Marianne Wiendl, Wolfgang Gillessen, Uschi Ostermeier-Sitkowski, Gisela Wesche-Nielsen and a lovely group of supporters received about 170 participants at the 21 International Holistic Vision Conference, organized by the Association for Healthy Vision - Verein für Gesundes Sehen, which took place during the first week of November in a beautiful fairy tale castle on the bank of the Lake Starnberg, in Tutzing, about 40 km south of Munich. This region is even today associated with the dream couple the Bavarian King Ludwig II and the Austrian Empress Elisabeth (Sissi). The conference focused on Eye training in the area of prevention, education and recreation, eye training and support as a therapy for people of all ages and with all kinds of eye problems up to visual impairment, as well as workplace-related eye training in companies.

This really wonderful Tutzing Academy received us with lovely rooms and excellent food, and the beautiful golden autumn colours, dark brown and red leaves, swans all about the Lake and great excitement in the air: meeting again old friends, creating new ones, a wide exchange of experiences and knowledge happened during this week. Very interesting and relevant subjects evolved and were discussed by the German speakers such as the ophthalmologist Prof. Dr. Ilse Strempel and the scientific studies on the efficiency of relaxation methods such as meditation and music therapy, on glaucoma cases; a new look about vision training by Marianne Wiendl; and holistic medicine by Dr. Sabine Nebendhal, just to mention some of the speakers. All about preventing pathologies of the eyes was discussed by Meir Schneider (USA), while Handle Work - gently enhancing clients vision was presented by Dror Schneider (USA) noting just some of the twenty presentations the public could listen to. Sylvia Loretta Lakeland, representing Brazil and Portugal, analyzed her work, during the period of 2003 to 2007, on vision improvement and quality of life for low vision persons. Sylvia created quite an empathy with all participants, mainly while explaining her voluntary work in universities, outdoor exercises and classes in the São Paulo Central Park, having received a cheerful support to follow up this work, mainly with low vision persons of all ages. Parallel to the main Conference, participants welcomed the workshops by Roberto Kaplan (Canada& Austria), cracking the eyecode, Peter Grunwald (New Zealand) was greatly motivated about his EyeBody work, Giorgio Ferrario (Italy) impressed the audience with is work on music therapy and Thomas R. Quakenbush (The Netherlands) was indeed totally committed to explain and teach each participant of his workshop, all about night vision training. Peter Ruiter and Almuth Klemm were great fun always with new gimmicks to help vision exercises. The 22nd International Vision Conference will take place at Spa, Belgium from 29.10 to 3.11, including the days for workshops. Please check Special Events and the www.holisticvision.be for more details. We will be organizing a group of participants from Brazil to be part of the Conference, so if you are in South America, please feel free to join us. More details, e-mail lakelandsylvia@gmail.com