Today we’d like to introduce you to Claudia Muehlenweg.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Claudia. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
From an early age, I had trouble seeing well and using my eyes together; my right eye kept turning in. The decision was made for me to get glasses before I even turned three.
And even though they helped me see better, they created a lot of pain, especially once I started school. I got teased and bullied. None of the cool kids wanted to play with me. Glasses were not hip back then.
Years later, I joined a handball team. I wasn’t allowed to wear the glasses during practice for safety reasons. As my skills and confidence grew, my eyesight improved and after a few years of playing I was able to ditch the glasses.
I had this taste of freedom, of feeling attractive and successful… but it was short lived.
During my rocky marriage, my eyesight declined again and I found myself back in glasses. I eventually divorced and lived the life of a single mom, sleep deprived and constantly stressed.
Shortly after my 40th birthday, I decided to take a friend up on an invite to a party in Silverlake. Everybody at the party was good-looking and sexy.
I didn’t know any of the guests and felt incredibly disconnected. After an hour I decided to drive back home to Mar Vista.
It was a moonless night. I got lost in a sketchy part of DTLA and had to pull out the Thomas guide; no Google maps back then. The print was so tiny I could barely read anything.
Somehow, I made it home. When I took my glasses off, everything was super blurry, much more than normally.
After a few minutes of crying, I had an epiphany:
My emotional well-being was related to my visual well-being. When I was confused and insecure about where I was and how I fit into the world, my vision was blurry. When I was happy, successful and felt connected to others, my vision was clear.
A few weeks later my yoga teacher told me she’ll be doing a Natural Vision Improvement Teacher Training. I had never heard of that but was immediately interested.
When she came back to LA, I worked with her 1:1. My vision got better, until I was eventually able to ditch my glasses for good.
I felt joy again. I felt attractive and sexy. Being over 40 didn’t feel like being over the hill anymore. And my kids were happier too!
I immersed myself in the study of eyesight. The more I learned, the more fascinated I became with vision, realizing it goes well beyond the eyeball.
From the moment I helped my very first client during my own training at the College of Vision Education in London, I knew this was what I was born to do. Since then I have helped many people improve their eyesight naturally and feel better overall. I am humbled and grateful for this opportunity to improve lives.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I had moved back to my hometown Hamburg in Germany during the time of my vision teacher training in London. Germany has a great health care system but most holistic and natural approaches are not paid for by insurance, and natural eyesight improvement is one of them.
Having lived in LA for fourteen years before moving back, I had forgotten how unwilling people in Germany were when it came to investing into their health out-of-pocket. In the end all of this wasn’t a big problem since I decided to move back to LA about a year after my training (great weather and the friendliness of Angelenos being two of the many reasons).
The most exhilarating challenge is the one I am in right now. I have been teaching only privates for the last eight years. While I love working with clients 1:1 and seeing their success in person, it’s been frustrating to only being able to help so few people who want better eyesight. There is only so many hours in the day to work with people privately.
That’s why I am currently creating an online course that will launch next year. I am super excited about course and have already a large number of interested people on board. But it’s been humbling to realize how much I need to learn, despite my background as an art director in advertising. From click funnels to marketing, webinars and list segmentation, it’s a whole new game!
Holistic Vision – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Holistic Vision is a new company name for my eight-year-old natural vision improvement coaching business BatesVision. While natural vision improvement is based on the Bates Method, my approach is truly holistic. I am using a variety of modalities to help my clients get results and wanted that reflected in the name.
Eyesight is about 90% brain and only 10% eyeball. Anything from habits to emotions effect one’s vision. Every client shows up with a different challenge, not just in terms of their eyesight, but in terms of what got them there and what approach will be most helpful for them. It depends on a myriad of factors such as lifestyle, profession, diet, screen use, stress levels, self-care, mental health to name just a few.
I work with people of all ages, from very young children to the elderly. Everybody can improve their vision no matter what the current eyesight “looks” like. It can be a refractive error like nearsightedness, presbyopia, astigmatism or an eye teaming issue like squint, lazy eye or double vision.
And even people with eye diseases such as cataract, glaucoma and macular degeneration will be able to see better. That doesn’t mean that everyone will be able to get back to 20/20 in the end. It depends on what level of vision you start with, how long you have worn glasses, what the exact issue is, and most importantly, how deeply you want to see better.
There is no quick fix in health, especially in eye health. Lasik is like a permanent contact lens that never be taken out and doesn’t address the cause of the blurry vision. 100% of Lasik patients end up in corrective lenses again. It can take a year, a decade or longer, but Lasik is not a permanent solution and has a ton of side effects, with dry eye symptom and halos around lights the most common. And of course, you’ll have the prescription etched onto your cornea, which is never your vision for life, but the state of clarity you were in when you got the expensive procedure done.
Glasses are not only a barrier to the windows of the soul, they also distort the image your brain receives and make vision worse over time. Who would trust a doctor who says that you have to wear a cast for a broken leg for the rest of your life? Yet most people believe eyesight can only get worse and there is nothing that can be done about it except for wearing glasses or contacts.
Any reduction in diopters will help prevent eye diseases later in life, and any improvement in eye teaming will create better depth perception which means being less prone to falls or bumping into things and being a safer driver.
And if you have a debilitating eye disease like macular degeneration — which is so common in old age especially when one has worn strong glasses that’s it’s often just called age-related macular degeneration — any improvement in your visual perception will allow you to enjoy the beauty of life better.
I am proud by the amazing results my clients achieve and the positive reception I have received in Los Angeles. Just a few weeks after I moved back in 2011, I had people booking me for sessions, without any advertising whatsoever.
I have built connections with a handful of holistic optometrists who realize that vision is much more complicated than what they learned in optometry school. The number of these doctors is growing so it’s getting easier to get reduced prescription lenses and a holistic exam for anyone who is interested in improving their eyesight but cannot just ditch the glasses.
This work is truly my passion and I wish that it will become the norm to offer this as an alternative to the “crutches” for anybody who would rather save, protect and improve their eyesight.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://myholisticvision.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/holisticvisioncoach/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/batesvision/
Image Credit:
Dorit Thies
Claudia Muehlenweg
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