Brainspotting – by Roby Abeles
What I tell my clients about body-aware processing and Brainspotting is this:
The Bodymind has its own special language. It communicates through sensations, variations in body temperature, aches, pains, shakes, trembles, twinges, tingles, dreams, pleasurable physical sensations, and metaphors – like “I felt like I’d been hit by a bus” – which are all sensory focused.
I think for most of us, our bodies walk around in despair because no one seems to understand what they are trying to communicate to us. And also for most of us if we could understand what the Bodymind is saying and needing to heal we could do that quite effectively. The Bodymind has innate wisdom that we need to process what goes on in our lives and thrive.
Here’s a metaphor my Bodymind used to help me understand. It feels like a deaf person who walks the streets every day using sign language but everyone just walks by without understanding what they are saying.
Every day it goes back out and all day it is communicating in its own way with no one responding or understanding.
Then, one day, that body is walking down the street communicating in sign language and across the road they see someone doing something with their hands that looked for a moment like they were also speaking sign language. But, the body took a big sigh and remembered that no one understood what it was trying to say and kept on walking.
But then again, that other person across the street started talking again in sign language, there was no doubt now. She was talking in a way the body could understand and communicate what it had been wanting to say for so long. And the two met. And every week, the two met again and slowly but surely the Bodymind was able to communicate all it needed to so that it could heal and be free again.
This is what Brainspotting is – it’s the language of the BodyMind, and as we know once we can tap into what it knows to do to heal us, we can work as a powerful team to release what needs to be released, to resource what needs resourcing and to rebalance our whole system back to health and happiness.
