Brain Spotting

Written by: Amelia Sun

Many things about ourselves are fixed, our height, our age, our lived experiences, some more pleasant, welcome and helpful than others, our immediate families, even some life circumstances. When life presents challenges it may be useful to understand how our thoughts, feelings and actions are deeply rooted in our neurobiology and that our brains are capable of forming new neural pathways, neuroplasticity, to promote revelatory healing that will alter how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. Brain spotting is one such therapeutic approach that helps us create safety for our neuro-biological, energetic system, to promote healing and growth of new neural pathways. Brains at any age and stage are capable of growing and changing.

Brain spotting was developed by David Grand, Ph.D., as a therapeutic treatment centered around the premise that where you look affects how you feel. The optical nerve grows out of the brainstem in-utero. Therefore, the brain spots in our field of vision are directly correlated with neural pathway channels that root within deep subcortical areas of our brain that control our instinctive survival responses. Brain spotting provides support as we identify brain spots, activated vision spots, surrounding various feelings, troubling thoughts, relationships, and events. The practice involves as little or as much verbal processing as the client prefers.

Words, thoughts, images may arise as clients fixate their gaze on one particular spot for a session that may last 50-60 minutes. Sometimes clients may close their eyes when their eyes become tired. Often, closing their eyes and other body movements like eye twitching, facial expressions, shifting in their seat, deep breaths, may indicate deeper and deeper levels of brain processing.

Brain spotting is like a key that allows us to access deeper memory banks within our unconscious mind through a simple and powerfully effective process by providing a safe engagement during the uncovering process that takes place during focused concentration on one brain spot. Brain spotting works with the body-mind-soul connection to bring ultimate safety to latent, suppressed neuro-connections that are usually highly defended and resistant to therapeutic processing.

This method helps get behind the defenses in a way without having to talk or analyze. It is effective within the first session, and may produce lucid dreaming, a sign of deep subconscious level processing. For some it may have a subtle sensation of the reorientation of interlocking networks gears and wires shifting. Brain spotting may be integrated and adapted to work in tandem with many therapeutic approaches.