Welcome to Where Science Meets Self -Care with Ida Fanelli. With over 30 years in beauty and wellness and a background in medical science, Ida blends clinical knowledge with holistic care. Each week, she and her guests share insights to help you achieve healthier skin, balanced energy, and empowered self -care. Now, here's your host, Ida Finelli. Hello, everyone. I'm excited to say that I have Kimberly Linnert here today. She is a pioneer in behavioral optometry.
While she began her education as a traditional optometrist, her journey soon led her beyond just glasses and eye charts into the deeper layers of vision where the eyes, brain, and body work together in profound and often surprising ways. Her education spans a broad spectrum from traditional optometry and brain rehabilitation to microcurrent therapy, neurolinguistic programming, Reiki, emotional healing, and neuroplasty -based intelligence training. From all this knowledge, she formed
the Optic Brain Fit Foundation. This world -class therapy combines traditional vision therapy with brain and movement integration for life -changing results. She's also the author of Visualizing Happiness in Every Area of Your Life, a beautifully accessible guide that merges sensory awareness with practical goal setting, offering readers an experimental path towards greater clarity, joy, and purpose. On a personal note, Kimberly raised three children as a single mother and
is now a proud grandmother. She finds joy in connecting with people, doing CrossFit and yoga, creating art and being near water, the beach, a lake, a pool, or anywhere nature calls. Welcome, Kimberly. Let's start with your journey. How did you first get into optometry and what led you to the behavioral aspect of this work? All right. Well, thank you, first of all, for having me on your show. I love it. Thank you for being
here. You have. So, yeah, when you're growing up and people say, what is it you want to do when you grow, you know, when you get older? And I thought, well, I had an aunt who was a doctor and I said, I want to be a doctor like her because I admired her. And then I realized when I got to high school and I had to do biology. you know, using pigs and dissecting and everything, I decided that blood was not for me. And so I looked to see what thing I could do to help people
that didn't involve a lot of blood. And about that same time, I was trying contact lenses for the first time. And I'm like, oh, this doctor helps people. And he doesn't have to deal with blood. So I'm like, that would be a good profession. So that's how I chose optometry itself. And optometry is a very left brained type of calling as far as just doing the science of everything. And I'm very right brained in that I'm very artistic.
I see that. And I also love. working with people so when I got into optometry school I did a rotation in the vision therapy clinic where I worked with a young boy I'll just call him Darren and he was a nine -year -old when he came in he was very shy looking down but very friendly you know sweet kid but very shy and you could tell he kind of lacked confidence and so I started working with him doing these vision eye exercises and after about four or five weeks he'd come in and
his Head was up. He was happy. He was like smiling. Hey, how are you? And I'm like, Darren, because I'm new, so I'm just doing what I was taught, right? So I said, Darren, has anything changed since I've been working with you these last few weeks? He's like, yes. I said, well, what is it? He said, well, I don't feel stupid anymore. I said, what? You don't feel stupid anymore. I said, what do you mean by that? He said, well,
in the past. I couldn't read. And so when I was asked to read aloud in class, everyone would laugh at me. But now I can read and nobody laughs at me. And I'm just like, oh, that just hit my heart. And I'm like, oh, if I could just do this over and over, help people have the skills they need to have that confidence, have that self -love, the feeling like they can do things again. I'm like, that would be fulfilling enough for me for a whole life. That's what I did. I went
into what's called behavioral optometry. And that's where we have therapy centers and we kind of train the eyes and the brain to work together as a team. And then as I was doing more and more work there, I realized I was doing more brain work than vision. So it flipped from... 80 % vision, 20 % brain to 80 % brain work, 20 % vision. And then I realized as I added movement to it, that would give me sustainable results where they would really stick because the body has
memory from movement. We also create new brain pathways when we move. And so that's where the optic brain fit came in. As the years went on, I was just developing this new technology. Wow. It's so nice when you get feedback from people and then it inspires you to go on. You've been called a mind -body -soul whisperer. That's such a powerful phrase. How did your work evolve to
blend holistic and scientific approaches? Yeah, so about the same time I was learning vision therapy and I was being mentored by Dr. David Cook, who is... one of the most famous vision therapy doctors in the world at this point. In fact, he just got a very prestigious award a couple months ago, like the highest award you
can get in behavioral optometry. As I was learning from him, my children were very small, and my middle child had a nose that kept running and running, and no matter what we did, she walked around and it was horrible. She had this runny nose and I didn't know what to do. And the regular doctors weren't helping us. And so somebody said, well, take her to this doctor who does naturopathy. He's a naturopathic doctor. I'm like, okay. So
I took her there. He said, well, first of all, she needs to stop eating cheese because she's allergic to dairy. And then he gave us some homeopathics and she got better. I'm like, oh, there's something to this. So then as I evolved, I integrated more and more natural medicine into it, learning energetic medicine, homeopathy, herbs, different supplements.
So because when I work with people, I need to look at their nutrition as well as their mental health, as well as their emotional health, as well as just even their family structure and what's happening at home. Because if you're working with someone in a therapy center, but things at home are not positive for that person and they're going home and they're being put down or things aren't happening well, then your gains
are going to keep falling apart. You're going to say, well, this person gets better and then gets worse and then gets better and then gets worse. So you have to look at everything when it comes to the person to create a customized program to help them get to the goal they want.
Yeah, so for those... who are new to this space can you explain to them what exactly optic brain fit is and how does it differ from traditional vision therapy traditional vision therapy we're using a lot of lenses and prisms and doing a lot of focusing and making just the eyes work a lot and getting the eyes to coordinate together as a team eye movements things like that but the optic brain fit a large portion of it You are moving your eyes and doing certain tasks
with your eyes, but it's more of the body integrated for most of the work. It puts in a lot more movement. The eyes are deeply connected to the brain, and some holistic practices even explore how eye patterns reflect systemic health. Regardless of the modality, there's no denying vision's influence on emotion, hormone balance, and motor coordination. Why do you think vision is a powerful yet often overlooked part of brain and body performance?
I think part of the reasons anything is overlooked is that most traditional, I guess, Western medicine doctors are just treating parts. They're treating parts. You go to the ear, nose, and throat doctor, he's treating your ears. He's not looking at all of you. oh, why does this person have an earache? Well, if you're just treating the ear locally, what if they have an infection in their whole body, but you don't know it because you're not checking everything? So I think that's one
of the reasons. And behavioral optometrists in general are going to look at the whole body. We're going to look how everything works. Many unconsciously move their neck instead of using their eyes to track movement, weakening the muscles over time. Does over -relying on head or neck movement rather than accurate eye tracking impair visual performance or disrupt brain integration? And how might this habit impact posture coordination or emotional regulation? That's a really good
question. So it's really important that your eyes and your head move independently. Now, if you're going to go walk in a direction to the right, you definitely want to turn your body, turn your head and turn your eyes going in that direction. But you also want to have the ability to turn your head to the right and turn your eyes to the left because when they work together,
it's very inefficient. Even a small eight or nine -year -old, if they're reading and they're, looking like a chicken pecking when they're reading, that's very inefficient. And their reading comprehension and reading speed will go down significantly. And they'll just be considered a slow reader or have difficulty with reading. Yeah. My husband had an accident that caused damage to his peripheral vision. How might that affect his navigation, perception, or emotional life experience? And
what... One surprising thing about the vision system you wish more people knew? That's a two -part question. Okay. The first part is, you know, we have central and peripheral vision. Our central vision is for identifying, clarifying things, focusing. Our peripheral vision is for balance and for navigating. So if he had something that was affecting his peripheral vision, first of all, It's not as safe for him in the environment because he's not noticing what's around him.
So he could easily either fall over because of balance or run into things. People who have had injuries and say, like, I keep running into the side of the door. Especially those doors where it's all glass. And they really are looking at the door and they think they see where the door is, but because they have what we call neglect on that side. they don't see it and they run right into it. So it's really important that you use your central and your peripheral vision
together. And for lots of reasons, one for navigating, two, it just increases your ability to think, to make decisions, to have certainty in life, to have confidence in life. There's so many things attached to that. Most of us go around using just our central vision. Why? Because we're in front of screens all the time. But it's very important that you open up and use everything.
And then the second part of the question, there's lots of things that I wish people knew about the vision, but just looking at just the physical health of the eyes. The eyes are the endpoint for everything. So if your body is sick, these are the endpoints. If you have diabetes, you could get bleeding in your eye. If you have thyroid issues, you can have problems with your eye. If you have high blood pressure problems, you're
going to have problems with your eyes. So it's really important to keep care of this part of your body, the whole body. And what's important is one, breathing, which sounds funny, but we need to breathe and get good oxygen and breathe well. We need to move to keep everything circulating
the way it should. And then when it comes to foods, the most important thing for eyes, is green i tell people green is good so you want to eat green spinach and collard greens and turnip greens and broccoli the darker green the better other things that are good of course carrots are famous for that there's a good for night vision some other things and then even your tomatoes and your yellow peppers your yellow and orange vegetables are very very important for eyes what
is damaging to eyes in the physical realm is anything with chemicals so aspartame and eat things out of the frozen section and or in the canned section And it has those chemicals that are very damaging to the retina. Wow. I never thought about it that way. We take astaxanthin every day. We heard it was good for the eyes too. So I'm sure you're big on that as well.
Okay. I'm curious. Can trauma or chronic stress manifest in the visual system and how might visual therapy support emotional or even spiritual healing? Yes. So first of all, just looking at the emotions. Regardless of how your vision is, whether you wear glasses or contacts or not, how well you see or not, when we're tired, sick, or upset, our vision doesn't work as well. It gets blurrier.
We don't notice as much things. Sometimes we get tunnel vision, or we just don't feel good, or even things get kind of fuzzy in our world, and that's from the stress. Even after doing vision therapy, during those situations, tired, sick, or upset, Like, for example, if there's a person that we worked with and their eye was one eye pointing over here and one eye pointing straight, and we got them so that their eyes look straight all the time, it's called strabismus.
When they're tired, sick, or upset, sometimes their eye will still go out because they don't have any resources left, if you will. But most of the time, they're going to control the eyes and look straight. But any person under stress, your vision is not going to be as good. Definitely. You also lead retreats. Can you share more about what those experiences offer and how they differ
from your one -on -one work? Yes, I prefer very small groups, 8 to 12 at the most, because I like to go very deep with people because retreats are when you take someone out of their regular environment and you put them in this little safe place away from their regular life. And that's when you can really do deep work. So I'll work with them in a group, but then I'll also work
with them one -on -one. And usually people are coming because they're in a transition period or they're making decisions that are not beneficial for themselves. And so we need to kind of clear some of those blind spots, some of those things, filters that are causing them to make decisions that aren't good or keeping them from making decisions that are beneficial for them. Do you see some exciting results from doing that? I
love doing it. A lot of people, they've had emotional things or trauma in their life, and they might have been going, and this is not to put down any other profession, but they've been going to a counselor or a psychologist or psychiatrist for years for the same traumatic event and talking about the same traumatic event over and over for years. And guess what? They still are feeling the trauma. And it was like, okay, something's
wrong. The way I work with people, we don't make them go back into the trauma and live it again or talk about it or anything. We just look from kind of a distant place, almost like a third person place, if you will. I use the example of... You're in a church in the balcony and you can see the front and you can see the people in the bottom and you're up here and the events happening down on the stage, but you're up here. So you're like looking down at it. So it's a
way they can distance themselves from it. They can emotionally distance themselves from it and then just wipe it out. And it's like, okay, let's take this away as if it had never happened. At least it's not going to have any more charge over me. Oh, great. You blend science, healing, emotional wellness, and spiritual insight into your client's work. Do you follow a structure or process when guiding someone through a transformation? Yes, I have a framework, but it depends on the
person I'm working with. So I will go deeply into the case history, if you will. Being a doctor, I call it a case history. I'm going deeply into, okay, where are you at right now? What's the outcome you want? From that point, I choose which tools to use because I told someone this once and they thought it was kind of funny, but I tell people, I have a shed full of tools in the back. I have a lot of tools because I had to learn so many different things because of what
I did. So I see what's there. I see where you want to go. And then I pull out the... appropriate tools oh great personalize it for them then yes okay do you have daily practices to help with your own vision yes yes and there's like I'm just wondering you had trouble with your eyes have your own eyes improved oh definitely so this is a long time story so about 30 years ago I actually went through a vision therapy treatment myself and also did some things on my own as
far as treating my vision. Not everybody knows what the numbers are, but I was nearsighted. My numbers were minus 3 .00. So I tell people that's in diopters. So diopters are in dollars and quarters like money. So it was a minus 3 in the right and a minus 3 .00 in the left. That doesn't sound good. No, I was very nearsighted. I have trouble driving at night. I was very nearsighted. Also, when I was tired, I would see two yellow lines in the road. I would get some double vision
sometimes too. And glasses didn't help you with that? No, no. It helped me clear my vision, the glasses, but it didn't get rid of the double vision. Okay. I did the vision therapy on myself. And now... My prescription is a minus 1 .25, so it was $3, but now it's $1 .25 and $1, 1 .00. And you don't see the double lines now? I don't see the double lines now, and it's been that same prescription for 30 years. That's great, you know, because usually when you get older,
your eyes get worse. Right, and I'm way over 40, and I need nothing for reading. which is uncommon. I'm way past 40 and I need nothing for reading. So like you're doing maintenance on yourself still is what you're saying. I think at this point I am not doing a daily like vision therapy exercises, but there's practices that I've implemented that I automatically do. So for example, if I'm driving and I see it, look at how did it assign and it looks a little bit
fuzzy. I know to blink and wink my eye a certain way, like blink it open fast, and it's going to clear it because I've practiced it so much that it automatically becomes clear. Oh, great. Well, that's so exciting to hear that. Same thing as when I walk outside, you know, talking about the central peripheral vision, so many people walk around with their blinders on or the people who have attention issues, it's because they're using their peripheral and they're not focused
and they just. run after everything or whatever, they can't stay focused. But I've already practiced that when I go freshly into a bigger place, it's easier to expand then, that I just automatically use my central peripheral vision together. But it's because when I was practicing it, I practiced it till it was automatic. So now the things I'm doing are automatic. And that's why my vision is staying stable and good. That's wonderful
to hear that. It's inspiring. Do you ever use any of your devices that you have to help it or is it just exercises? Well, there's different things you can use because when you say devices, that just opens up a can of worms. There's so many things. So one of the things that I didn't use when I first started out doing the therapy on myself, but I incorporated it later, was syntonic
light therapy. So using certain frequencies of light can be very healing, not just for vision itself, but for emotions, for the physical body. So different colors. heal different things or at least balance the body depending on what you need. So that's one thing. And there's a microcurrent you can use. The microcurrent you have, you know, you're actually putting things on the body. This one, you just hold these electrodes in your hand and it circulates through the body. And so you
can self -do it. In other words, you don't have to have another person do it. You can just hold them, and then the microcurrent machine can be programmed. So mine is really just programmed for reducing stress. Like we talked about, if you have high stress, you're not going to see well. So I have mine programmed for just stress relief, but that can be programmed for all the different layers in the back of the eye and everything. They're all separate frequencies. That's exciting
to hear. Yeah, I know I've watched a few YouTube videos on those devices, but nobody up here does it. Okay, so you also do keynote speaking. What message do you most love sharing from the stage? Well, let me put it this way. My mission in life, what I think my purpose is, because I'm helping other people find their purpose, right? So my purpose is to help people feel loved, important, and needed. I wrote this book, Visualizing Happiness,
and every... area of your life. And it's kind of like a step by step guide to finding out who you are, what you like, what's important, and then putting it on your calendar and actually making it happen. So this is one way I can help people find their purpose or what they're supposed
to be doing right now. I do it through my podcast by having all sorts of different people on there doing different things to spark people's curiosity and creativity about what they might like to do by just having different people on there. And then when I speak to people, I like to give them First of all, the message that you are enough, you're important, and give them tools to increase their confidence, increase their feeling like,
hey, they can do everything. And then that therapy part of me, especially if I'm working more with people independently, if there's something they want to master, everything has basic steps. And I don't have to be a master of golf to work with a golfer. I just teach them the basic steps of mastering something to help them get to their goal. So I like to speak about finding your purpose, high performance, and just being the best version of yourself. Well, that's important because sometimes
people can't see it for themselves. You know, they need to be guided. Okay, so you talked about your book, Visualizing Happiness in Every Area of Your Life, and what inspired you to write it, and why should someone pick it up? Thank you for asking that. It's a while ago now. I had a colleague who was a neurochiropractor that sometimes when I had really hard cases, I would enlist him and say, hey, I need help with this person because they have so much going on. And
he was brilliant. I mean, when he was speaking and he spoke fast, half the time I couldn't keep up with him. And I was trained in brain stuff, but he was like super trained in it and just knew so much. And one day, one of our patients that we shared came in. And they said, do you know that he died a couple weeks ago? I was like, what? And he was in his late 50s. And I thought to myself. He died with all the brilliance inside him. He hadn't written a book. He hadn't written
it down. And all his experience, all his information that he found or that he researched or that he learned was gone now. just gone because he wasn't here anymore. And I'm like, I don't want that to happen to me. I want to find a way to share my experience, my knowledge that I've learned over these, the time is 20 something years, and share it with people. When I leave this earth, I want to leave empty. I don't want to leave
with all my knowledge inside me. So I asked somebody, well, what do you do to disseminate information to a lot of people? And they said, well, You write a book and you become a speaker. So that's what I did. And I thought about what would I want to write a book about? Because my background is about really living the best life and mastering and becoming your best self. I thought, what better than finding happiness in every area of
your life? So that's why I wrote the book. The reason someone might want to pick up this book is. It's a step -by -step guide to creating a life you love. So a lot of research on happiness, like how to be happy. And then at the end of every chapter, I have questions. So like at the end of the chapter says, who am I? Then there's questions you can answer. And you want to write down these questions or type them, whatever your preference is. But you want to write them down
as you go through the book. So it's kind of like a book with information, but a workbook. And as you write down the answers, you get to know yourself a little bit better. And then at the end of the book, you put it all together by actually putting it on your calendar. What is it I like? What's important to me? Who do I want to spend time with? What are my values? And then we put
it all together actually on a calendar. And I tell people, you should kind of assess yourself about every quarter because things change and what's important to you during that season might be different. So that's one reason. Another reason is there's stories from different people, just like on my podcast, stories from different people about how they found happiness. So that's also in the book. The other thing is, you see, it's a nice little book. I'm a big time reader, but
I like little books that are easy to read. So it's very easy to read. See, there's a lot of white space. And it's one that you can go through and actually complete it. Because, you know, what's the sense of a book if you read it and don't remember it or you never complete it? So it's easy. I tell people even a 9, 10, 11 -year -old kid could read this and get something out of it. You've designed it for all ages is what you're saying. Yeah. Well, that's good to know.
It's not too complicated then. Right, right. And that's the whole idea of it. It's not like a school assignment. It's like, oh, I'm spending this few minutes to read this one chapter and then answer the questions to learn about me. Because how do we know what we want if we don't know ourselves? So it's to help you get to know yourself. Yeah, well, that's great. And you're
also writing another book, right? Actually, I'm doing the second edition of this one right now, so I'm just adding to it because there's some things after I had written this, and this one took me a while because it was my first real book, if you will. It took me a while and I kept changing and morphing it. But there's more things I want to add to the book. So I'm actually going to re -release the second edition of it. So it'll still be in that same format with the workbook
and everything. It's just there's some additional things I want to add to it. So if somebody bought the second book, does that mean they don't have to have the first book is what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's just, yeah, we all learn and think, oh, I should have put this in. I should have put that in. So your podcast, The Incredible Life, must be very inspiring for you to meet all these different people. And what highlights do you have from doing that show? Do you have
any? Yes. So first of all, deeply in my heart, I feel like. Every single person on the planet is here for a reason, for a purpose. And some people are going to do things that everyone sees, but everybody has a purpose. Even the grandmother who is now 88 in a wheelchair, she still has a purpose. Her purpose might be to hug her grandkids. So we all have a reason for being here. As long as we're breathing, we're here, we have a reason
to be here. And sometimes... Our purpose at one season is different than a purpose at another season. And so I love having people from all different walks of life on the podcast. One, because I think everyone's story is valuable. You don't have to be a famous person or be in the spotlight all the time. I think of a mom of five came on and said, you know, this is how I be a good mom. That's valuable. So I think
everyone has something to share. And it's really important that you not only find your purpose and do it and master it and be the best you can at what you're supposed to be doing here, but also that you share your gifts with people. Because what's the point? If you don't share your gifts, there's a hole. We all lose. The rest of society loses when someone doesn't share their gift.
Oh, definitely. learns from their life experiences you don't share what you've learned it's just like someone when they start out they're starting from zero with nobody to learn from yeah so that's great how can people connect with you you can connect with me on Facebook or on LinkedIn I also have a link tree which has all my links on it I don't have a I'll put it at the end your link tree yeah But the first one, if you actually wanted to connect with me, the first one is a
15 -minute connection call. So you can always sign up for that and we'll have a conversation. Other than that, my links are just all on my link tree. Anything you want to see that I'm doing, I'm a very eclectic person. Just like my book, Visualizing Happiness in Every Area of Your Life, on my link tree I have things from financial stuff to brain stuff to supplements. to, you know, vision therapy stuff. So whatever it is you're interested in. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
that's good. Yeah, because I did look at your link tree. I thought, wow, that's a good idea, I thought. And on your podcast, you also incorporate, you don't just talk to other people. You have information about optometry things, right? I mostly am interviewing other people right now. I have thought about doing that. a lot recently. I did see one. You have a YouTube video on the meibomian gland dysfunction and dry eye relief. I thought that was a good one. I did that for
my patients, actually. And one of the reasons I did that is when I have someone in the chair and they have dry eyes, and this was for a particular thing called meibomian gland dysfunction, which is a certain kind of dry eye, but there's a procedure that I have them go through. And there's so many people where I live in Georgia and United States that have dry eye because of allergies or being on computers and things like that, that I tell people this procedure all day long when I'm seeing
patients. And a lot of times they forget or whatever. So what I do is I go through it briefly with them in the room, but then I give them the video. That saves me chair time. That gives them a video that they can watch it again and again if they need to. Yeah. So that's the reason for that. It's not part of the podcast. I just put it up to help my patients or anybody who has dry eyes. I thought it was quite informative. Is there
anything else you want to say? Like you want to share and you can just be open with what you want to say. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for letting me be on the podcast today. And we met because you are a very famous Brains Magazine contributor. Amazing articles that you write. And I just started as a Brains Magazine contributor. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no, no. Yeah, I've read some of yours too. And that's how I even contacted you. I'm like, I have to have her on my podcast.
Well, thank you. I enjoy, like you, that's my way of leaving my legacy is giving this information. Thank you for being so kind. I really enjoyed talking to Kimberly and it was nice that we could share this time together. And hopefully we'll get to talk another day. That would be great. Thank you so much, Ida. Thank you for tuning in to Where Science Meets Self -Care with Ida Fennelly. Ida bridges clinical science with holistic wisdom, guiding you toward radiant skin, balanced
energy, and lasting well-being. Don't forget to subscribe, share the show, and join us next time for more inspiration and practical tools to help you live beautifully inside and out. To connect with Ida, visit linktr.ee/idafanelli. Until then, take good care of yourself. And remember, self-care is where science and soul meet.