"The Optometrist Yoga Teacher: Treating Dry Eye From the Inside Out"

Episode: The Optometrist Yoga Teacher — Treating Dry Eye From the Inside OutIn this episode, Garry sits down with Sal, an optometrist and yoga teacher based in Bristol who's about to open her own practice built around a radical idea: that eye health and mental wellbeing are inseparable.Sal has spent 11 years as an optometrist and nine as a yoga teacher, running both careers side by side — and she's now merging them into one holistic model of care. As she puts it, she's "obsessed by eyes" and "obsessed by yoga," and believes the two disciplines "go really well together."Her core philosophy challenges how the profession typically treats dry eye. Rather than only addressing symptoms, she wants to look at root causes: "think about what is the underlying cause," she says, drawing a parallel to her own experience with weight loss, where she learned to treat "the ultimate cause, not the proximate cause."She walks through the biochemistry behind her approach — how stress keeps the nervous system "in fight or flight constantly," spiking cortisol and reducing tear production, which in turn "creates inflammation" at the front of the eye. Her list of who's most affected is blunt and wide-ranging: "menopausal women," people newly diagnosed with glaucoma, anyone "working for 15 hours in front of a screen." Her conclusion: "every patient that has dry eye has an element of stress in their life for some reason or another."The conversation also covers her forthcoming Bristol practice on White Ladies Road, Clifton — three months from launch, complete with a dedicated space for yoga and breathwork sessions for patients. She's candid about the pressure of starting from scratch rather than acquiring an existing practice: "I have a dream, I have a vision. The location is right, I have everything I need."The episode closes with something you won't hear on most business podcasts: a live guided breathing exercise, which Sal leads Garry and listeners through in real time — heart hand, belly hand, and all.A genuinely different kind of Optician Show conversation — equal parts clinical, spiritual, and practical for anyone thinking about opening a practice of their own