Preparing for your first Brainspotting session.
Many people enjoy listening to bilateral music while brainspotting. Bilateral music is designed to be used with headphones as different sounds are played in each ear to stimulate different sides of the brain. Bilateral music is not essential to have a successful Brainspotting session. The only thing we really need is a position for the eye (I’ll guide you through that in our meeting). However, having some of the items below to hand will mean we can be spontaneous and have the most flexibility in our session. So if you can, gather these items for our brainspotting meeting, but don’t worry if you can’t.
Preparing your environment
The following things would give us the most flexibility and choice during our brainspotting session, but we can also make do with what you have at hand. These items will help us identify “spots” that are close, far and in the mid-distance.
- Sit at a comfortable table and chair. Have your monitor at eye level in front of you. (You could use books under your laptop, a lower seat or cushions to get to eye level with me).
- The desk should face into the whole room, not at a wall so you can identify ‘spots’ near and far away from you.
- Have post-it notes or blu tac handy, during the session we can fix ‘spots’ on the walls for you to gaze at. (We won’t know until we are in session, so it’s useful to have these things handy just in case). Post-it notes are ideal for marking a place on the wall, you could also use a picture of a comforting image – a photo or a fun drawing.
- Have some items on your desk, something short like a cup and something tall, like a tall vase or tall candle, these are good to mark near ’spots.’
- You could use a long ruler, an old aerial, long piece of bamboo, or kitchen utensil placed upright in a jar with some rice or dried beans to hold it still. This could be used to mark high ‘spots’ which are near and ‘spots’ at mid-distance in the room.
- Finally, have a look around for something you could use to cover one eye as we might explore one-eye Brainspotting, a wide soft headband (Alice band) or soft cloth eye mask use for travelling would work well. A pirate eye patch from a child’s playbox would be ideal, as would old goggles with one ‘eye’ blocked off.
Music & Accessories
I’ve compiled some playlists on Apple Music and Spotify as these are the most popular music subscription services, but the same songs and albums will be available elsewhere. You can follow the playlists or add the albums to your music library. If you prefer to buy music, you can purchase it directly from David Grand’s website for download.
It’s best to listen to these through headphones. The ones that have come with your mobile phone are fine but listen through both ears, not just one. It’s easiest to listen from a second device (mobile phone), not the one we use for the video call (computer) to avoid audio problems.
Apple Music
Spotify
Look forward to seeing you online soon,
