Interviews

If you are interested in interviewing Dr. Battenberg, please contact her.

Suggestions for Interview Questions

Change Within, Change the World Interview Questions

What compelled you to write this book?

Two things compelled me. The first was surveying our current condition. Looking at our external world, on every front, every global issue, we’ve passed the eleventh hour and are approaching the twelfth. We are grappling with economic inequalities, mass forced migrations, climate change, cybercrimes, terrorism and child pornography to name a few. No longer can a single nation, let alone a single individual, solve any of these issues alone. Yet if we are to survive, these are the tasks of our time and of our generations. A word in current usage among younger generations is woke, increasingly used as a byword for being self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm, and striving for social and racial justice. A major premise of this book is that waking up-staying woke-entails a unique responsibility for each of us if we are to survive. Given this, I was inspired to address what we can do.

I wanted to jump in and make a difference! But I had no idea where to start or what would count. It was like trying to combat a forest fire with a kitchen fire extinguisher. It was fearful, yet I’ve never let fear hold me back. One of the things I usually do when confronted with something overwhelming is I gather information, trying to get the largest perspective for the issue. Doing this led to Part I of the book, trying to find the largest fractal of where we are in consciousness evolution. We appear to be at the culmination of an era where we will not survive unless we transform like the caterpillar into a butterfly.

And this leads to the second reason for writing the book. Much of my life has been about change—changing what seems impossible, changing deeply embedded limiting beliefs and changing physical and mental conditions, both for myself and for clients.

For me, inner change is the key to changing the external world… You’ve heard the expression, as above, so below, well, as within, so without, we project onto the external world what we have internally created. More than a self-help book, Change Within, Change the World is a clear call to do just that – change our internal projections as a way to change the external world. If we bring vestiges of the old model such as patriarchy, racism and greed, then we run the risk of putting a Band-Aid on when major surgery is needed.

I’d like to share an experience I had of making an internal change to change something happening around me. While having lunch with a friend, enjoying the warm spring sunshine out on a restaurant patio, the peaceful ambience was disturbed by a woman at a nearby table angrily spewing loud complaints about something at her work to her companion. I looked at my friend and said, “I’ll fix that.” I closed my eyes and briefly thought of every place I was holding anger or resentment, quickly forgiving, letting the emotions go. It took only a minute or so, and when I opened my eyes, I blinked in surprise. The two women were peacefully chatting. My companion was looking at me with awed disbelief, exclaiming “You’re a witch!” I had done nothing with the two women. I only thought that if that anger was projected in my external world, I must be holding anger somewhere inside myself. When I released any of my own internal anger, the external circumstance bizarrely changed!

Changing within is taking the blindfold off the habitual automatic roles we take on, our beliefs about ourselves, and the limitations we think we have. It’s about reshaping ourselves into whom we came here to be. The unconscious mind has ideas about who we are, what we believe, and what we expect to happen, and it gives these to us every day. We may change jobs or friends and still have the same issues and patterns show up. To transform our lives, we need to go into the operating system of our brains and get our unconscious minds to make the necessary adjustments that will result in our lives changing.

In writing this book, what started out as a series of articles and blogs has morphed into a fervent, persistent cry for the world. To change the external, we have to change the internal. In this way the book is about change in the midst of chaos. It’s also about hope.

What will compel people to read your book?

I believe that each of us has a larger purpose than our daily habitual routines. To fulfill this larger purpose does require a greater awareness and a higher usefulness than our ordinary lives. This book gives skills for manifesting a lifesaving, world-saving agenda—by changing within and changing the world simultaneously. It entices the reader to examine themselves – their values, beliefs, visions and strengths. It gives tools for going deep and honing these skills.

It has bite-size food for thought to tease out and expand the reader’s larger purpose. I’ve peppered it with stories, quotes, pictures and quirky and entertaining anecdotes. It is a good read for people who want to quickly get to the heart of the information without wading through a lot of words. It is geared to stimulate the reader’s own creativity.

In a time when it is common to feel powerless, my book points out places where we have power that we may have overlooked, discounted or not recognized.
Both those who have long-striven for change as well as today’s courageous young people who are frustrated by what passes for leadership are searching for ways to shift the present paradigm and its consciousness. Younger generations may uncover fresh ideas to support their own revolutionary notions. For it is they who will shape the world long after their elders have passed!

What are some of the exercises you offer your readers?

Early in the book, I suggest three guidelines for readers. One guideline is life is a point of view. Change your point of view, and you can change your life. Two, it’s all practice. Let go of needing to have things be perfect the first time—just keep practicing until you get it like you like it. And three, keep it fun. Let’s look at Guideline 1, Life Is a Point of View: change your point of view and you can change your life. Your point of view about things acts like a magnet, drawing that reality to you and in a sense manifesting it for you. For example, if you think people are generous, they will be. If you think people can’t be trusted, they won’t be. William Shakespeare said, There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Take a look at your automatic, often unconscious beliefs about how things are. Find a limiting belief about yourself you wish you didn’t have, then rewrite it to be the most powerful, positive viewpoint anyone could have. For example: • I can’t seem to ever get ahead. Rephrase: I expect to get ahead and be outrageously successful. Next example: • God lets me down. New viewpoint: God loves me and has my back. And one final belief: • People will cheat me if given a chance. New belief: People are surprisingly helpful and generous to me, even when I don’t expect it.

Experiment with this by consciously adopting a different point of view to see how the world shapes to conform to that new viewpoint. I tried this with ice cream. I was eating too much of it, and it wasn’t good for me. So, I made up the view that I didn’t like ice cream, thinking of warm, cloying ice cream melting on a sidewalk. Every time someone mentioned ice cream, I said I don’t like ice cream. If I did eat it, it tasted good and I enjoyed it. But then I said to myself that I really don’t like it. Long story short, I rarely eat ice cream and don’t ever binge on it. I taught myself to have that point of view.

What is the main message you want people to take away after reading your book?

In current times it is urgent that we move out of complacency to change our world.

We each have a larger purpose than that of our habitual daily lives. It takes deeper thought and examination to express our purpose and align our inner beliefs and values with that purpose in order to fully express it in our actions. This book is about changing within and changing the world simultaneously. I offer this book of techniques for change, some that I’ve developed and all that I’ve used on myself and on clients as my contribution to a better world.

Eye Yoga Interview Questions

1. What is Eye Yoga?

Simple eye exercises to maintain and even improve one’s vision. On the surface, at least. The Eye Yoga book quickly leads the reader into brain exercises, because the eyes are hard-wired into the brain, there is an eye-brain connection and you can actually exercise your brain as you exercise your eyes. It can make you smarter, increase your creativity, improve your vision. How you see is how you think and how you think is how you see. Because of the recent advances in Neuroscience, it’s properly understood that the brain’s neuroplasticity continues throughout life. Using eye exercises and brain exercises can have beneficial effects on your mental abilities as well as your vision.

2. How did you become interested in this?

Originally, I was going to become a vision therapist. I began doing the vision exercises in the optometrist’s office, because I was going to be working with kids. And I actually improved my own vision to the point where I passed the driver’s licence eye test, even though previously I’d needed glasses to do that.

When I increased my distance vision, it also increased my ability to see my life in a larger perspective and I changed a lot of things in my life as a result.

My sister improved her vision by changing her lifestyle and she eventually went on to become a vision educator/therapist.

What we found from vision therapy was we could do simple exercises to maintain or even improve our vision without spending a lot of money. It was just like going to gym to exercise our bodies.

3. How did you decide to write this book?

We did some more research and became convinced that for an average person with no major eye problems, these daily exercises can be very useful. It’s not a substitute for treating diseases of the eye or any major problems. It’s like going to gym for the health benefits of exercise – eye yoga gives health benefits to your eyes. We decided to write a book so that other people could get these benefits at very low cost.

4. What types of person would be interested in reading your book or in attending your workshops?

A wide variety of people can get benefit from this. Having said that, as the ‘baby boomers’ age they find that their arms get shorter or their prescriptions get stronger every time they go to the doctor and they might want a way to maintain their eyesight so they don’t have to go to bi-focals or tri-focals. It’s like going to the gym – use it or lose it.

For young people there’s the whole eye-brain connection to how to use your eyes – where to look, to learn better, to be more creative, to get in touch with your feelings more quickly, master cognitive tasks like spelling. Young people just love it – it’s like a game or a toy.

5. What would you say are the five most important benefits a person might get doing eye yoga?

Most people can maintain their current level of vision with eye yoga – that means they arrest any decline in their vision and continue to see as well as they have been doing without needed stronger glasses or a different prescription.
Many people go on to improve their vision with eye yoga. They reduce their need for glasses or even go to a lower prescription.
Regularly practising eye yoga also builds familiarity with your own brain processing and your ability to use your mental abilities.
Using the eye-brain connection to see differently stimulates a person’s creativity and can also provide insight to emotional difficulties and past trauma.
Improve cognitive performance on tasks that involve visual information, such as spelling.

6. Is this strictly for older people or would it benefit younger ones as well?

7. What is the consistent feedback you get from people doing eye yoga?

In the workshops, some are astounded that they can actually improve their vision in one workshop. Others have said, it wasn’t so much the vision improvement but how they used their learning of how their brain works that was so powerful. For example, one of the exercises in the workshop is to show people they can turn the vision on and off in one eye. It’s useful to be able to see with both eyes because you get depth perception. But since the right eye mostly processes in an analytical way and the left mostly in an emotional way, sometimes the brain will just shut off the vision and information coming from one eye or the other. Learning to do that at will gives people choice about how they process their experience – emotionally or analytically and allows them to maintain depth perception.

People who have picked up the book via amazon or a bookstore often contact us to say that it’s highly useful information

Is this something you’ve actually applied to your own life and with what results?

Many third world countries have some serious vision problems. Would this help people in those countries?

From a human interest standpoint, how was it writing the book with your sister?

Is there any condition where this would not help?

There are a lot of exercises, right? I’m curious, is there a gender difference in peoples’ ease at doing them or picking them up?

Can you explain the science behind Eye Yoga? What is the history of Eye Yoga – is it a new modality or does it borrow from ancient healing modalities?