From David Grand's opening talk at this training. Notes, not a transcript: his framing in brief, so you can come back to it after the days are over.
Brainspotting is a global model. It takes Western science and Western psychotherapy into account, and it is not in any way limited by them. Indigenous healing practice and wisdom from around the world is not an alternative to science; it is science, from a wider lens than the one that claims the word.
Departing from the strictures of Western science invites the charge of pseudoscience. David's answer is that the charge dismisses thousands of years of accumulated wisdom from every part of the world, and that people who level it have generally never taken a training, received a session, or observed one.
Culture precedes Western science chronologically, and it precedes science in each of us: in what our clients bring to us, and in what we bring to them. This is not only a question of diversity for BIPOC people. It is a question about all human beings. We are cultural beings.
Brainspotting is oriented toward the senses, and culture is where our deepest sensory experience comes from, in our current lives and from our ancestors: sound, movement, smell, taste, and what the body holds.
The human experience can never be narrowed down.
Very little evidence-based research takes culture into account, sometimes by neglect and sometimes by design. Something central to who we are is missing from what gets called evidence-based therapy, and the diversity of the people studied is often missing too.
Twenty-three years of therapists around the world seeing healing in hundreds of thousands of clients is treated as not-evidence. The consulting room is the real laboratory: living, evolving, session to session. Working that way over time makes you what David calls a clinical scientist, someone who comes to know things about the human neuroexperience that brain scientists do not, because they do not do what we do.
He is careful that this is not a critique of other models or their leaders. It is an encouragement: we can always do better.
A global model is permeable: information goes out, and information comes in. When Brainspotting went to Senegal, the instruction was not that Senegal must take in Brainspotting, but that the Brainspotting brought there must take in Senegal, and African culture wherever it goes.
Korean medicine has come into Brainspotting. So have Andean medicine, Filipino indigenous healing, and Māori indigenous healing. David puts this as a moral imperative rather than a permission.
We don't try to be inclusive. We embody inclusiveness.
Brainspotting is built on uncertainty: of the human nervous system, of eight billion people now and the billions before us, of the universe. So the work puts out fewer answers and more questions, each of which leads to five or ten or a hundred more. That goes past the scientific into the philosophical and the spiritual, and that is as it should be.
Even the frame, David says, is a concept: an artful but always inartful attempt to describe two beings coming together in the face of uncertainty, for a moment that is ephemeral and already passing. What follows from that is what follows. It is never the same twice.
This is why a single variable design cannot test it, and why the tail of the comet is the honest description of the work: you never know what will happen until it happens, and by then the client has already moved on.
Every grouping of human beings, over thousands of years, including peoples with no contact with any other, has had spiritual beliefs, experiences and practices. Whether or not it can be proven in a Western laboratory, it is an inherent historical part of the human experience.
David describes moments in processing when parts of the nervous system that could not communicate begin to, and dissociative barriers become permeable. Connection with ourselves, our communities and the wider world: he counts those as spiritual experiences.
Clients often keep their spirituality out of therapy, expecting it to be criticized or twisted. He treats their spiritual wisdom as information beyond his own, and as a resource. Put simply: you do not have to believe what they believe, you only have to believe them.
Asked in this training whether belief could be added, David said yes: the statement is an open invitation to be expanded.
Summarized from the opening of Day One, August 2026.