The Movie Technique
“Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes. In order to be free, we must learn how to let go. Release the hurt. Release the fear. Refuse to entertain your old pain. The energy it takes to hang onto the past is holding you back from a new life. What is it you would let go of today?”
Last week we looked at an easy way to use Tapping to bring down the intensity of something that feels scary without having to get too close to it. This week, we’ll continue on with one of the best techniques to use once you’ve done that and feel ready to dive in and resolve it.
Once your target has been reduced in intensity on a subjective scale of 1-10 to a low number, around 3 or lower, you’re ready to start working with the Movie Technique, one of the most-used techniques under the EFT umbrella. To do this, make a distressing thing that happened into a movie that spans no more than a few minutes of run time. If you think your movie is longer than that, no problem—just break it up into smaller pieces so that each one is just a few minutes starting at a relatively neutral place, with only one or two emotional spikes within its time frame.
Next, you will imagine running this movie in your mind, and as soon as you feel any emotion at all rising in response to it, you PAUSE the movie and Tap on the emotions that came up and why. You might notice that they arise in response to an image, an aroma, a sound, or something else. It’s important to make these a part of your Tapping, as well as any feelings in your body that correspond to these emotions. You may find that you also notice imagery, sound, or other impressions that seem to correlate with the emotions that are not based on the movie, and it’s important to acknowledge these too. You may find that it’s clearest to work on one emotion or one visual or other sensory aspect at a time so that you can tell where it falls on the 1-10 scale after each Tapping round. The goal is to to work them all down to zero intensity and be able to rewind that tiny piece of your movie to the beginning and replay it, feeling no emotional intensity at all, before moving on to the next piece of the movie that brings up emotion.
Depending on how intense this movie was to begin with and how deeply this event has influenced you, you might have to work through it over the course of multiple sessions. It can take hours to reduce the charge on every little piece of your short movie so that you can finally run it without emotional reaction, but when you can do that, you’ll know you’ve really accomplished some major change! Often, once people have done this, they find that their perspective on the event naturally shifts and it doesn’t have the same limiting meaning to them that it did before. Releasing the burdens of old events is empowering to say the least.
As always with Tapping, don’t take on anything that feels like too much to tackle on your own, and take breaks whenever you want. You can come back to your target as many times as you need to. I do recommend that you stick with it, though. Getting to the other side of this process frees up a lot of energy and often brings a lot of relief and joy that is so worth the effort!
The Movie Technique is relatively simple to learn and use, but it can create amazing results. Work methodically, and I think you’ll notice big changes around old memories that may have been bothering you for a long time. Happy Tapping!