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The Science and Soul of Aromatherapy
In this episode, Dr. Sam Berne explores the foundations of aromatherapy and how essential oils support vision, calm the nervous system, and restore whole-body balance. This talk is adapted from the first part of his professional Aromatherapy Master Class.
ONLINE | Aromatherapy Foundations Certification
January 28, 2026 – March 4, 2026 • Wednesdays, 5:30–6:45 PM MT • Live on Zoom
Ready to go deeper with essential oils and learn how to use them clinically, energetically, and intuitively? Join me for a 6-week Aromatherapy Foundations Certification training where we’ll explore 15 core oils that support vision, nervous system regulation, immune balance, digestion, respiration, and emotional healing. This is a professional-level course for practitioners, coaches, healers, and serious students who want to bring aromatherapy into their work and daily life with confidence.
Learn more and register here:
https://www.drsamberne.com/workshop/online-aromatherapy-foundations-certification/
Podcast listener bonus:
Mention that you heard about the course on my podcast and receive $100 off the registration fee.
To claim your discount, email Dr. Berne at [email protected] before registering.
Sam Berne (00:00.078)
And this is being recorded and thank you for the ping in terms of emails. If you didn’t get the link for today’s class and there were a couple of last-minute signups and my team and I tried diligently to get everybody the zoom link. My suggestion would be when you do get the recording link and the handout today.
that you download it to your computer. We just never know between zoom and the Dropbox how long the recordings will be on there. If I think I’m going to download this to them to my Dropbox and my Dropbox tends to last longer than zoom, but this is yours forever. And there’s a lot of great information.
We will have time for Q &A at the end and also we’re probably going to do a little meditation as well.
So I think I’m going to share my screen and we’ll start in on.
my presentation. Feel free to make any comments in the chat box. I’ll be monitoring those throughout our presentation today. So the title of this workshop is called see clearly now essential oils and natural protocols for vision renewal and a little backstory on how I actually got involved in aromatherapy.
Sam Berne (01:49.835)
Two things happened. One was that I was working with a lot of people. I was doing a test called the tissue mineral analysis hair analysis. Many of you maybe have had that done and I was working with a group of doctors with working with different detoxification systems to get rid of heavy metals out of the body.
And hair mineral analysis is one of many ways to do that. So in the in the process, I happen to be at a health fair and I met this woman who had a small boutique aromatherapy company and I told her what I was doing. And so she donated some essential oils to me to use on these kids. We worked with the children in the study.
Who had heavy metal toxicity and the essential oils. We actually used were black cumin, which we put six drops in a glass of water and they drank in the morning. Black cumin is a is a really great essential oil for immune health. We used it a lot. We used it a lot during covid. The second oil that I used was in a world called patchouli and patchouli works very well at
getting heavy metals out of the body and it’s a good detoxifier. We had the protocol was two drops on the soles of the feet in the morning. We also used a another essential oil for adrenal health cedarwood Atlas, which is a tree Atlas a tree essential oil and we had parents put two
essential oil, two drops of that Cedarwood Atlas on the back around the kidneys and adrenal area. And then the last essential oil we use, which we’re going to talk about today was spike lavender. And we had parents put two drops of spike lavender on the soles of the feet and we had them do it for three months.
Sam Berne (04:15.004)
We tested the the kids there were 20 kids in the study and we measured their hair mineral analysis at the beginning and then at the end of three months and at the end of three months doing that essential oils protocol. What we found was that the heavy metals had left the body completely hundred percent.
I was I was really actually pretty surprised and so that really caught my attention on the power of medicinal essential oils. And not all essential oils have that level of therapeutic value, but the ones we were using from the small boutique company and I’ll talk about, you know how to choose a company to use and anyways, it was a really it was really great experience.
So then I began studying aroma therapy. became certified in it. I worked for a company and I taught classes and certification and did that for a few years and then kind of went off on my own. And so aroma therapy and essential oils or something that are near and dear to me. I feel they’re really really great support medicinally and so
That’s that’s one way that I got into it. Another way was personally I had some digestive issues that I was dealing with during the time I was doing a lot of traveling and teaching. So I began using cardamom essential oil and basil essential oil and I would put those in water and sip them after I ate and within two weeks the
Digestive inside the digestive situation cleared up and never came back and every now and then if I you know eat something that’s a little hard for my digestive system. Basil is my go-to and pull a basil essential oil and a glass of water and that tends to take away the the digestive distress. So.
Sam Berne (06:37.678)
We’re not going to go into, know, all the different essential oils, respiratory digestion and and so on, but I am doing a certification course in aromatherapy starting the end of January 2026 and I’ll talk more about that certification. It’ll be online six court six weeks and you’ll need to buy 15 foundational essential oils that will go through.
And we’ll talk about all the different systems. But today we’re going to focus a little more on the vision brain part of my clinical work. So my resume is that I’ve been involved in holistic optometry for 40 years. And to me, vision has always been a doorway to my nervous system health, my fluid body health.
Learning all different kinds of modalities from your ideology to craniocic role energy healing the eyes are an amazing doorway into the body and coupling that with the central oils is a very intelligent plant medicine and I’ll talk more about why I think that is but I have consulted and counseled thousands of people.
to use essential oils and it’s made a really big difference in their life. So I hope to be able to do that for you.
So, as you know, in my brand, I have a new direction in vision. Carry my vision. Care is holistic. It’s mind body and the process is called functional vision, integrative body. And so that means that the eyes are related to the body. They were related to the brain. They’re related to our metabolic and systemic health. There’s just so many possibilities.
Sam Berne (08:39.986)
in terms of, you know, applying different aspects of vision to my to my work. So let me just see if everybody is. Okay. Yes, I will hold off on some of these until the end, but I’m tracking your questions and we’ll we’ll keep going. Appreciate the comments, by the way.
So I have a strong lineage of teachers and at every workshop and seminar that I teach, I honor my mentors. I wouldn’t be here without them. This is a picture of me back in 2016 when I was leading retreats at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California did that for seven years. We used to run month-long retreats at Esalen and it was tremendous loved it. Anyways, I want to just
briefly touch and give gratitude to my teachers. Am Skeffington. I never met him, but his writings were incredible and he was one of the fathers of holistic optometry. Dr. Albert A. Shankman was my optometrist and helped me completely reverse my myopia. You’ve probably heard that story and I went to him early on in my career and optometry and by completely reducing my myopia.
It inspired me to focus on a more holistic approach. Dr. Albert Sutton was a great friend and mentor of mine who helped me understand child development and how our vision really starts in utero and our in utero experience our birth and our bonding experiences have strong imprints on
how we develop our eyes and vision and dr. Sutton was a major influencer in that dr. John streff and dick a pal. They were my teachers and professors when I attended the gazelle Institute and gazelle was a institution affiliated with Yale study center at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, and I spent a year there learning how to evaluate and treat special needs kids.
Sam Berne (11:03.902)
It was an amazing time early in my career to get that training under my belt. I’d like to thank Emily Conrad. Emily is a somatic pioneer. passed away in 2014. She started the practice continuum movement. I was an authorized continuing movement teacher trained by Emily since left continuum, but still use many of her somatic principles.
If you want to read a good book, her book that came out life on land, is today. That book is if you read it, you go, my goodness, that’s what’s happening today. And she wrote that book 10 15 years ago. So pretty amazing. Shout out to Dr. Kordkoff, who taught me about biofield analysis and the GDV camera. My research with assisted dolphin swims.
using the biofield analysis and measuring people’s energy fields before and after dolphin swims color therapy central oils really wonderful. Dr. Hazel Parcells. She was one of my early teachers here in Santa Fe. I met her when she was 103 years old. She was just starting a retreat center in Sapio, New Mexico and she lived to 106 and I became
A student of hers for three years and she taught me a lot about nutritional therapies, energy healing and many other things. She has a book that came out written by one of her associates called live better longer. It’s a great book. If you’re interested in having longevity in your life, I would check out dr. Parcell’s and her writings number eight. Dr. Ellen Jensen. Ellen was my teacher in urology. certified.
In iridology and the iris is a genetic map of the body and her father-in-law was the founder of iridology in the United States. Bernard Jensen. You’ve probably heard of him great naturopath had a wonderful clinic in Escondido, California outside of San Diego. And when he passed away, Ellen took over. She’s a wonderful teacher and I’ve learned so much from her not just analyzing the iris, but also
Sam Berne (13:30.073)
naturopathic techniques and helping bring people back into balance and number nine my clients and patients shout out to them because they’ve taught me a lot about aromatherapy and herbal. Now our focus today is not on herbs, but I might do another webinar on herbal remedies lots of great compresses and things that you can use around the eyes terms of the herbs and sometimes you can just
Pick the herbs in your backyard or, you know, in, you know, close by. And so anyways, herbs are amazing. And I’m actually going to quote an herbalist who I studied with later today in this lecture. So I want to just touch base on some foundational truths about our eyes. And number one, the eyes originate from the brain tissue originally. And the eyes are are one of the most ancient.
Early tissues prenatally, you know, the eyes start developing from the brain very soon after conception. So it’s a very old part. It takes us back to the primordial part. When we start, you know, working with our eyes in a more somatic way, we can actually start accessing things in our prenatal experience. And, you know, it’s very potent when you start opening your eyes to that.
that connection to the brain. The eyes are also interrelated and interconnected to our body. This includes cranial rhythm, our liver health, our digestion and on and on. So the eyes have a very strong connection to our body. The eyes carry 60 to 80 % of body tension, especially with all the digital time we’re on. If you’re on screens more than an hour a day.
It’s very important that you do eye relaxation techniques to discharge the absorbed tension that you might get in your eyes from looking at screens. Myopia and nearsightedness is increasing by epidemic proportions and part of that is just so much tension that we have. Next, the way to heal your vision and increase your wellness is to realize that it’s a process.
Sam Berne (15:54.36)
process that could be psycho emotional, energetic, spiritual and physical so that we have to go beyond the physicality of the eyes and the numbers. You know, one of my sayings is I don’t look at the numbers, but I look at the person behind the numbers and every individual that I evaluate gets a personalized program. Even in our workshops.
We we give out personalized programs. Not everybody gets the same thing because our vision develops based on our perceptions based on our movement posture diet stress lifestyle. So all of these things affect how we see and how we develop our seeing wearing the proper lens. Is very important most
glasses and contact lens prescriptions that eye doctors prescribed are way too strong and it’s amazing in, you know, the eye exams that I used to do. I would say ninety-first five percent of the people that I would evaluate. I would reduce their prescription during the first visit. This was even before any physical therapy exercises. Oxygenation and hydration are the keys to healthy eyesight.
And that plays right into the essential oils that we’re going to talk about.
So here’s a picture of a retina that I wanted to show the see. This is what I doctor see when they look in the eye and this over here where the vessels come out is called the optic nerve and these vessels are going into the optic nerve back to the brain over here. This is the macula area these thicker vessels arteries and veins. So we look at the crossings.
Sam Berne (17:56.191)
high concentration of micro capillaries micro capillaries of the tiny blood vessels in the eye tremendous amount and the macula which is right here that has the highest metabolic need of the retina. So the eyes need a lot of nutrient support to stay healthy and if they don’t get that that oxidative stress and inflammation starts to creep in.
And then you go to your doctor and there’s a surprise. You’ve got cataracts. You’ve got glaucoma. You’ve got macular degeneration just to name a few and it’s a surprise to you. But probably the the depletion has been going on for a long time, but now it’s getting to the point where it’s creating physical changes. Well, guess what? You don’t have to live out your doctor’s diagnosis and you can improve and change your vision.
Today, we’re going to use essential oils to help you with that.
So essential oils, what they tend to do is a couple of things. Number one, they can improve your circulation. Number two, they can improve your lymph flow and number three, they can increase your relaxation. Now there needs to be certain rules guardrails structures around application and I’m going to go into in great depth how to safely apply the essential oils.
to your body so that you get the best result without any burning or side effects or or things like that. Essential oils can also calm your nervous system, which can affect your vision, all your sensory systems, your brain, your memory and so on. Also essential oils. They can give you ocular comfort. They can ease tension.
Sam Berne (19:54.938)
And they can reduce oxidative stress. I would add another one where they could actually improve your visual clarity and your peripheral vision. I’ve seen that many, many times, especially with the eye protocol that I’m going to be sharing with you today.
Sam Berne (20:13.007)
So I want to talk for a minute about the nervous system and in the nervous system. have basically two tributaries. have the sympathetic nervous system and we have the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is the part of our nervous system. That’s active. That’s the state we’re in when we’re walking, we’re running, we’re, you know, we’re activate activating.
mentally, we’re working and then we have the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our relaxation state. That’s the state where we go into rest and settle and sleep digestion meditation. And so in both of these sympathetic parasympathetic, I would say in our society today, we are spending way too much time in our sympathetic nervous system.
And basically no time in our parasympathetic nervous system. That’s why so many people have sleep disorders that we have digestive problems. We have anxiety. And so the idea is that harmony and balance occur when we have this this symbiotic state of sympathetic parasympathetic and when we do that it creates more resiliency in our organism.
And essential oils can help you with that depending on what oils you use and how you apply them. Now, one rule that I want to get clear about at the very beginning is that we never put essential oils in the eyes. We can put them around the eyes maybe, but we have to be very careful of even handling the oils on our hands and fingers and then touching our eyes.
Because if you’re handling the oils and you handle them directly, you want to keep them away from your sensitive areas and the eyes are one of those sensitive areas. So you need to be mindful. If you’re going to put them on your hands, you don’t want to put them inside the eyes. Very, very important. All right. I want to take a moment and I’m going to talk about the limbic brain. So the limbic brain is associated with
Sam Berne (22:39.242)
Emotions memory and motivation many other things as well. But the olfactory sense the smell the sense of smell is one of the initiating processes that I recommend when people start using essential oils. In fact in my certification classes, we do two things to be able to get certified. The first is that
We show the essential oils in an unmarked bottle and you have to look at the color of the essential oil in the bottle and tell what essential oil it is. The second thing is we blindfold you and we put out six essential oils and you have to identify the essential oils through your sense of smell. that the essential oils are a multi sensory experience. We smell them. We feel them. We can taste them.
You know, so there’s there’s lots of different ways to get the oils into your body. You know, I have an elder elderly couple and what they love to do. They work together every day. They’re in their 80s, but they they work in their their home and their writers and they diffuse very calming essential oils every day. And so it gets into the air their dogs love it. And basically the right now.
They’re using lavender as a way to create relaxation and harmony as they’re working. So diffusing the essential oil is one way to do it. We can talk about that. But I think the oils can definitely help us with self-regulation and sympathetic parasympathetic. I’ve seen this with kids a lot. Another thing that the essential oils do which really isn’t talked about very much is cellular and mitochondria.
Now, many of you have heard me talk about mitochondria support through the photobiomodulation process of red light therapy. But the the idea is is that the essential oils can also work in supporting mitochondria function mitochondria are the energy batteries of the cell and they produce something called ATP and ATP is an important ingredient that
Sam Berne (25:03.625)
gives the cell more energy reduces oxidative stress reactive oxygen species and those kinds of things. So I’m not going to go too deep into mitochondria. But what I will say is that the longevity movement today is really looking at mitochondria support as a way to slow down the aging process.
Sam Berne (25:27.656)
All right. So when we talk about essential oils, we talk about how often we use them and we can also talk about the synergistic relationship. If we use more than one essential oil, you know, I remember when I was researching what are the best essential oils for the eyes and I’m going to give you that answer today. There was a chemical reaction that I used in measuring people with my GDV camera.
doing subjective questionnaires with people and really coming up with a great combination that works synergistically because the essential oils have a very complicated chemical makeup. I mean, they’re naturally made, but it’s a it’s a really interesting situation. And then last is vision and brain pathways connection. So
Knowing that the eyes originate from the brain and understanding that we’re not just working with the eyes here. We’re working with the brain. We’re working with development and there it is. This is how we we go for it. So I’m going to stop here because I want to tell a little a little story and in this story. It has a lot of significance because it really relates quite a bit.
to our focus today. So there was a group of pharmaceutical scientists. They worked for a big pharmaceutical company and they have been observing these Amazon shamans.
And they decided that they wanted to make a trip to the Amazon and they wanted to talk to these shamans about why their plant medicines were working so well in healing all these chronic conditions. So they were able to arrange a trip. They went down to the Amazon and they had a three-day meeting with these Amazon healers.
Sam Berne (27:46.765)
And during the three days, you know, the scientists asked a lot of questions about, know, the chemical makeup, the, you know, how they created the the potions and so on and so forth. And the the Amazon shamans took them out into the forest showed him the plants and you know, a good time was had by all. So the pharmaceutical
Scientists were instructed by the CEO to pay these Amazon shamans $1 million for the formula. And so the Amazon shamans got together. had a council and they said, okay, you pay us a million dollars and we’ll give you the formulation. And so they had the transaction and they went back up to, you know, their laboratory in New Jersey where they
where they lived and worked and researched and this was one of the top three pharmaceutical companies in the in the United States billions of dollars. And so they thought they got this, you know, for a steal because they what they were going to do is they were going to take the formulation and they were going to make up all these, you know, drugs around it. And then they were going to distribute and disseminate to the consumer.
So took them about six months. They went through their research and development and they released the the drugs. And of course, there was a lot of marketing behind this and you know, they basically were promising the same things that they had heard from the Amazon shamans in terms of healing all these different conditions and they were charging so much money for these drugs. So big marketing.
People bought them and guess what? Nothing happened. There was a total flop total flop with the pharmaceutical companies and the Amazon shamans never revealed this. But what they what they said was that it wasn’t the formulation that created the healing. It was the relationship that the Amazon shamans had with the plants that created the healing.
Sam Berne (30:16.043)
And this is a very important teaching right here that you know, I can recommend the fanciest protocol in plant medicine. But if you have no relationship or communication with nature with the plants themselves, then probably not much is going to happen. And I’ve seen this over and over again. And what’s really interesting about drugs and I’m going to talk a little bit about
pharmaceutical drugs as we get back into the.
presentation is that those are synthetically made. They’re chemically and synthetically made. They are not natural and anything that you take synthetically is going to have potentially side effects that the body is going to reject. And when we talk about the field, we talk about the energy field and in the energy field when we start taking a lot of drugs that energy field vibrates at a much lower
Frequency when we work directly with plants, whether it’s herbs, essential oils, flower essences, you name it doesn’t matter. They’re all accurate and valid. Homeopathy is another one that I’m a strong believer in when we work with those plant-based medicines. We are working at a much higher vibratory rate and those vibrations meet our vibrations.
And that’s what what heals the disharmony because pharmaceuticals treat symptoms plant plant medicine creates more balance and harmony. And one of the things that I’m working really hard at with my students and my patients right now is to get them out of the fix it model and that’s very hard for people and I’m turning people away. I’m not working with certain types of people anymore because I’m not doing fix it work.
Sam Berne (32:18.325)
You know, I’ve got this give me that it’s an you know, it’s very a very linear way of doing it and my my focus and my teaching is about saying what we want to do is give you something that creates more balance and harmony and there’s a word we use called adaptogenic and if I give lavender oil to 10 people, they might have to 10 different responses to it.
Based on their body chemistry, their lifestyle, their nutrition, their genetic makeup and on and on. So it’s very important that if you start really using these deeply that you even if you take a walk in nature, even if you acknowledge nature, you know, and some of my more advanced in-person retreats, we actually do some journaling around relating to the plants.
Whether it’s a flower or a tree, you know, a grass doesn’t matter because in terms of essential oils, we can get we can get essential oils from all the different plant parts. So that’s a that’s a little bit about
The post The Science and Soul of Aromatherapy first appeared on Dr. Sam Berne - Holistic Eye Care.
The post The Science and Soul of Aromatherapy appeared first on Dr. Sam Berne - Holistic Eye Care.
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By Dr. Sam Berne - Holistic Eye HealthIn this episode, Dr. Sam Berne explores the foundations of aromatherapy and how essential oils support vision, calm the nervous system, and restore whole-body balance. This talk is adapted from the first part of his professional Aromatherapy Master Class.
ONLINE | Aromatherapy Foundations Certification
January 28, 2026 – March 4, 2026 • Wednesdays, 5:30–6:45 PM MT • Live on Zoom
Ready to go deeper with essential oils and learn how to use them clinically, energetically, and intuitively? Join me for a 6-week Aromatherapy Foundations Certification training where we’ll explore 15 core oils that support vision, nervous system regulation, immune balance, digestion, respiration, and emotional healing. This is a professional-level course for practitioners, coaches, healers, and serious students who want to bring aromatherapy into their work and daily life with confidence.
Learn more and register here:
https://www.drsamberne.com/workshop/online-aromatherapy-foundations-certification/
Podcast listener bonus:
Mention that you heard about the course on my podcast and receive $100 off the registration fee.
To claim your discount, email Dr. Berne at [email protected] before registering.
Sam Berne (00:00.078)
And this is being recorded and thank you for the ping in terms of emails. If you didn’t get the link for today’s class and there were a couple of last-minute signups and my team and I tried diligently to get everybody the zoom link. My suggestion would be when you do get the recording link and the handout today.
that you download it to your computer. We just never know between zoom and the Dropbox how long the recordings will be on there. If I think I’m going to download this to them to my Dropbox and my Dropbox tends to last longer than zoom, but this is yours forever. And there’s a lot of great information.
We will have time for Q &A at the end and also we’re probably going to do a little meditation as well.
So I think I’m going to share my screen and we’ll start in on.
my presentation. Feel free to make any comments in the chat box. I’ll be monitoring those throughout our presentation today. So the title of this workshop is called see clearly now essential oils and natural protocols for vision renewal and a little backstory on how I actually got involved in aromatherapy.
Sam Berne (01:49.835)
Two things happened. One was that I was working with a lot of people. I was doing a test called the tissue mineral analysis hair analysis. Many of you maybe have had that done and I was working with a group of doctors with working with different detoxification systems to get rid of heavy metals out of the body.
And hair mineral analysis is one of many ways to do that. So in the in the process, I happen to be at a health fair and I met this woman who had a small boutique aromatherapy company and I told her what I was doing. And so she donated some essential oils to me to use on these kids. We worked with the children in the study.
Who had heavy metal toxicity and the essential oils. We actually used were black cumin, which we put six drops in a glass of water and they drank in the morning. Black cumin is a is a really great essential oil for immune health. We used it a lot. We used it a lot during covid. The second oil that I used was in a world called patchouli and patchouli works very well at
getting heavy metals out of the body and it’s a good detoxifier. We had the protocol was two drops on the soles of the feet in the morning. We also used a another essential oil for adrenal health cedarwood Atlas, which is a tree Atlas a tree essential oil and we had parents put two
essential oil, two drops of that Cedarwood Atlas on the back around the kidneys and adrenal area. And then the last essential oil we use, which we’re going to talk about today was spike lavender. And we had parents put two drops of spike lavender on the soles of the feet and we had them do it for three months.
Sam Berne (04:15.004)
We tested the the kids there were 20 kids in the study and we measured their hair mineral analysis at the beginning and then at the end of three months and at the end of three months doing that essential oils protocol. What we found was that the heavy metals had left the body completely hundred percent.
I was I was really actually pretty surprised and so that really caught my attention on the power of medicinal essential oils. And not all essential oils have that level of therapeutic value, but the ones we were using from the small boutique company and I’ll talk about, you know how to choose a company to use and anyways, it was a really it was really great experience.
So then I began studying aroma therapy. became certified in it. I worked for a company and I taught classes and certification and did that for a few years and then kind of went off on my own. And so aroma therapy and essential oils or something that are near and dear to me. I feel they’re really really great support medicinally and so
That’s that’s one way that I got into it. Another way was personally I had some digestive issues that I was dealing with during the time I was doing a lot of traveling and teaching. So I began using cardamom essential oil and basil essential oil and I would put those in water and sip them after I ate and within two weeks the
Digestive inside the digestive situation cleared up and never came back and every now and then if I you know eat something that’s a little hard for my digestive system. Basil is my go-to and pull a basil essential oil and a glass of water and that tends to take away the the digestive distress. So.
Sam Berne (06:37.678)
We’re not going to go into, know, all the different essential oils, respiratory digestion and and so on, but I am doing a certification course in aromatherapy starting the end of January 2026 and I’ll talk more about that certification. It’ll be online six court six weeks and you’ll need to buy 15 foundational essential oils that will go through.
And we’ll talk about all the different systems. But today we’re going to focus a little more on the vision brain part of my clinical work. So my resume is that I’ve been involved in holistic optometry for 40 years. And to me, vision has always been a doorway to my nervous system health, my fluid body health.
Learning all different kinds of modalities from your ideology to craniocic role energy healing the eyes are an amazing doorway into the body and coupling that with the central oils is a very intelligent plant medicine and I’ll talk more about why I think that is but I have consulted and counseled thousands of people.
to use essential oils and it’s made a really big difference in their life. So I hope to be able to do that for you.
So, as you know, in my brand, I have a new direction in vision. Carry my vision. Care is holistic. It’s mind body and the process is called functional vision, integrative body. And so that means that the eyes are related to the body. They were related to the brain. They’re related to our metabolic and systemic health. There’s just so many possibilities.
Sam Berne (08:39.986)
in terms of, you know, applying different aspects of vision to my to my work. So let me just see if everybody is. Okay. Yes, I will hold off on some of these until the end, but I’m tracking your questions and we’ll we’ll keep going. Appreciate the comments, by the way.
So I have a strong lineage of teachers and at every workshop and seminar that I teach, I honor my mentors. I wouldn’t be here without them. This is a picture of me back in 2016 when I was leading retreats at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California did that for seven years. We used to run month-long retreats at Esalen and it was tremendous loved it. Anyways, I want to just
briefly touch and give gratitude to my teachers. Am Skeffington. I never met him, but his writings were incredible and he was one of the fathers of holistic optometry. Dr. Albert A. Shankman was my optometrist and helped me completely reverse my myopia. You’ve probably heard that story and I went to him early on in my career and optometry and by completely reducing my myopia.
It inspired me to focus on a more holistic approach. Dr. Albert Sutton was a great friend and mentor of mine who helped me understand child development and how our vision really starts in utero and our in utero experience our birth and our bonding experiences have strong imprints on
how we develop our eyes and vision and dr. Sutton was a major influencer in that dr. John streff and dick a pal. They were my teachers and professors when I attended the gazelle Institute and gazelle was a institution affiliated with Yale study center at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, and I spent a year there learning how to evaluate and treat special needs kids.
Sam Berne (11:03.902)
It was an amazing time early in my career to get that training under my belt. I’d like to thank Emily Conrad. Emily is a somatic pioneer. passed away in 2014. She started the practice continuum movement. I was an authorized continuing movement teacher trained by Emily since left continuum, but still use many of her somatic principles.
If you want to read a good book, her book that came out life on land, is today. That book is if you read it, you go, my goodness, that’s what’s happening today. And she wrote that book 10 15 years ago. So pretty amazing. Shout out to Dr. Kordkoff, who taught me about biofield analysis and the GDV camera. My research with assisted dolphin swims.
using the biofield analysis and measuring people’s energy fields before and after dolphin swims color therapy central oils really wonderful. Dr. Hazel Parcells. She was one of my early teachers here in Santa Fe. I met her when she was 103 years old. She was just starting a retreat center in Sapio, New Mexico and she lived to 106 and I became
A student of hers for three years and she taught me a lot about nutritional therapies, energy healing and many other things. She has a book that came out written by one of her associates called live better longer. It’s a great book. If you’re interested in having longevity in your life, I would check out dr. Parcell’s and her writings number eight. Dr. Ellen Jensen. Ellen was my teacher in urology. certified.
In iridology and the iris is a genetic map of the body and her father-in-law was the founder of iridology in the United States. Bernard Jensen. You’ve probably heard of him great naturopath had a wonderful clinic in Escondido, California outside of San Diego. And when he passed away, Ellen took over. She’s a wonderful teacher and I’ve learned so much from her not just analyzing the iris, but also
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naturopathic techniques and helping bring people back into balance and number nine my clients and patients shout out to them because they’ve taught me a lot about aromatherapy and herbal. Now our focus today is not on herbs, but I might do another webinar on herbal remedies lots of great compresses and things that you can use around the eyes terms of the herbs and sometimes you can just
Pick the herbs in your backyard or, you know, in, you know, close by. And so anyways, herbs are amazing. And I’m actually going to quote an herbalist who I studied with later today in this lecture. So I want to just touch base on some foundational truths about our eyes. And number one, the eyes originate from the brain tissue originally. And the eyes are are one of the most ancient.
Early tissues prenatally, you know, the eyes start developing from the brain very soon after conception. So it’s a very old part. It takes us back to the primordial part. When we start, you know, working with our eyes in a more somatic way, we can actually start accessing things in our prenatal experience. And, you know, it’s very potent when you start opening your eyes to that.
that connection to the brain. The eyes are also interrelated and interconnected to our body. This includes cranial rhythm, our liver health, our digestion and on and on. So the eyes have a very strong connection to our body. The eyes carry 60 to 80 % of body tension, especially with all the digital time we’re on. If you’re on screens more than an hour a day.
It’s very important that you do eye relaxation techniques to discharge the absorbed tension that you might get in your eyes from looking at screens. Myopia and nearsightedness is increasing by epidemic proportions and part of that is just so much tension that we have. Next, the way to heal your vision and increase your wellness is to realize that it’s a process.
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process that could be psycho emotional, energetic, spiritual and physical so that we have to go beyond the physicality of the eyes and the numbers. You know, one of my sayings is I don’t look at the numbers, but I look at the person behind the numbers and every individual that I evaluate gets a personalized program. Even in our workshops.
We we give out personalized programs. Not everybody gets the same thing because our vision develops based on our perceptions based on our movement posture diet stress lifestyle. So all of these things affect how we see and how we develop our seeing wearing the proper lens. Is very important most
glasses and contact lens prescriptions that eye doctors prescribed are way too strong and it’s amazing in, you know, the eye exams that I used to do. I would say ninety-first five percent of the people that I would evaluate. I would reduce their prescription during the first visit. This was even before any physical therapy exercises. Oxygenation and hydration are the keys to healthy eyesight.
And that plays right into the essential oils that we’re going to talk about.
So here’s a picture of a retina that I wanted to show the see. This is what I doctor see when they look in the eye and this over here where the vessels come out is called the optic nerve and these vessels are going into the optic nerve back to the brain over here. This is the macula area these thicker vessels arteries and veins. So we look at the crossings.
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high concentration of micro capillaries micro capillaries of the tiny blood vessels in the eye tremendous amount and the macula which is right here that has the highest metabolic need of the retina. So the eyes need a lot of nutrient support to stay healthy and if they don’t get that that oxidative stress and inflammation starts to creep in.
And then you go to your doctor and there’s a surprise. You’ve got cataracts. You’ve got glaucoma. You’ve got macular degeneration just to name a few and it’s a surprise to you. But probably the the depletion has been going on for a long time, but now it’s getting to the point where it’s creating physical changes. Well, guess what? You don’t have to live out your doctor’s diagnosis and you can improve and change your vision.
Today, we’re going to use essential oils to help you with that.
So essential oils, what they tend to do is a couple of things. Number one, they can improve your circulation. Number two, they can improve your lymph flow and number three, they can increase your relaxation. Now there needs to be certain rules guardrails structures around application and I’m going to go into in great depth how to safely apply the essential oils.
to your body so that you get the best result without any burning or side effects or or things like that. Essential oils can also calm your nervous system, which can affect your vision, all your sensory systems, your brain, your memory and so on. Also essential oils. They can give you ocular comfort. They can ease tension.
Sam Berne (19:54.938)
And they can reduce oxidative stress. I would add another one where they could actually improve your visual clarity and your peripheral vision. I’ve seen that many, many times, especially with the eye protocol that I’m going to be sharing with you today.
Sam Berne (20:13.007)
So I want to talk for a minute about the nervous system and in the nervous system. have basically two tributaries. have the sympathetic nervous system and we have the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is the part of our nervous system. That’s active. That’s the state we’re in when we’re walking, we’re running, we’re, you know, we’re activate activating.
mentally, we’re working and then we have the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our relaxation state. That’s the state where we go into rest and settle and sleep digestion meditation. And so in both of these sympathetic parasympathetic, I would say in our society today, we are spending way too much time in our sympathetic nervous system.
And basically no time in our parasympathetic nervous system. That’s why so many people have sleep disorders that we have digestive problems. We have anxiety. And so the idea is that harmony and balance occur when we have this this symbiotic state of sympathetic parasympathetic and when we do that it creates more resiliency in our organism.
And essential oils can help you with that depending on what oils you use and how you apply them. Now, one rule that I want to get clear about at the very beginning is that we never put essential oils in the eyes. We can put them around the eyes maybe, but we have to be very careful of even handling the oils on our hands and fingers and then touching our eyes.
Because if you’re handling the oils and you handle them directly, you want to keep them away from your sensitive areas and the eyes are one of those sensitive areas. So you need to be mindful. If you’re going to put them on your hands, you don’t want to put them inside the eyes. Very, very important. All right. I want to take a moment and I’m going to talk about the limbic brain. So the limbic brain is associated with
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Emotions memory and motivation many other things as well. But the olfactory sense the smell the sense of smell is one of the initiating processes that I recommend when people start using essential oils. In fact in my certification classes, we do two things to be able to get certified. The first is that
We show the essential oils in an unmarked bottle and you have to look at the color of the essential oil in the bottle and tell what essential oil it is. The second thing is we blindfold you and we put out six essential oils and you have to identify the essential oils through your sense of smell. that the essential oils are a multi sensory experience. We smell them. We feel them. We can taste them.
You know, so there’s there’s lots of different ways to get the oils into your body. You know, I have an elder elderly couple and what they love to do. They work together every day. They’re in their 80s, but they they work in their their home and their writers and they diffuse very calming essential oils every day. And so it gets into the air their dogs love it. And basically the right now.
They’re using lavender as a way to create relaxation and harmony as they’re working. So diffusing the essential oil is one way to do it. We can talk about that. But I think the oils can definitely help us with self-regulation and sympathetic parasympathetic. I’ve seen this with kids a lot. Another thing that the essential oils do which really isn’t talked about very much is cellular and mitochondria.
Now, many of you have heard me talk about mitochondria support through the photobiomodulation process of red light therapy. But the the idea is is that the essential oils can also work in supporting mitochondria function mitochondria are the energy batteries of the cell and they produce something called ATP and ATP is an important ingredient that
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gives the cell more energy reduces oxidative stress reactive oxygen species and those kinds of things. So I’m not going to go too deep into mitochondria. But what I will say is that the longevity movement today is really looking at mitochondria support as a way to slow down the aging process.
Sam Berne (25:27.656)
All right. So when we talk about essential oils, we talk about how often we use them and we can also talk about the synergistic relationship. If we use more than one essential oil, you know, I remember when I was researching what are the best essential oils for the eyes and I’m going to give you that answer today. There was a chemical reaction that I used in measuring people with my GDV camera.
doing subjective questionnaires with people and really coming up with a great combination that works synergistically because the essential oils have a very complicated chemical makeup. I mean, they’re naturally made, but it’s a it’s a really interesting situation. And then last is vision and brain pathways connection. So
Knowing that the eyes originate from the brain and understanding that we’re not just working with the eyes here. We’re working with the brain. We’re working with development and there it is. This is how we we go for it. So I’m going to stop here because I want to tell a little a little story and in this story. It has a lot of significance because it really relates quite a bit.
to our focus today. So there was a group of pharmaceutical scientists. They worked for a big pharmaceutical company and they have been observing these Amazon shamans.
And they decided that they wanted to make a trip to the Amazon and they wanted to talk to these shamans about why their plant medicines were working so well in healing all these chronic conditions. So they were able to arrange a trip. They went down to the Amazon and they had a three-day meeting with these Amazon healers.
Sam Berne (27:46.765)
And during the three days, you know, the scientists asked a lot of questions about, know, the chemical makeup, the, you know, how they created the the potions and so on and so forth. And the the Amazon shamans took them out into the forest showed him the plants and you know, a good time was had by all. So the pharmaceutical
Scientists were instructed by the CEO to pay these Amazon shamans $1 million for the formula. And so the Amazon shamans got together. had a council and they said, okay, you pay us a million dollars and we’ll give you the formulation. And so they had the transaction and they went back up to, you know, their laboratory in New Jersey where they
where they lived and worked and researched and this was one of the top three pharmaceutical companies in the in the United States billions of dollars. And so they thought they got this, you know, for a steal because they what they were going to do is they were going to take the formulation and they were going to make up all these, you know, drugs around it. And then they were going to distribute and disseminate to the consumer.
So took them about six months. They went through their research and development and they released the the drugs. And of course, there was a lot of marketing behind this and you know, they basically were promising the same things that they had heard from the Amazon shamans in terms of healing all these different conditions and they were charging so much money for these drugs. So big marketing.
People bought them and guess what? Nothing happened. There was a total flop total flop with the pharmaceutical companies and the Amazon shamans never revealed this. But what they what they said was that it wasn’t the formulation that created the healing. It was the relationship that the Amazon shamans had with the plants that created the healing.
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And this is a very important teaching right here that you know, I can recommend the fanciest protocol in plant medicine. But if you have no relationship or communication with nature with the plants themselves, then probably not much is going to happen. And I’ve seen this over and over again. And what’s really interesting about drugs and I’m going to talk a little bit about
pharmaceutical drugs as we get back into the.
presentation is that those are synthetically made. They’re chemically and synthetically made. They are not natural and anything that you take synthetically is going to have potentially side effects that the body is going to reject. And when we talk about the field, we talk about the energy field and in the energy field when we start taking a lot of drugs that energy field vibrates at a much lower
Frequency when we work directly with plants, whether it’s herbs, essential oils, flower essences, you name it doesn’t matter. They’re all accurate and valid. Homeopathy is another one that I’m a strong believer in when we work with those plant-based medicines. We are working at a much higher vibratory rate and those vibrations meet our vibrations.
And that’s what what heals the disharmony because pharmaceuticals treat symptoms plant plant medicine creates more balance and harmony. And one of the things that I’m working really hard at with my students and my patients right now is to get them out of the fix it model and that’s very hard for people and I’m turning people away. I’m not working with certain types of people anymore because I’m not doing fix it work.
Sam Berne (32:18.325)
You know, I’ve got this give me that it’s an you know, it’s very a very linear way of doing it and my my focus and my teaching is about saying what we want to do is give you something that creates more balance and harmony and there’s a word we use called adaptogenic and if I give lavender oil to 10 people, they might have to 10 different responses to it.
Based on their body chemistry, their lifestyle, their nutrition, their genetic makeup and on and on. So it’s very important that if you start really using these deeply that you even if you take a walk in nature, even if you acknowledge nature, you know, and some of my more advanced in-person retreats, we actually do some journaling around relating to the plants.
Whether it’s a flower or a tree, you know, a grass doesn’t matter because in terms of essential oils, we can get we can get essential oils from all the different plant parts. So that’s a that’s a little bit about
The post The Science and Soul of Aromatherapy first appeared on Dr. Sam Berne - Holistic Eye Care.
The post The Science and Soul of Aromatherapy appeared first on Dr. Sam Berne - Holistic Eye Care.