 5’7”, don't audition.

Denise: Oh, no.

Dr. Elisa: And I was 5’9” at the time. And I grew taller than that. And, then I was accepted into the Joffrey Ballet for the summer program that year after ninth grade. But my parents would not allow me to live in Greenwich Village in New York for the summer. And I never forgot that. But so now what I do is I integrate movement work, the reflexes that underlie vision development and somatic, very gentle, gentle resetting of our muscles and neuromuscular and organ and bone structure. These things underlie natural eyesight improvement. And so that's become my passion. And then I also integrate my background. I got a master's in 2019 in nutrition and reversing chronic and acute illness using, using really preferably the raw living foods, organic veganic lifestyle. So, some people think this is all really intense. And I work now with highly motivated people, people that are really interested in positively changing their world, their inner ecosystem, and also changing the outer world. Because my strong belief now is very spiritually based. I'm also a spiritual nutrition counselor. I have a master's in that. A master's degree, a Master of Arts, that as we shift our own awareness, our visual spatial awareness, our inner ecosystem, we are changing the world because we are the world. So. Yeah.

Denise: Wow, that is a lot to take in. It just occurred to me as you were speaking that I'm wondering if you've seen a connection between misalignment in the body and, and the eyes, because I was actually born pigeon-toed, extremely pigeon-toed, and had casts on my feet that moved my feet out for. I don't remember how many. I don't, I don't remember if my mom told me how many months, but as a child, an infant, and then after they took the casts off my feet, they said they're still a little bit crooked, but she'll fix it on her own. And I remember walking into the church building and seeing that my feet were turned in and having that conscious decision to straighten them and, you know, always having problems with my feet ongoing through my life. And I didn't know if there was any kind of a connection there.

Dr. Elisa: So, if you don't mind me asking, do you still have issues with your feet?

Denise: I don't, actually. I had bodywork done many years ago. It was probably 2007, 2008. I had orthotics in my shoes from the time I was 16 until that time. But after the body work, she lowered my arches, she moved everything around. All the bones in my feet had been in the wrong place. My podiatrist told me when I got the orthotics as a 16 year old, but it all got moved around to where it should be, you know, where the medical doctor said that would only be something they could adjust with surgery that would probably not work. The body work took care of that. I haven't had any problems with my feet since then.

Dr. Elisa: That's beautiful. That's beautiful. When was your eye surgery, if you don't mind me asking?

Denise: It was six years ago, so 2017.

Dr. Elisa: So, you answered your own question to some degree. You asked me if, you know, misalignment in eyes has anything to do with our bodies. And the answer is yes; it has everything to do with our bodies. And so, there's an optometrist and an educator. There's, you know, I don't know if you ever heard of Darrell Boyd Harmon or, or Alex or Skeffington, but these people. And, and I do this to a very large degree also. And many of my colleagues that are developmental, functional, neurodevelopmental, optometrists, behavioral optometrists. I'll back up for just a minute. When I took my state exam for Maryland, early on, I was licensed in four locations. Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia. I just took all the tests and luckily passed them all when I first was in practice, because I was traveling around a little bit before I settled in Pennsylvania. And when I walked in each exam was a little bit different by state. In the state of Maryland, you had to examine a patient. And so, this person walked in and I knew from the way that he walked, even before he sat in the chair, I knew something about his vision. And this is when I was just out of school, because I've always understood the connection between movement and eyesight and behavior. So, I knew that his eyes were moving. And when I did my testing that I was going to find a tendency that his eyes would be moving in a certain direction. So, you might say, well, I've never heard of that before. Well, then you might say to yourself, no wonder my toes turned in. And then you might back up further and say, hmm, when I was a baby, I wonder if I was allowed to be on my belly by myself without a walker or a bouncer or being held all the time. Or I wonder if I was in a crib all the time or if I was in bed with my parents. And so, I've spent my career bringing people's attention to how we were in our womb, the womb of our mother, what our mom was doing during that time frame, how she was in her body. And it's not to place blame, it's not for judgment, but it's to help new mothers and people who want to become mothers. In part, the understanding that the way that we move through space as parents has a lot to do with the development of our children in terms of their visual system, because the visual system, vision is our highest sense. Okay, maybe I'm biased. I'm an eye doctor. Okay, I'll give you that. But it's true. And so, Harmon and Skeffington in particular, really talked about ergonomics and the importance of school children sitting with slant boards and sitting with their feet on the ground and having chairs that were the proper size so that their feet could rest nicely on the floor and not be dangling in the sky. Because all of our somatic or body sensation feeds from the bottom of our feet all the way through our legs into our torsos, into our fingertips and eyes and brains. And so, as we are able to balance our bodies, which your podiatrist told you at the age of 16 and your body workers told you in 2007 and 2008, our whole-body functioning depends on how we. FM Alexander talked about the use of our bodies. Our behavior is totally reflected in our visual system. So, when I would have looked at you as a small child, when you were first starting to walk, I would have known the posture of your eyeball was in. It's called a phoria. Sometimes it's called a tropia. If an eye turns or if one eye turns and then alternates with the other eye. Some people go back and forth, and these things change. These things change over time, depending on how we as humans decide to be in the world, if that makes sense.

Denise: Yeah. I think it's interesting, though, because the feet turning in was something my mother noticed when I was very small as an infant. Right. And she didn't notice an eye turn for me until I was about 3, a month before I turned 3, and I woke up from a nap, and my eye was turned in.

Dr. Elisa: And so, the bottom line is, and because you've done so much work with this between then and now, I feel comfortable mentioning this to you.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Elisa: Because we're never complete, right. In this human form. We're always working with ourselves if we choose to be motivated to do so. When she noticed that you're feet turned in, if there was a practitioner that was aware of bodywork in the way that you had in 2007 and 2008, it's very much easier to work with babies than it is to work with adults. But we all have the potential, no matter what age, as long as we're still breathing and our heart is beating. Hold on for just a second. I'm in a podcast right now, so I'm getting a blessing here of a delivery of some food, which, because I've been going all day long. Thank you. So, I would like this to be part of the podcast. The understanding that how we behave. Are we going to eat during the podcast or am I just going to salivate? Am I going to talk to people during this podcast that's theoretically on healing our sight. We're thinking eyeballs. Am I going to take some time during maybe a short meditation that we do in the next five minutes or so, because we don't have that much more time during the course of this podcast to meditate on food and make the connection or the relationship between how we eat, our masseter muscles, which are these gigundo muscles of our jaw and our orbicularis oculi, those circular muscles, and you can palpate or touch around your eyes that surround your eyes. What is the relationship between the muscles of our face and our eyesight or vision? And because I'm salivating, with your permission, I will do or offer a five-minute meditation for your audience here, if that's okay with you. Or I could do a more formal one where we don't involve food. But I'm making this up right now on the fly because this food smells really good. Now, my husband would tell you he's not an optometrist, he's a lawyer. He would tell you eating starts with your eyes, it doesn't start with your nose. He argues with me about this. Okay, so think about that. Visualize that question. Where does digestion begin? And what is digestion? Is seeing with your eyes part of digestion? My husband absolutely would argue yes. And guess what? He's got me convinced. So how about. I'm going to ask you, because you presumably may not have food in front of you right now, right? But I want you to imagine. Imagine that you have a raisin in front of you. We're going to do. This is going to be a visual activity.

Denise: Okay?

Dr. Elisa: I want you to imagine that you have a raisin sitting on the desk in front of you. If you're sitting or if you're in your kitchen, go to your pantry or your shelf and go find a raisin. So, I'm actually going to pause for a few minutes and my podcast host, the Amazing Denise Allen, may be uncomfortable with this, but I'm going to pause to give you a moment. And as you're looking for a raisin or you're looking for your visualized raisin on your desk or in your pantry, imagine where this raisin was grown, who the people were that were involved in the production of getting that raisin to your plate, or your counter or your desk or your pantry. Visualize the rain that has fallen on that raisin. I don't grow raisins. I grow grapes. Oh. Imagine the process of a grape, a juicy, juicy green grape turning into a light-colored raisin, or a juicy, dark purple grape turning into a dark colored raisin. Have you ever thought about that? So here I'm. We're integrating the power of visualization. And then I want you to make your fingers like this. Pincers, your forefinger and your thumb. And I want you to reach into the container of raisins or reach towards that container and you can actually do this. Reach onto your desk. Whether or not there's a raisin there in front of you, pinch that raisin, pretend that it's there. Bring it up to your mouth. Appreciating. Don't put it in your mouth yet. Appreciating the round muscle around your mouth and thinking about or visualizing or touching the round muscle around your eyes, beneath your eyebrows, out towards your temples. You can palpate or touch around this orbital bone that protects your eyes. And then come back to that raisin between your fingers and place it in your mouth, on your tongue. On your tongue. Don't start chewing it yet. How does that raisin feel on your tongue? Can you detect the sweetness? Which part of your tongue detects sweetness? I'm not even sure I remember. Is it the tip of the tongue? Is it the side of the tongue? Is it the middle of the Tongue, the back of our tongue, it doesn't matter. Let that thought go. Even if you don't know the answer, if you do know the answer, pat yourself on the back, you get an A on the test. And guess what? If you don't know the answer, you get an A plus on the test for not perseverating on the idea. And then take your tongue and roll that raisin around your tongue. If you can, roll your tongue. If you can't roll your tongue, you get extra credit because you have more patience. You have patience to allow the raisin to rest on your tongue. Notice. Notice the reason and know. Now visualize that your upper palate, the top part of your mouth, shares common ground with the lower part of your eyeballs. Can you hold that raisin in the middle of your tongue at the same time that you touch the tip of the tongue, the tip of your tongue to the middle of your upper palate? Is that too much of a trick? Then don't do it. Allow the raisin to remain on your tongue. And know that that upper palate, the top of your mouth, is sharing with a sinus or an empty space in between the lower portions of your eyes, your orbital bone that supports your eyes. And know that when both of your eyes work together as a team, you are able to see one of everything in the world rather than two. If you are not one of those people who has any. Easy, here's a big word. A big four words, single, simultaneous binocular vision, meaning you use both of your eyes together as a team. If you're not one of those people, give yourself an A because you have navigated the world in a very different way than the masses. You are a visionary. You have deeper insight. Appreciate yourself extra. And with that, I'm going to actually stop this visualization. Do what you want now with the raisin, because we could go on for another 10 minutes or 15 minutes with this, but I'm going to wrap it up here because I have a feeling we're coming towards the end of our time together on this particular podcast.

Denise: Okay, well, thank you for that. I was really feeling and tasting that raising of my tongue, so that's awesome. What do you find people experience working with you as far as their visual development?

Dr. Elisa: Sure, sure. So, there was one young girl I worked with. I want to say that when I started working with her, she was definitely in grade school. I'm trying to remember what grade, but she may have been in first grade when I first started working with her. And when I did the Evaluation. Her eyes were not able to converge. People know this in today's terminology, technically as convergence insufficiency, meaning one of her eyes was looking maybe at me as the practitioner, at about four feet, sitting in front of her. Her other eye was looking out the door of my office. At some distances, she could converge her eyes, meaning they would both look at the same point in space, but not easily and certainly not for reading. She could not read. She was, like, failing out of school. She was in a very intense program because she was an Orthodox Jew who had to take, like a bilingual program. So, she was studying both English and Hebrew, which meant she had to read from left to right and from right to left, which was a confusing thing in her body. So, she couldn't get it on the paper either. This was before the kind of device that I'm working on called an iPhone. It was before computers were used in schools, really. And what did I. How did I work with her? What did we do? What could a person expect that works with me in office in the days that I was doing that? I'm working very differently now, mostly virtually. And sometimes I work with people in the woods, if they live locally in southwestern Pennsylvania. But I work very experientially. So, we work with lenses and prisms to help shift her visual spatial awareness. In the office, we worked with walking rails and the prism glasses, where she would walk back and forth and let me know what she was noticing, what she was experiencing, maybe with a visual target across the room that she would be tracking, meaning moving her eyes side to side, or that she would be looking at something far away and then up close. So, we helped with her near far focusing. And we would go outside and. I would put large rings on the ground, and we would hop and we would skip and we would jump and we would do jumping jacks. And then I would send her home with home vision therapy, meaning movement techniques that I would give to her. Maybe like some version depending on where the person is in their movement development, but some version of angels in the snow on dry land or other kinds of activities. And I always work directly one on one with people, and I work right from where they are. So maybe that gives you a little bit of an idea. Now, before we start in vision therapy, we always rule out disease pathology. We want to make sure that a person's visual status is not related to a brain tumor, for example, or a systemic disease like diabetes or some other neurological issue or other kind of issue. And after that is all ruled out, we may or may not prescribe lenses, but the way that I have always prescribed lenses is in a preventative way rather than a compensatory way, meaning that I would often prescribe low plus lenses. So, people know plus lenses who have never worn glasses before when they hit the age of around 40 or 45, sometimes 50 or older, or sometimes never if you really keep your soma or your body in shape. But they know that's because they could go to the drugstore and get some glasses. They usually don't start lower than like a plus one plus one and a quarter plus 150. I would prescribe very low plus lenses, sometimes just, you know, a twelfth of a diopter or a quarter of a diopter or a half of a diopter, which is much less than anything that you could get in the drugstore, of course, with the appropriate size frames. Sometimes I would work with bifocals. I never, ever, ever in my career have prescribed, nor will I ever prescribe what's called a progressive lens. I feel that those are not appropriate for to be put in front of humans and their visual systems. But maybe that gives you an idea of how I work with people.

Denise: Okay, but your work now is not in the office like it was at that point in time, right? So, if someone wants to work with you, what, what would you suggest?

Dr. Elisa: So, if somebody's interested in working with me, I'm more than happy to do consulting work. I advise people about how to interface with their eye doctor, even if their doctor is a neurodevelopmental, functional or behavioral optometrist, how to advocate for themselves so that they are sure that they have the most appropriate lenses to work in the context of natural eyesight improvement, whatever that might look like for them. And my website is called Enlivening Consciousness. It's E N L I V E N I N G no space. And then consciousness is C O N S C I O U S N E S S.com and you basically you pay for either a half-hour or one-hour consultation. And then I get an email that you've, that you've, you're interested. And then I call or I email to you and we set up a mutually convenient time. So, I will work with people just once, sometimes for hour or 45 minutes or an hour. Well, half-hour or one-hour time are the time slots that I have set on my website. Sometimes people like to work week after week or twice a month or once a month for six months. And so, I'll work with you however you see fit. I like to be a collaborator. I don't sell packages, at least not right now. If you don't see any changes in your world, then I don't want you to continue working with me. I could either refer you to somebody else or you can find somebody else yourself. The other thing that I'm offering right now are yoga classes. I call them yoga classes. They're really somatic classes. Soma, referring to body somatics, is very gentle. And we spend most of the class, most of the time on the floor. But if you can't get onto the floor easily or stand up from the floor easily, you can work in your chair, you can work in your bed. I just ask that you have lots of pillows, blankets around to prop yourself. We work very slowly. And my true belief is that the classes that I'm offering once a week live on zoom with people from all around the world. And usually there aren't very many that come maybe four or five a week. Sometimes there's just one, sometimes there's nobody. And I just do the class with myself. These classes are the fundamental basics of natural eyesight improvement because they work with the movement patterns, the reflex patterns that underlie vision development. And they're good in my view. Again, second, true confession bias. I'm totally biased. They work with vision development, and this is the basis, and they're for everybody. So that's it.

Denise: Awesome. Well, and I wanted to mention I really did enjoy your class on Wednesday. That was awesome. Thank you.

Dr. Elisa: Thank you.

Denise: I signed up for a couple more and. Yeah, we'll see how that goes. I want to try and write down the sequences so that I can do them on my own. Or do you have that written down somewhere?

Dr. Elisa: What I would recommend, and I recommend this to all the people that are listening, is that you pick up a copy of the book called Somatics, Okay. And it's by Thomas Hanna. And in the back of the book, first of all, it'll give you some of the theory about, you know, he coined the term somatics. I was actually on his table right. When I got out of optometry school, I went to a workshop. I'd volunteered, you know, to be the subject. I still remember the position that I was in. I was laying on my back with my knees bent parallel, and he was at my head on a table, and he was teaching, and I was there, but. And there's pictures of me on that table somewhere. I don't have them myself. Some. Anyway, that's another story for another day. But pick up that book. And in the back of that book are all of the exercises are written out. And there's models. You'll see models. They're not people. It's like a wooden model but pick that up. I would say, you know, some people like to take one of my classes, some like to take three. Some like to hang out for the whole year. Some come and go. But the idea is keep doing these movement patterns, even if it's just a teeny, eensy bit. Right now, I could cue inhale and arch your back gently. Exhale, come back to neutral. You're sitting. You've done it for today. Okay. And Denise is nodding. You can't see her nodding, but you can imagine her nodding because she took one class and she knows that the inhale and the exhale are part of it with movement. And so now she's thinking, oh, yeah, I could do this while I'm sitting during the day. And don't beat yourself up if you're not spending 45 minutes a day on it.

Denise: Yeah, great. Yeah, I tend to bite off a lot of things to do that I want. I want to spend 15 minutes on this and this and this and this and this. And then I don't do more than maybe part of one of them. And then I beat myself up because I didn't do all the stuff. And I'm glad that you're making this a lot easier for people. So, thank you so much for everything today, and I will look forward to seeing how people respond to this episode. I think it's really fascinating and probably a little outside of the norm for what they might expect from this, you know, type of a podcast, but.

Dr. Elisa: No, I don't believe it.

Denise: It'll be great, I think.

Dr. Elisa: Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's really a pleasure and an honor. I appreciate it so much.

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 site to leave suggestions or comments. Have a great day.