The Client Who Opened My Eyes

I was still an intern in my social work program when I met a client whose bipolar I disorder made it nearly impossible for him to leave his home. He struggled to function at a basic level. Some sessions he’d show up completely disheveled. Some nights he couldn’t sleep at all. Other stretches, he’d be so depressed he couldn’t get out of bed for days.

He was doing neurofeedback alongside our therapy work, and over the course of a year, I watched him transform in a way I can only describe as astounding. He went from being somewhat incoherent in our sessions to offering clear, thoughtful reflections. He became so much more able to organize himself and his life. By the time we stopped working together, he was applying for full-time jobs — something that had felt completely impossible when we started.

I didn’t understand much about neurofeedback yet. But watching him come back to life opened my eyes to the power of this modality, and I couldn’t stop being curious about it.

The Barrier I Kept Running Into

As I grew as a clinician, I started referring clients to neurofeedback clinics when I saw them struggling in ways therapy alone wasn’t reaching — especially when medication either wasn’t enough or wasn’t something they wanted.

But again and again, clients would come back to me frustrated, sometimes even angry, once they found out what it actually took: traditional clinics typically charge $500–$1,000 a month, require two to three visits a week for 20–30 minute sessions, and usually aren’t covered by insurance. For so many of my clients, that cost and that time commitment simply weren’t realistic. I kept hearing the same frustration, over and over.

Bessel van der Kolk Pushed Me Over the Edge

Meanwhile, neurofeedback kept showing up in the spaces where I was learning — conferences, trainings on EMDR and somatic work, conversations among clinicians. Then I heard a recording of Bessel van der Kolk speaking at a psychedelics conference, making a firm case that neurofeedback deserved just as much attention as psychedelics in our field. That talk is what finally pushed me to actually pursue training and become a neurofeedback practitioner myself.

Brain Training, Not Insight or Chemistry

The more I learned, the more it clicked for me conceptually. Neurofeedback is a brain training modality. Unlike medication, it doesn’t rely on an external chemical to create change. And unlike talk therapy, EMDR, or somatic work, it doesn’t require a client to have a lot of insight or self-reflective capacity to benefit. It works directly on the brain’s electrical patterns, supporting regulation and regularity through consistent training.

This is part of what drew me to the Myndlift system specifically: it’s home-based, which makes it far more affordable and accessible than a clinic model. I can set the monthly cost, adjust rates when needed, and clients train on their own schedule instead of having to travel somewhere multiple times a week.

What Changed in My Own Brain

Before I ever offered it to clients, I trained on my own brain. The relief in anxiety and insomnia was almost immediate. Later, I started noticing a real reduction in my ADHD symptoms — more clarity, less brain fog, more follow-through in my day-to-day life.

What surprised me most was what happened to my creativity. It had felt dormant for a long time, in a season of building a practice, building a career, and raising a young child. Neurofeedback made room for it again. It made room for leisure — for rest that had started to feel impossible, and then started to feel not just possible, but necessary.

I think for the first time, I understood that I couldn’t white-knuckle my way through life. And it took releasing some of that anxiety to even see that clearly enough to live into it.

Why This Fits a Liberation-Based Practice

As I built out the framework for how I want to practice, neurofeedback started to answer a question I’d been sitting with: what tools actually meet people where they are, especially when they’re not in a place to talk things through and draw insight from conversation?

I think a lot about how BIPOC folks are often locked into survival mode (as I was) — sometimes without even fully recognizing it. Carrying the weight of responsibility, of hypervigilance, of constantly scanning for threat, shapes how the brain functions. It can lock people out of rest, out of deep sleep, out of creativity and reflection — out of feeling like their full human selves. Neurofeedback, alongside its accessibility and cost advantages, felt like a real answer to what my practice needed to offer.

So Why Haven’t You Heard of This?

If neurofeedback works this well, a reasonable question is: why isn’t it more mainstream? I don’t want to get too conspiratorial here — I think it comes down to a few practical realities.

For one, neurofeedback has actually been around for over fifty years, and there is a lot of evidence to support its effectiveness. But for most of that history, it stayed inaccessible. The equipment was expensive, and the training practitioners needed to use it well was long and difficult to access. It simply didn’t scale the way a pill or a manualized talk therapy protocol could. It was mostly offered in psychiatric wards and neurology clinics to people with severe mental health problems or people recovering from stroke or brain injury.

It also doesn’t map neatly onto how mental health care gets paid for in this country. Our system is built around pharmacological and insurance reimbursement structures — recurring prescriptions, billable therapy sessions. Neurofeedback doesn’t fit that model, partly because of how it works: it creates lasting change. It’s not something you rely on indefinitely.

Most people do neurofeedback for somewhere between three and six months, and some for as long as a year or eighteen months, depending on their goals and where they’re starting from. I personally recommend a longer course, but it really depends on what someone’s coming to it with. If you have a young, healthy brain, you may not need much training at all to get the result you’re looking for — and your brain can maintain those healthier patterns as long as you’re keeping up basic rhythms like sleep and stress management. If a stressful period hits down the road, a bit of additional training can bring you back to that baseline quickly, because the circuits are already built.

That’s a hard thing to build a sustainable profit model around. From my observation, it seems neurofeedback is used more widely in countries with nationalized healthcare systems, where the incentive structure is oriented around long-term cost savings rather than recurring revenue. In a system like ours, a treatment that resolves and doesn’t require ongoing billing is, frankly, a harder sell.

One Tool Among Many

I leaned heavily on EMDR and somatic-based therapies before neurofeedback, and I still believe in them — they’re genuinely good tools. But they don’t work for everyone. I’ve had clients have adverse reactions. I’ve had clients who didn’t feel safe enough in their bodies to access somatic work at all. I’ve had clients get nothing out of EMDR, for all kinds of reasons.

What neurofeedback gave me was another option — something to reach for when I could recognize that what I had wasn’t working, rather than running out of tools. I’ve seen genuinely remarkable transformations in the clients who’ve done this work. For some, the shift is subtle. For others, it’s dramatic. But in my experience, it works for the overwhelming majority of people who try it.

Why I Think It Works Best Coming From Your Own Therapist

In my experience, neurofeedback works best when the person doing it with you is also your therapist. When I’m running the training myself, I’m not just relying on what a client tells me about how they’re doing — I can see it. I notice the subtle shifts: a change in tone of voice, a loosening in body language, the way someone starts talking about a hard topic differently than they did a few weeks earlier. A lot of that is beneath a client’s own level of awareness. They may not even register the change themselves, but I can see it happening in real time.

That gets lost when neurofeedback and therapy are split across two different providers — when someone is training at a clinic and then talking to a separate therapist about their week. It’s still not common for therapists to offer neurofeedback directly, and I understand why: it takes additional training most of us weren’t exposed to in grad school. But I think more of us should be willing to build that skill, because the two together are extraordinary. Neurofeedback makes the therapy more effective, and the insight I gain from the therapeutic relationship — what a client is carrying, what they’re working through, where they get stuck — directly informs how I approach their neurofeedback protocol. They build on each other in a way that neither can do alone.

If you’re struggling with your mental health — if you don’t want to be on medication, or you’ve tried medication and it hasn’t worked or hasn’t worked well enough — I think neurofeedback is worth seriously considering. I will go as far as to say every brain deserves a chance to try it.

People sometimes ask me what regulating at the root looks like in practice. Not the theory of it. The actual, daily, unglamorous shape of it. So I want to answer honestly, using myself.

The core of my practice is mindfulness, but not the kind that means sitting cross-legged for an hour I don’t have. It’s dual awareness: checking in on what’s happening inside me and what’s happening around me, sometimes at the same time, sometimes in quick alternating glances throughout the day. What’s my body doing right now. What are my thoughts sounding like. What’s actually being asked of me by the world in this moment. It’s less a technique than a habit of attention, something I return to again and again rather than something I finish.

The part that changed everything wasn’t the noticing. It was how I met what I noticed. For a long time I could see what was happening inside me and still respond with judgment, criticism, the sense that I should be handling things better than I was. What actually opened things up, in a deep and lasting way, was learning to show up for myself with compassion instead. Not compassion as a mood I occasionally reach, but as the default posture. My body is achy, and instead of pushing through or criticizing it for being achy, I ask what it needs. My thoughts are spinning, and instead of arguing with them, I get curious about what they’re protecting.

That shift, from judgment to care, is the whole practice. Everything else is just what it looks like on a given day.

Some days that means exercise. Some days it means acupuncture, or a massage, or the specific relief of a bathhouse where I don’t have to do anything except let heat and water hold me for a while. I meditate. I do yoga. I go for long walks with no destination. I pray. I breathe on purpose. I get chiropractic care, facials, pedicures. I do neurofeedback, both for myself and because I need to understand from the inside what I ask my clients to trust from the outside. I go on vacations when I can.

I know that’s a long list. It can sound like a lot, or like something out of reach. But I don’t think of it as a checklist I’m running through. I think of it as a living toolbox I’m always adding to, wide and deep enough that on any given day, I can reach for whatever that day actually needs. Some days that’s a hard workout. Some days it’s doing absolutely nothing, unstructured time to think, to doodle, to daydream, with no agenda attached. Both are the practice. Neither is more disciplined than the other.

A part of this I want to name clearly: I cannot do it all myself, and I’ve stopped pretending I should. There’s a lot demanded of me, and some days what I need most is a space where I get to lie down and let someone else do the heavy lifting. That’s not a failure of self-sufficiency. It’s an honest accounting of capacity. Learning to receive care, not just administer it to myself, was its own kind of root work.

None of this happened quickly, and none of it happened by accident. It took years of deliberate, unglamorous adjustment, small tweaks made and remade, to build a life that could actually hold a full practice, a young child, a partner, a household, friendships, family, and still leave me intact at the end of most days. I didn’t find the formula once and settle into it. I’m still adjusting it now, and I expect I always will be.

That’s the last thing I want to say clearly, because I think it’s the part people skip past. I am not a fixed thing that, once healed, stays healed in one static shape. I’m dynamic. Always in motion, always in process. What I needed five years ago is not what I need today, and what I need today won’t be what I need next year. There are things I have healed through, and things I’m just scratching the surface of. The goal was never to arrive at some permanent, unchanging state of okay. The goal is a relationship with myself steady enough, and honest enough, to keep noticing what’s true and keep responding to it. Day in and day out. Through the easy stretches and the hard ones.

That relationship, more than any single practice on the list, is what regulating at the root actually means. It’s not a technique you master once. It’s a conscious, trusting relationship with yourself that you build, session by session, choice by choice, until it becomes the fabric of how you meet your own life.

Some days it’s easier than others. Most days, showing up for it at all is the whole practice.

You’ve probably been told some version of this: that you’re too sensitive. Too anxious. Too much. That if you could just breathe deeper, think differently, download the right app, you’d finally feel calm.

And maybe you’ve tried. Maybe you’ve done the therapy. You understand your history. You can explain, in clear and thoughtful sentences, exactly why you are the way you are.

And your body still won’t settle.

The heart still races in the meeting. The dread still arrives at 3 a.m. The exhaustion sits in you like weather. You know you’re safe, and some older, faster part of you hasn’t gotten the message.

I want to tell you what I’ve come to believe after years of doing this work, on my own nervous system and alongside the people I sit with. That part of you isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing its job. It learned, somewhere along the way, that the world required constant vigilance, and it was right. It adapted to the conditions it was handed. The problem was never that your alarm system is broken. The problem is that it learned its job too well, in a world that gave it good reason to.

That’s a different story than the one most of us were told. And the difference matters, because it changes what healing is for.

Two stories that both leave you stuck

There are two dominant stories about why you feel the way you feel, and I think both of them fail you.

The first is the wellness story: your suffering is a personal optimization problem. Regulate your breath, fix your morning routine, correct your mindset, and peace is a discipline away. This story is seductive because it hands you control. But it quietly blames you. If calm is just a matter of the right technique, then your continued struggle must be your fault. You didn’t try hard enough, didn’t want it enough. It takes real forces that shaped your body, like scarcity, discrimination, generations of stress you inherited before you could speak, and makes them disappear.

The second story is the opposite: nothing personal can help, because the system is the problem. The world is unjust, the stress is structural, and until that changes, what’s the point of a breathing exercise? This story is truer than the first. The forces are real. But it can leave you sitting inside your own dysregulation with nowhere to go, waiting for a revolution to arrive before your body is allowed to rest.

I don’t think you have to choose between these. I think the truth is harder and more hopeful than either.

Regulation at the root

Here is what I hold, and what everything I write here will come back to: the conditions that shaped your nervous system were real, and your nervous system can still learn to settle. Both. At the same time.

You are allowed to name the systemic weight you’re carrying, and also to do the intimate, physiological work of helping your body come down out of survival mode. One doesn’t cancel the other. Refusing the personal work isn’t solidarity, and refusing the systemic truth isn’t healing. You can regulate at the root and keep your eyes open about why the root is what it is.

This is what draws me to the work I do: neurofeedback, somatic practice, EMDR, the slow retraining of a nervous system that has been braced for a long time. Not as a way to make you more productive inside conditions that hurt you, but as a way to give you back some ground to stand on.

Because here is the thesis underneath everything I do. The liberation and peace we long to see in the world have to come alive somewhere first, and the only place they can begin is inside us. You cannot pour out what you have never been allowed to hold. But when peace takes root in your own body, your own mind, your own nervous system, it doesn’t stay contained. It emanates. You become, almost without effort, an agent of peace. An advocate for change. Someone who makes choices aligned with the freedom you can finally feel inside yourself, instead of choices driven by the alarm.

Your calm is not a betrayal of everything you know about the world. It’s the ground the changed world grows from.

I know this from the inside

I don’t write any of this from a distance. I’m a trauma survivor. Everything I share here I’ve practiced on myself or lived through: the disorganizing, devastating parts, and the long, unglamorous road back. I know how it feels when your own body stops making sense to you. I know how hard it is to find your way home to yourself.

I’ve also come to believe the breaking isn’t the end of the story, or even a detour from it. We all get broken and damaged in this life. It’s part of how we learn, part of how we’re shaped. The point was never to avoid it. The point is what becomes possible once you’ve had the chance to heal deeply: how you get back to yourself, back in the business of thriving, back in touch with the organic ways you feel moved to lead and to cultivate change, in large ways and small.

That’s what I’m here for. Not to help you manage your symptoms forever, but to help you come home, and to become, from that rooted place, someone the world gets to feel the good of.

What this is, and who it’s for

This is a publication about the nervous system, but from an angle you won’t find in most of the healing conversation. I write where the body’s stress physiology meets the systems that shaped it. Where the science of regulation meets an honest reckoning with why so many of us are dysregulated in the first place.

It’s for you if talk therapy gave you insight but not relief. If you’re tired of wellness that pretends the world is fair, and tired of politics that acts like your body can wait. If you want to understand what’s actually happening inside you, and what you can do about it, without being told your pain is a personal failing.

Each week I’ll share essays like this one: reframes, the science made plain, the stories underneath the symptoms. For paid subscribers, I go further, with guided practices you can actually do, walk-throughs of what regulation looks like in the brain, and the deeper how-to of settling a nervous system at the root.

If any of this lands in your body as much as your mind, subscribe. That’s usually the signal that you’re in the right place.

Your nervous system isn’t broken. It’s been waiting for conditions safe enough to soften. And as you soften, as liberation stops being an idea out there and becomes something you can actually hold in here, it begins, quietly, to move outward into everything you touch. That’s where the freer world starts. Not out there first. Here. In you.

Let’s begin.