What Happens When Brainspotting & Reiki Meet in the Same Session

I want to tell you about a moment I didn't plan.

A woman came to me for a Reiki session, & at that time, she was navigating fertility challenges & had been carrying the weight of that journey for a long time. We were well into the session when suddenly her breathing changed, her body tensed, & within moments she was moving into a full panic attack on the table.

At that time, based on instinct, I placed one finger above her face & asked her which part of her visual field felt calm. We found a resource Brainspot, right there on the Reiki table, in the middle of a session that had nothing to do with Brainspotting at all.

She calmed almost right away.

A year later, she reached out to tell me she had just had a baby girl, & that was when it all started, & how I began understanding, going through research & confirming that Brainspotting & Reiki are actually accessing the same healing territory, just from two different directions.

That realization changed everything about how I practice.

What Reiki Actually Is

If you're new to Reiki, let me give you the plain version before we go any further.

Reiki is a Japanese healing modality that works with the energy that flows through the body. The word itself translates roughly as universal life energy. The idea is that when energy gets blocked or stuck, whether from stress, trauma or emotional weight, it shows up in the body as tension, pain or a general sense of being off. Reiki works by helping that energy move again, restoring a natural sense of flow & ease.

A Reiki practitioner, once attuned, channels this energy through intentional presence & gentle hand placements. The goal isn't to direct healing in a specific way. It's to support the body's own natural capacity to restore itself.

If that sounds familiar to how Brainspotting works, that's exactly the point.

What Brainspotting Actually Is

Brainspotting is a brain-based healing approach developed by Dr. David Grand. It uses the visual field to find specific eye positions, called Brainspots, that directly connect to where the brain is holding pain, trauma, or old patterns.

The principle behind it is simple: where you look affects how you feel. When you hold a specific eye position that corresponds to stored activation in the nervous system, the deeper part of the brain gets a direct channel to process & release what's been sitting there. There's no need for retelling, reliving, or analyzing because the brain does what it was always built to do when it finally feels safe enough.

Brainspotting bypasses the thinking mind entirely & works at the subcortical level, the older, deeper part of the brain that stores survival responses, body memories & emotional experiences that don't always have words attached to them.

Why These Two Belong Together

Here's what I discovered when I started researching after that fertility session.

Both Brainspotting & Reiki work below the level of conscious thought. They both rely on attuned presence as a core part of the process, both trust the body & the nervous system to lead the healing rather than the practitioner directing it, & both have been shown to shift the nervous system into a deeper state of calm where genuine processing can happen.

Research on Reiki has shown measurable effects on pain, anxiety & the autonomic nervous system, the part of your body that governs your stress response. Research on Brainspotting consistently demonstrates subcortical processing that talk therapy simply doesn't reach.

When you bring them together in one session, they work in layers. What Brainspotting opens up in the nervous system, Reiki helps clear & restore energetically. The healing becomes more complete, more integrated & in my experience it tends to stay in a way that feels different from either modality used alone.

The Second Story

The fertility session showed me what happens when Reiki calls on Brainspotting unexpectedly, but I've also experienced the opposite.

I've been holding space for clients in Brainspotting sessions when I become aware that my Reiki hands have activated, without any plan or intention on my part. It just happens & more than once, a client has said some version of the same thing in that moment: it feels like the healing is being accelerated, like something is moving that was stuck before.

These weren't isolated moments. I have seen that it kept happening, & each time it did, I came to understand more clearly that these two modalities aren't just compatible, they are genuinely complementary in a way that makes both of them more effective.

Brainspotting knows how to find where the nervous system is holding the activation. Reiki knows how to help the energy move once it's been located. Together they create something that neither achieves alone.

What This Looks Like for You

Whether you're coming to this as someone looking for deeper personal healing or as a practitioner wanting to expand what you offer, the integration of Brainspotting & Reiki opens something worth navigating.

For personal healing, if you've tried talk therapy or one healing modality & feel like something still isn't shifting, combining these two approaches might be the missing piece. They reach layers of the body & nervous system that most approaches simply don't get to.

For practitioners, if you're already trained in one of these modalities & curious about the other, the combination doesn't require you to abandon what you know. It builds on it. Your existing attunement & presence become even more powerful when you understand how these two approaches are working toward the same thing from different angles.

Knowing Where You Look Affects How You Feel

Dr. Grand's foundational insight for Brainspotting, that where you look affects how you feel, turns out to connect beautifully with what Reiki practitioners have always known: that energy follows intention & that attuned presence is itself a healing force.

Both of these things are true. & when you put them together in one container, the results are something I've watched move people in ways that still genuinely move me after all these years of practice.

Join Us for the Brainspotting & Reiki Workshop

If this is resonating & you want to experience this combination firsthand, I'm hosting the Brainspotting & Reiki Specialty Workshop on August 28th. It's a full day on Zoom, 10am to 4pm Central, & 6 CE hours are available for practitioners.

You don't need prior Reiki experience to attend. You just need to be curious about what becomes possible when these two come together in the same space.

Registration closes August 26th.

Register for the Brainspotting & Reiki Workshop - August 28