👉🏽 Subscribe for thoughtful, bite-sized emails — from Liz Zhou, a neurodivergent therapist — on how to take care of your nervous system & understand your brain.
How Brainspotting works to heal the nervous system 🌿
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Lately, my favorite way to take care of my nervous system has been through daily walks in nature. My nervous system enjoys the visual stimulation (soft lighting and vibrant colors), as well as the auditory input (birds chirping, the creek flowing, and a deep sense of quiet). On a psychological level, being in nature helps me slow down - which I welcome, as my mind can spin pretty quickly sometimes. 🌊 Sitting next to a creek, my body naturally releases tension, and starts to breathe more deeply. My gaze lands on a spot in the water, where the sunlight makes the creek sparkle in a magical way - and I stare at this spot for several minutes. My brain loses a sense of time, and settles into a state of simply being, feeling, and sensing. The experience is deeply recalibrating & restorative for my nervous system. What is happening in these moments is a spontaneous & natural form of Brainspotting. 🧠 If you haven’t heard of Brainspotting before - in a nutshell, it is a healing modality that works directly with the deep brain & nervous system, by identifying Brainspots (fixed eye positions in your field of vision) that correlate w/ memories, sensations, & emotions. I use this modality in my counseling practice (which you can learn more about here), and I’ve benefitted from it in my personal healing as well. Healing through Brainpotting can look many different ways. It can look like a structured session, facilitated by a practitioner. It can look like sitting in nature & letting your mind wander as you watch the leaves on the stream. It can look like lying down in your bed, listening to music, and staring at the wall - while deeply processing. The point is: healing can happen in a therapy office, and it can also happen in a quiet spot in nature; in the relationships that we create with ourselves & others; and in the way that we take care of ourselves on an ordinary Tuesday. I hope that you are tending to yourself with kindness, gentleness, and care - today & always. 💗 P.S. Know someone who needs to hear this? Forward it along. New readers can subscribe here. P.P.S. If you’re interested in working together, I’d love to support you. 🌻 For folks who are overwhelmed & burnt out, but too busy for weekly therapy, I offer Nervous System Healing Intensives — three 90-minute sessions, using brain-body modalities (Brainspotting, IFS, EMDR) that go deeper than talk therapy & help you feel better, sooner.
Intensives are a type of short-term, accelerated therapy — for folks who prefer a hyper-focused approach to healing; who need longer than 50-min sessions to warm up & process deeply. 👉🏽 If you want to get an Intensive on the books, click here to book an intro call. I help highly sensitive, neurodivergent adults heal their nervous systems & connect with their authentic selves. 💗 Need a nervous system reset? —> Join me for a Calm Place meditation. |
Liz's Neurodivergent Letters
👉🏽 Subscribe for thoughtful, bite-sized emails — from Liz Zhou, a neurodivergent therapist — on how to take care of your nervous system & understand your brain.
Recently, I brought my newly adopted dogs, Toto and Didi, to their first vet appointment. Since they’re anxious beings, still adjusting to the rhythms of our home, I wanted to find a vet that would treat them with the care & patience that they need. That’s how I ended up at a “fear-free” vet clinic, which emphasizes “stress-free visits that put your pet at ease.” The way the vet interacted with our dogs reminded me what it means to take care of the nervous system - whether animal or human....
Dear all, I’m excited to share that – after years of living in Colorado and a season of travel/nomadism – I have moved into a new home in Oregon. My nervous system is loving the moisture, the greenery, and the ancient trees of the Pacific Northwest. 🌿 Nature is a huge part of how I resource myself and take care of my body/mind/spirit. I can’t wait to share more about the medicine of the nature here as I settle into my new home & build community here. Me & my dogs hanging out in the beautiful...
Last weekend, I attended a Brainspotting & Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy training in Portland, Oregon. I gathered with a group of lovely therapists to explore the integration of low-dose ketamine (a consciousness-shifting medicine) with Brainspotting (a brain-body therapy). The training - led by my dear friend Mari at Awaken Consulting & hosted at the beautiful sanctuary of Empathy Grove - covered important topics like: safety considerations (because ketamine-assisted psychotherapy - KAP -...