Brainspotting, House Music, and the Places We Learn to Heal

How brainspotting, house music, and embodied sound helped me heal, reframe my past, and become a different kind of DJ

There is a fairly new therapeutic technique called brainspotting that has changed my life.

I do not mean that lightly, and I do not mean it in the vague, self-help way people sometimes talk about life change. I mean that it has changed how I talk to myself, how I understand my own past, how I move through difficult feelings, and even how I hear music.

I have been doing brainspotting with my therapist since July 2023, and somewhere along the way, healing stopped being just a concept and became something I could feel happening in real time.

My own way of explaining brainspotting is simple.

I can work through almost any challenge by identifying what is happening, staying open to talking through it, and using visual points in the space around me as portals. That is the word that feels most accurate to me: portals. I know that might sound unusual, but that is genuinely how it feels. Certain visual points open something. They create a pathway. They let me access emotions, memories, and truths that are harder to reach through language alone.

What fascinates me most is not just that the technique works. It is what happens once it does.

I begin talking to myself in a profoundly different way.

Very often, I end up speaking to my younger self.

Our sessions are virtual, but they are powerful. My therapist uses a pointer and moves it slowly across the screen, from one end to the other. As the pointer travels horizontally, I track what is happening inside my body. He asks me to tell him when to stop.

That is where it gets interesting.

As the pointer moves, I can feel the challenge begin to form in my belly. The slow sweep across the screen becomes an intensifying experience. The issue I have brought into the session starts to gather weight. It begins to rumble and tighten and announce itself physically. Then, at a certain point, thought and feeling intersect. The challenge I am holding and the position of the pointer meet in a way that feels undeniable.

That is my stop point.

Then I ask him to move the pointer back to a less intense place, where my belly rumbles less and the feeling begins to fade into the background again. Right there, in that movement between intensity and relief, I learned something I had not fully understood before: I have more control over my feelings than I once believed.

Not control in the sense of suppression. Not control in the sense of pretending not to feel. I mean control in the sense of being able to approach a feeling, locate it, stay with it, step back from it, and return when I am ready.

That is different.

That is freedom.

When we talk through what is causing the intense feeling, the roots are usually familiar. Guilt. Sadness. Shame. Worthlessness. Depression. Anxiety. Fear. The old crew. The long-running cast of emotions so many of us carry through life, often without fully realizing how much room they are taking up inside us.

And then comes the part that has changed me the most.

When I am ready, I ask him to return the pointer to the most intense part, because I am ready to feel it again. Not because I want to suffer. Because I want to work on making it small.

That is when I begin updating my younger self.

You do not have to feel guilty about this anymore.

You are safe now.

You are thriving now.

You do not have to be afraid of that anymore.

You learned from it.

You moved past it.

You know better now.

You are okay.

Those moments are hard to describe to anyone who has not experienced something similar. They feel private, sacred, strange, and deeply practical all at once. The problem does not always disappear. The past does not suddenly erase itself. But the largeness of it changes. The thing that felt huge and looming becomes smaller. Quieter. Less charged. Still there, maybe, but no longer dominating the whole room.

Session over. Time flew.

That has been my experience.

And the more I have thought about it, the more I have realized how connected this is to music, especially house music.

Healing did not arrive in my life only through words. It arrived through rhythm. Through repetition. Through body awareness. Through surrender. Through the willingness to stay with a feeling long enough for it to transform.

House music has always understood that.

As Eddie Amador put it: “It’s a spiritual thing. A body thing. A soul thing.”

Exactly.

That line has always hit me, but now it hits me differently.

Because brainspotting has shown me that healing is not just intellectual. It is somatic. It is bodily. Sometimes the breakthrough is not a sentence. Sometimes it is a sensation. Sometimes it is the moment you realize your body has been carrying a story your mind has not fully been able to narrate.

House music works on me in a similar way.

A kick drum can regulate me.

A bassline can ground me.

A chord progression can remind me that emotion moves.

A vocal can reach some bruised and hidden part of me that ordinary speech cannot quite touch.

And when movement enters the picture, the effect deepens even more. Dance does something important. It gets us out of the courtroom of the mind. It interrupts overthinking. It returns us to pulse, breath, sweat, timing, presence. It helps us metabolize what might otherwise stay trapped inside us.

That may be one reason I have always gravitated toward collecting music and DJing. I used to think I was just obsessed with songs, arrangements, grooves, transitions, vocals, and the architecture of a great set. And I am. But now I think there was something else happening too.

I was building healing environments.

I was learning how energy shifts.

I was studying emotional movement.

I was trying, maybe without fully knowing it, to help myself and others travel from one feeling state to another.

Brainspotting has made me a better DJ because it has made me a different DJ.

I do not just hear tracks now. I feel where they land in the body. I notice tension and release more clearly. I understand emotional pacing differently. I pay closer attention to what a record is doing beneath the surface. I trust stillness more. I trust repetition more. I trust the long blend more. I trust the journey more.

And just like in therapy, I have learned not to rush resolution.

Some feelings need to be approached slowly.

Some transitions need room.

Some intensity needs to peak before it can soften.

That understanding has changed the way I listen, the way I mix, and the way I respond to what is happening inside a room.

It has also changed how I use sound outside of DJing.

I love singing bowls, and I use them often to calm and focus myself and my surroundings. I take the wooden mallet and begin making circles around the bowl, pressing into it as the sound starts to rise and bloom. The tone gets louder, fuller, more alive. When I do this, I try to stop thinking. I let the consistent motion and the sustained vibration open my mind. I begin praying out loud. I give thanks. I express gratitude. I speak dreams into reality for myself and my family.

There is something about that circular motion, that drone, that steady blooming tone that feels deeply related to both therapy and music.

A singing bowl teaches you to stay with resonance.

House music does too.

In fact, sometimes when I overlap one house track over another, I hear a third thing emerge. A blended sound. A new and expressive tone that did not exist in either track on its own. That fascinates me. A singing bowl feels similar. You are not just hearing a note. You are hearing overtone, shimmer, vibration, after-image. You are hearing sound become atmosphere.

Maybe that is what healing can sound like too.

Not the complete disappearance of pain, but the emergence of something new in relationship to it.

Not erasure, but transformation.

These days, I no longer rely only on the pointer. I have grown into self-spotting, double spotting, resource spotting, and gaze spotting. That still amazes me. What started as something guided has gradually become something I can access with greater independence. That does not mean I have transcended struggle. It means I have developed tools. It means when life gets heavy, I am no longer as powerless inside myself as I once was.

That matters.

For a long time, I think music was helping me survive before I had the language for why. Now I have more language. I have more awareness. I have more agency. And because of that, I think I also have more reverence for what music has been doing for me all along.

Maybe that is why certain records feel medicinal.

Maybe that is why some vocals sound like reassurance.

Maybe that is why a steady beat can feel like safety.

Maybe that is why dance floors sometimes become places of release, memory, prayer, and return.

I used to think DJing was mainly about selection, taste, timing, and technical skill.

Now I think it is also about care.

Care for mood.
Care for memory.
Care for the nervous system.
Care for the moment when a body decides, even briefly, that it is safe enough to let go.

Brainspotting helped me understand that healing is not always linear, verbal, or tidy. Sometimes it is visual. Sometimes it is physical. Sometimes it is spiritual. Sometimes it sounds like a bowl singing. Sometimes it sounds like a house record at exactly the right moment.

And sometimes the path back to yourself begins with where you look, what you hear, and whether you are finally ready to tell the younger version of you:

You are safe now.
You can let this go.
You made it.
You are okay.