Brainspotting
What is Brainspotting?
Brainspotting is a brain-based therapy and body-centered approach that helps you heal from the source of where you are stuck. It focuses on the deep body–mind roots of emotional and somatic issues, unresolved trauma, and attachment wounds, so they can resolve from within.
How it works:
Brainspotting helps us contact where overwhelming experiences, emotions, or relational patterns are held in the body. Often, these experiences—if we are able to feel them in our body at all—feel either vague or diffuse (“everywhere and nowhere”), or we are flooded by sensation that seems to come from everywhere.
Brainspotting therapy allows these experiences to be felt more precisely. This both brings the experience into awareness—so it can be processed and released—and helps you become more accurately attuned to your inner world. The processing and release happen naturally when the experience is brought into awareness in a digestible chunk—our body knows how to metabolize what it carries.
Over time, this skill allows you to meet your needs with greater clarity and respond from presence rather than old, worn-out patterns.
What Brainspotting Can Help With
- Trauma (large or small)
- Anxiety and the trauma that contributes to it
- Depression and its underlying roots
- Attachment wounds and patterns of disconnection
- Chronic pain
- Addiction
- OCD
- Complicated or traumatic grief
- Creative blocks / performance issues
- Or anything that obstructs your full experience of life—whether it registers as “too much” or “not enough.”.
The Process
A session might begin with me guiding you to hold an issue, a concern, or a memory in your awareness while noticing where you feel it in your body. This helps bypass the thinking brain and access the limbic system, where emotional memories are stored.
Together, we find a “brainspot” in your visual field that connects to this issue. You may notice that looking in different places shifts how you feel, brings different sensations online, and allows them to be felt more precisely—bringing different aspects of the experience into awareness.
From here, the work unfolds. Memories, images, sensations, thoughts, or emotions may arise. You are guided to stay with whatever comes, gently and without judgment, until the experience moves through and something new emerges—release, clarity, or simply more space inside.
Integration with the Realization Process
Brainspotting works at a slightly less subtle level than the Realization Process, making it excellent for accessing and processing patterns that are stuck in the bodymind but that might feel imaginary if you tried to reach them on a more subtle level.
As these patterns are released, your system naturally begins to refine toward more subtle levels of perception, preparing the way to perceive the luminous, unchanging ground of being explored in the Realization Process.
Brainspotting – Standalone Sessions
Brainspotting can be a powerful tool for specific issues even outside of ongoing therapy. You may choose a standalone Brainspotting session if you want focused support for creative blocks, performance challenges, spiritual opening, or integrating a difficult or peak experience. These sessions allow you to go directly to the body–mind source of stuck patterns and move through them with precision, whether or not you are engaged in longer-term therapy.
I am happy because I choose to look at things that make me happy and my eyes catch their funny edge and I laugh.
— Don Juan from Carlos Castaneda's A Separate Reality
What is a Brainspot?
David Grand, PhD–the discoverer and developer of Brainspotting–explains exactly what a brainspot is.
