Sounds like you're trying to access a my variables that's declared in another file. That would be outside of its scope (where it's visible). You can't. The whole point of using lexical variables is to prevent this.

You need to change the existing module to expose the variable (e.g. by providing an accessor).

(Otherwise, you will need to grab a reference to the variable from a sub that captured it using PadWalker. This would qualify as a hack.)