CFT and vision
what does fascia have to do with it?
Remember when I talked about CFT? That’s craniosacral fascial therapy. It’s the therapy that alleviated my neck pain when literally nothing else on earth could. It was the most woo-woo thing I’d ever done until I took the training to become a craniosacral fascial therapist and began to understand how it works. It’s my own, personal miracle cure.
I wrote a whole explanation of it here, and if you read today’s essay and think I’m crazy, go back and read that one to learn how and why it works. You can also find good information on the CFT website.
The TL;DR version of how I wound up in CFT is that I have had neck pain for many years, predominantly on the right side, as a result of many traumas over my lifetime. I tried all the things to get relief—chiropractic adjustments, massage, cupping, dry needling, accupuncture, physical therapy, even a steroid injection in my spine—and got none until I had CFT twice a month for a year. Now I have no neck pain and I am a firm believer in the woo.
What we know about fascia is that it is a tough web that runs throughout the body: in and around every muscle, every organ, every cell. There is nothing in the body that is not connected by fascia, and fascia is lubricated by the flow of cerebrospinal fluid. When there is any kind of trauma—physical, emotional, psychological—the body reacts by clenching—tightening up—and that includes the fascia. Where fascia is tight, cerebrospinal fluid flow is restricted, making the fascia dry and less moveable, like the rusty, creaking joints in the Tin Man. Muscles can be relaxed, at least temporarily, with massage, but fascia? It requires a different modality to release its hold and get the fluid flowing again.
CFT is a hands-on therapy, but not in the way massage is. You don’t manipulate fascia into relaxing. You give it a signal of safety and allow it to release. You don’t make it loosen up; you let it.
I see you rolling your eyes and hear you heavy sighing, but in case you don’t understand how healing from trauma (any kind) works, the first ingredient must be a felt sense of safety. If your body doesn’t feel safe, it will remain in a clenched physiology. There will be no releasing of anything. You can’t talk or fool your body into feeling safe. It knows when it’s safe and that’s all there is to it.
If you go to psychotherapy, you must feel safe with your counselor. If you go to massage therapy, you must feel safe with your masseuse or masseur. Same with CFT. I am so comfortable with my CFT therapist that sometimes I fall asleep on the table.
In CFT, the therapist begins by putting her hands behind your head, fingers at the edge of your occiput (the base of your skull just above your neck), and just sits there. She may move one hand (or both) to different places to see if she feels tension that needs to be released, and her hands’ presence in those places signal to the body that it’s okay to relax, to let go. Very often when I am being worked on, my stomach gurgles. That’s a sign that fascia in my abdomen is relaxing and stuff is now freely moving around. It truly is all connected.
Anyway, here’s what I learned this week that blew my mind.
I began having CFT twice a month for a year, starting in August 2024. My neck pain was gone after maybe 7 or 8 months, but I kept going because my body was responding well to it and I wanted that to continue. Then last August (2025, a year after starting CFT), I noticed that I was squinting. It wasn’t like I was squinting because I couldn’t see; it was more of an involuntary thing. My face muscles were just doing it on their own. Over the next few months it got worse and worse and by December it was driving me crazy. Many times during the day I would take my glasses off and put my hands on my eyes and cheekbones to make them stop squinching (a technical term). Since I have a family history of glaucoma and cataracts, I decided it was time for a visit to the eye doctor. My insurance only pays for an eye exam every two years and at this point it had only been one year, but I thought it was worth paying for out of pocket to make sure nothing was wrong with my eyes.
At my appointment, he did a full eye exam complete with dilation and all the stuff they look for. He pronounced my eyes perfectly healthy and said the squinting was probably blepharospasm, aka eyelid twitching, possibly caused by stress.
That didn’t sit right with me and the squinting did not get any better despite all of my efforts to regulate my nervous system and deal with stress in healthy ways. So yesterday I went back and said I just wanted a refraction (where they put the goggle thing in front of your face and change lenses, asking you which is better, one or two, three or four), which he did not do at the previous appointment because the problem appeared (to him) to be medical rather than vision-related.
So I had a refraction. Here’s my old prescription (from December 2024):
Yes, the astigmatism in my right eye is pretty severe. It has been my entire life.
And here’s my new prescription (February 2026, 14 months, one year of CFT, later):
Do you see the change in sphere and cylinder in my right eye? The sphere changed from .75 to .25, and cylinder changed from -6.75 to -6.00. In case you’re not good at math, that’s an 11% improvement in my vision in just over a year, unheard of in a 64-year-old with severe astigmatism. AI tells me that the top limit for correction in nearsighted individuals is -6.00, and I was beyond that. No wonder my optician had so much trouble making glasses that worked for me.
I was squinting because my eyes were over-corrected.
The only thing I did consistently during that time was CFT.
Notice my left eye did not change at all. Do you wonder why?
It’s because the tension in my neck muscles and fascia has always been on the right side, and the tension extended up into the right side of my head and face, which includes the eyes and all the soft tissues that controlled them. When the fascia in my neck was finally released, the fascia in my eyes followed and my vision improved.
Of course I had to go looking for information on this and was unable to find much other than a few anecdotal instances. Here is the best explanation I found. Granted, this info was written by the person who developed CFT, Dr. Barry Gillespie. But it makes perfect sense to me, and now I have seen the results with my own eyes (ha) and neck. Maybe we will hear more stories like this as CFT becomes more mainstream and we all start paying attention to what our bodies need.
CFT is not a quick fix. I was committed to have the therapy twice a month for more than a year, but in one year’s time, my vision improved enough that I needed a lower prescription. If you try this, please let know (a year from now) if you get the same results!
In the meantime, I will enjoy getting new glasses.