I was visiting my family this weekend and my sister was asking, "so what's this Brainspotting thing again?"
So I explained it. The real version... not the 30 second elevator pitch.
After I yielded the questions she threw at me and she finally felt like she understood it more, she says, "why don't you ever write about this in your newsletter? Why don't you tell people this part on social media?"
And I didn't really have a good answer. I talk about the results of Brainspotting constantly — the shifts, the breakthroughs, the "I don't know what happened but something's different" texts I get from clients. What I don't do is explain the thing itself. What it is. What it's actually doing in there.
So that's what this issue is. I'm dumping everything I've got. Some of it's going to get nerdy. Stay with me, because I promise it's going to make sense by the end.
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So what IS Brainspotting...
Think of your brain like a building. Your neocortex is the front desk — the part greeting people, answering emails, remembering to grab milk on the way home, keeping you organized enough to function. It's essential. You need it. But it has no idea what's going on in the wiring behind the walls. It was never built to speak that language.
Brainspotting is about getting past the front desk and into the wiring — down into the subcortex, the older, deeper part of the brain that doesn't run on language at all. Which is exactly why you can't talk your way into it. It doesn't understand words. It understands sensation, emotion, somatic experience.
Being the neuro-geek I am, this was the intriguing part when I first learned it: your eyes are wired directly into that deeper system. There's a whole network running from behind your retina straight into your nervous system, and where your eyes land or gaze upon can actually reveal what's happening underneath, in real time. That specific eye position is called a Brainspot, or gaze spot. Find it, hold it, and you're sitting right on top of what's called a physiological capsule — basically a place where a stuck or traumatic experience got filed away in the body, not just the mind, and never fully finished processing.
That's the whole premise. This isn't a modality where you talk your way to a breakthrough. It's one where your body shows you where the breakthrough is stored, and you sit with it until it moves.
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Okay, here's the nerdy part
Brainspotting works through the right side of the limbic system, which connects straight down into the brainstem — the oldest, most primitive part of your brain. That's not a small detail. It means this work is physiological before it's ever psychological. What's in the brain is in the body, and what's in the body is in the brain. You can't actually separate the two, so Brainspotting doesn't try to.
That limbic system is running your instincts, your emotions, your creativity, even what some would call your spirituality — quietly, underneath the version of you that's replying to emails and driving carpool. And none of it is fixed in place. Your brain is constantly rewiring itself through neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, which is just a fancy way of saying: neurons that fire together, wire together. Every time you feel a certain fear, or shrink in a certain room, or reach for food the same way at the same time of night, you're not imagining a pattern. You're reinforcing an actual wired pathway. Literally.
So in a session, the goal gets very specific: engage the parts of the brain actually doing the regulating, and get out of the way of the parts that aren't. In brain terms, that means working with the agranular isocortex and allocortex — the regions tied to your ongoing emotional and physiological regulation — while bypassing the granular isocortex, the part responsible for language, executive function, and higher-order thinking. That part sounds important, and it is, but it has nothing to do with regulating your nervous system. It's not in the room for this work. It doesn't need to be.
There's a visual and tactile piece happening too, through a structure called the superior colliculi, and when we bring in bilateral sound — tones alternating back and forth — you get an auditory piece on top of that. All of it working together is what helps bring your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems into coherence. Translation: your gas pedal and your brake actually start talking to each other again, instead of one of them being slammed to the floor while the other just goes along for the ride.
So that's the mechanism, boiled all the way down. An eye position, correlating to a place in the body, holding something stuck. Not something you think your way out of. Something you process your way out of.
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What are people actually using this for?
This is the part my sister didn't quite understand, so let me widen the lens.
Most people assume Brainspotting is for trauma — the capital-T kind, the thing that happened and you go to a therapist to work through. And yes, it works there. But what actually walks through the door is so much bigger than that.
It's the client who can't figure out why there's a ceiling on what he'll let himself earn, no matter how good the business gets, because some part of him decided a long time ago he isn't allowed to have more.
It's also the client who keeps making herself smaller — in rooms, in relationships, in her own business — because some version of her learned that taking up space wasn't safe.
It's food noise, that constant background static around eating that has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with what the nervous system is holding.
It's the weight that won't come off, or won't stay off, even when the plan itself is right.
It's money beliefs that trace back decades before anyone ever opened a business that stems back from watching your parents struggle and work hard to make ends meet.
And it's not only emotional. It's chronic pain. Physical ailments that don't have a clean medical explanation. Things we're carrying in the body that we're not even aware are connected to something we lived through, because the nervous system filed it away and never got the chance to finish the job.
It's also relationships — and this is the one that tends to land hardest. Ever notice you keep ending up with the same type of person, just a different face? That's not bad luck. Remember, neurons that fire together, wire together — if your nervous system got wired early on to read a certain kind of chaos, or distance, or unpredictability as familiar, it will keep clocking that same energy as "safe" or "comfortable", even when it's the opposite of good for you.
Your neocortex can know better. It can say all the right things and pick differently on paper. And you'll still feel the pull, every time, because the subcortex isn't choosing partners based on what's good for you. It's choosing based on what's known and familiar. That pattern lives in the body, not the logic, which is exactly why you can't think your way out of it, no matter how self-aware you already are.
And then there's expansion — wanting the next level in your business, wanting to grow, and feeling stuck anyway for reasons that don't make any logical sense on paper.
All of it can live in the exact same place. The subcortex doesn't sort your problems into neat little folders. It just holds what it's holding, whatever that happens to be.
I'm also running a promotional rate for Brainspotting sessions through the end of the month of July. So reach out before August 1st and we can get you locked in for your first session at the promo rate.
👉 Book a call here — let's figure out how we can work together.
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This Week's Practice: The Notice-and-Hold
This isn't a full Brainspotting session — that's something to do with a trained practitioner, because of how deep it can go. But you can start building the awareness that makes the work possible, on your own, right now.
- Think of something that's been sitting heavy — a stuck point, a worry, a place you feel small. Don't dive into the story, just let it be present.
- Let your eyes settle somewhere. Don't search for the "right" spot, just notice where they land and stay there.
- Scan your body. Where do you feel it? Tight chest, clenched jaw, heavy stomach — whatever shows up.
- Stay with the eye position and the body sensation together for sixty to ninety seconds. No fixing, no narrating. Just noticing.
- Take one full breath in and then out longer than the inhale, and let yourself come back to the room.
That's it. You're not trying to resolve anything in this exercise, you're practicing the skill of letting your body tell you where the material lives instead of your neocortex trying to think its way there. That skill is the whole foundation of the work.
If something showed up strong when you tried this, that's usually a sign there's more underneath it worth working through with an actual practitioner — which is exactly why Brainspotting sessions are built into Burn the Blueprint, and the first week is free.
👉 Grab the first week of Burn the Blueprint FREE.
👉 Schedule a Brainspotting Session here — let's find what's keeping you stuck.
🎧 This Week on the Hustle Rebels Podcast
🎙️ In case you missed it: In case you missed it — last week's episode with Lizzy Pennock dug into why high achievers feel guilty for resting, how patriarchy shapes our relationship to productivity, and what it actually means to be "ambitious about balance." If you've ever felt like you have to earn your own rest, that one's for you.
Watch on YouTube:
Listen Here: [Earning Rest, Burnout & Being "Ambitious About Balance" with Lizzy Pennock]
And this week, I'm releasing an episode with Ryan Syverson as part of The Toolbox — our series where we sit down with people doing real work in this space and dig into one tool you can actually use. Ryan burned himself all the way to the ground building a business on the side of a full-time job, and what came after was seven years fighting Lyme disease and mold illness.
Now he runs Sublyme, digging into genetic markers and root-cause work with people navigating that same territory. It's proof of exactly what I keep coming back to: what gets stored in the body doesn't stay quiet forever.
New here? Or feeling nostalgic?
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Check em out here: [Read Previous Editions of The Weekly Recharge]
If this is the first time this actually made sense, do me a favor — send it to the person who's asked you "so what even is Brainspotting?" and never gotten a real answer. That's how my sister got hers.
- Renae
Wayward Wellness Coaching
Hustle Rebels Podcast
