What Is Brainspotting? | The Nervous System Science Behind Trauma, Patterns & Pain

Brainspotting works somewhere your neocortex can't reach — deep in the subcortex, where trauma, money blocks, food noise, chronic pain, and even your relationship patterns actually live. 

In this episode of The Weekly Recharge, Renae breaks down the real neuroscience behind Brainspotting: what a Brainspot actually is, why your eyes are wired straight into your nervous system, and why you can't think your way out of what your body is holding onto. 

Plus: why you might keep ending up with the same type of person in a different body, and a simple practice you can try today to start noticing where your own stuck points live.

Want to work on what's stuck? Book a Brainspotting Session here

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Transcript

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So I was visiting my family this weekend and my sister was asking, So what's this brain spotting thing again? So I explained it. The real version, not the 30-second elevator pitch. And after I yielded the questions she had thrown at me, she finally felt like she understood it more and said, Why don't you ever write about this in your newsletter? Why don't you ever tell people this part on social media? And I didn't really have a good answer. I talk about the results of brain spotting constantly, the shifts, the breakthroughs, the I don't know what happened, but something's different texts I get from people that I work with. But what I don't do is explain the thing itself, what it is, and what it's actually doing in there. So that's what this issue is about. I am dumping everything I've got. Some of it's going to get a little nerdy, so stay with me because I promise that it's going to make sense by the end. And this is the weekly recharge. It's a little different than the Hustle Rebels, where I give you permission to say fuck it to the system and put yourself first. But it is a little bit more focused on nervous system regulation techniques and more of the things that I do on a personal level with the people that I work with. So if you like what you hear, feel free to subscribe to the weekly recharge newsletter. We'll get it directly in your email. Otherwise, let's just keep going. So what is brain spotting? Think of your brain like a building. Your neocortex is the front desk, the part that's greeting people, answering emails, remembering to grab milk on the way home, and keeping you organized enough to function. It's essential. You definitely need it. But it has no idea what is going on with the wiring behind the walls. It has never been built to speak that language. Brain spotting is about getting past that 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. And being the neurogeek 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 brain spot or gay spot. When you find it or hold it, you're basically sitting right on top of what's called a physiological capsule. So basically a place where a stuck or traumatic experience got filed away into the body, not just the mind, and just never fully finished processing. That's the whole premise. This isn't a modality where you talk your way through a breakthrough. It's one where your body shows you where that breakthrough is stored and you sit with it until it moves. Okay, and here's the nerdy part and where I kind of get a little more excited. So brain spotting works through the right side of the limbic system, which connects straight down into the brainstem, the oldest, most primitive part of your brain. And that's not a small detail. It means that 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 separate the two, so brain spotting 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 the carpool. 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 that neurons that fire together wire together. So every time you feel a certain fear or shrink in a certain room, or even 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 the parts that aren't. In brain terms, that means working with the agranular isocortex and allocortex. Those are the regions that are tied to your ongoing emotional and physiological regulation, while bypassing the granular isocortex, which is 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. So it's not in the room for this work. It doesn't need to be. There's also a visual and tactile piece happening too through a structure called the superior colliculi. And when we bring in bilateral sounds, which is tones alternating back and forth in your ears, you get an auditory piece on top of that. All of that is working together and helps bring your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system into coherence. The translation of that is that your gas pedal and your brake actually start talking to each other 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 that's holding something stuck. Not something that you can think or talk your way out of, something that you process your way out of. So what are people actually using this for? This is the part that my sister didn't quite understand. So let me widen the lens for you. Most people assume brain spotting is for trauma, the big capital T kind, right? The thing that happened, and then you go to a therapist to work through. And yes, it works there. But what actually walks through the door is really so much bigger and more accessible than that. It's the client who can't figure out why there's a ceiling on what he'll allow himself to earn, no matter how good the business gets, because some part of him has decided a long time ago that he isn't allowed to have anymore. It's also the client who keeps making herself small in rooms, in relationships, in her own business, because some version of her learned that taking up space wasn't safe. It's also food noise, that constant background static around eating that has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with the nervous system and what it's holding. It's also the weight that won't come off or won't stay off, even when the plan itself is right. It's the money beliefs that trace back decades before anyone even 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 clear medical explanation. Things we're carrying in our body that we aren't even aware are connected to something that we lived through because the nervous system filed it away and never got a chance to finish the job. It also looks like relationships. And this is one that tends to land the hardest. Because have you ever noticed that you might keep ending up with the same type of person, just a different looking face? It's not bad luck. Remember, neurons that fire together wire together. So 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 still feel that pull every time because the subcortex isn't choosing partners based on what's good for you. It's choosing based on what's familiar and what's known. That pattern lives in the body, not the logic, which is exactly why you can't think or talk your way out of it, no matter how self-aware you might already be. And then there's expansion, wanting that next level in your business, wanting to grow and feeling stuck anyway for reasons that just don't logically make 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, wherever that happens to be in your body. I'm also running a promotional rate for brain spotting sessions through the end of the month of July, which is the next few days. So reach out before August 1st and we can get you locked in for your first session at the promotional rate. And then this week's practice is going to be the notice and hold. It's not a full brain spotting session, that's something that you do with a trained practitioner because of how deep it can go. But you can start building the awareness that makes that work possible on your own right now. So I want you to think of something that's been sitting heavy, a stuck point, a worry, a place that you feel small. I don't want you to dive into the story. I just want you to be present with it. And then I want you to let your eyes settle somewhere. Don't search for the right spot. Just notice where they may land and stay there. And then I want you to do a body scan from head to toe. Where might you feel it? Do you feel a tight chest, a clenched jaw, a heavy stomach? Wherever it might show up. I want you to stay with the eye position and the body sensation together for 60 to 90 seconds. There's no fixing, no narrow rating. I just want you to notice. And then take one full breath in and then out longer than the exhale. Let yourself come back into the room. That's it. You're not trying to resolve anything in this exercise. You're just practicing the skill of being in tune with your body and letting your body tell you where the material lives instead of your neocortex trying to think its way to get there. That skill, it's the whole foundation of this work. So if something showed up strong when you tried this, it's usually a sign that there's something more underneath and it's worth working through with someone. So it's exactly why I've built in brain spouting sessions into the burn the blueprint identity reset, which the first week is always free for you guys. So you can grab that in the show notes. And if you feel cold to schedule a brain spouting session, that link is also down there in the show notes. And if you want the promotional rate, just reach out to me and we can schedule that. And in case you missed this week on Hustle Rambles, last week's episode with Lizzie 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. I love that she had said that. If you've ever felt like you have to earn your own rest, this episode is going to be a great one for you. And you can go ahead, you can watch it on YouTube or you can listen on all of your favorite podcast platforms. And then this week I'm releasing an episode with Ryan Sepherson as part of the toolbox, our series where we sit down with people doing real work in this space and dig into the one tool that you can actually use yourself. Ryan bird himself all the way into the ground, building a business on the side of a full-time job. And what came after that was seven years of fighting Lyme disease and mold illness. Now he runs his own company called Sublime, and he digs into genetic markers and root cause working with people navigating that same territory. It's proof of exactly what I keep coming back to, which is what gets stored in the body, doesn't stay quiet forever. And if you're new here or feeling nostalgic, you can always hop on to the link in the show notes and read the previous newsletters as well. If this is the first time this actually made sense around brain spotting, do me a favor, send it to the person who has asked, What is even brain spotting anyway? And never got a true answer. That's how my sister got hers. In the meantime, we'll see you guys next week.