Austin Biofeedback and EEG Neurofeedback Center opened its doors in 1981 at a time when most people had never heard the word neurofeedback, and biofeedback was still being established as a clinical discipline. We were not early adopters. We were among the originals.
For 45 years, through every shift in technology and every change in how the brain sciences have evolved, this practice has remained what it started as: a clinician-led center doing individualized work with real people. The equipment has changed. The science has deepened. The commitment to doing it properly has not.
What follows is how it started and how it grew into what you find today.
As professional and licensing standards for the use of biofeedback and neurofeedback in mental health treatment evolved in Texas, our practice evolved alongside them with a continued commitment to ethical, clinically guided care.
It Started With a Pioneer
Lynda Kirk's path to founding Austin Biofeedback didn't start in a clinic. It started in 1967, in a village in Dahomey, West Africa (now Benin), where she had been stationed as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Public Health sector, fresh from pre-med studies and full of assumptions about what healing looked like. She was there to bring Western medicine to underserved communities. What she didn't expect was to have her own understanding of medicine turned inside out.
After earning the trust of the village shamans, Lynda was invited to witness practices she had no framework for: chants, poultices, and ceremonies that brought people into altered states and produced outcomes she couldn't explain. People healed. Not through pharmaceuticals or procedures, but through the focused power of the mind and body working together. She came home a different person.
Back in the United States, she knew she couldn't return to the conventional allopathic model without first exploring what she had seen. She was convinced that the human mind held more clinical potential than Western medicine acknowledged. She just needed to find the science that could harness it.
In 1977, she joined Austin State Hospital and began her formal training in biofeedback and neurofeedback. These were emerging disciplines that used real-time physiological data to help people regulate their own brain and body states. It was, she recognized immediately, the bridge between the worlds she had witnessed: rigorous, measurable, and deeply respectful of the mind's capacity to heal itself.
Four years later, in 1981, she opened Austin Biofeedback. One of the first clinics of its kind in Texas.
A Career That Helped Shaped a Field
Lynda didn't just practice neurofeedback and biofeedback. She helped define them. Over the decades that followed, she served as President of the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback (AAPB), President of the International Society for Neuroregulation and Research (ISNR), and President of the Biofeedback Society of Texas. These are the three major professional organizations in her field, all led at different points by the same person who founded this clinic. She has held board positions across her career too numerous to list here. She holds a Master's Degree in Human Services and Counseling, a Licensed Professional Counselor credential, dual BCIA board certification in
both Biofeedback (BCB) and Neurofeedback (BCN), and BCIA Senior Fellow status, the highest designation the field offers. In 1985, the year Austin Biofeedback turned four, Lynda was named an Outstanding Woman of Texas, recognized in part for her service as the first female President of the South Austin Civic Club.
Lynda comes in every week. Some things don't change.
The Team She Built
When Lynda opened Austin Biofeedback in 1981, she had a clear idea of what the practice should be: clinician-led, individualized, and uncompromising about credentials. Forty-five years later, that standard is still the filter for everyone who joins this team.
Jennifer Schriever began working in biofeedback and neurofeedback in 1991, before most of today's practitioners had started their training. She came up in the field the same way Lynda did: hands-on, supervised, and focused entirely on this specialty. She went on to earn her Licensed Professional Counselor license and dual BCIA board certifications in both Biofeedback (BCB) and Neurofeedback (BCN), the same credentials Lynda holds. She has presented her clinical work at the Biofeedback Society of Texas and twice at the Biofeedback Federation of Europe. Today she serves as Clinical Director.
Sandy Wood joined the team in 2005, bringing her own Professional Counselor licensure and BCIA board certification in neurofeedback. Gerry Schriever, also a Licensed Professional Counselor, joined the team in 2013 and is currently completing BCIA board certification in neurofeedback.
Every person on this clinical team is a fully licensed mental health professional. Every one holds or is actively pursuing BCIA board certification. Together they bring more than 125 combined years of clinical experience in this specific field.
That is not a number pulled from a brochure. It is the actual sum of the years these people have spent doing this work, studying the brain, training it, and watching people change.
When you come to Austin Biofeedback and EEG Neurofeedback Center, you are not someone's early neurofeedback case. You are working with clinicians who have seen thousands of clients over decades, in this specialty, in this city.
Brain training at Austin Biofeedback is not a device procedure. It is a clinical relationship built over time, guided by a licensed therapist who knows your case.
No franchise protocols. No auto-generated reports. No high pressure sales. No technicians running sessions without clinical oversight. Just a small, deeply experienced team doing serious clinical work, the way Lynda built it to be done.