So Much Happier Blog
Where to Start?
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
In last week’s blog, I wrote about how during these strange times, you may be able to find space for some activities that will support your renewal even during all the uncertainty. You may be the only thing you have the power to change right now, but changing yourself can be very powerful—it can initiate change that ripples out and affects everything and everyone around you. If you’d like to do this, you may be wondering how best to figure out what to work on. Most of us have lots of emotions, thoughts, and beliefs left over from previous life events that could be benefitted by Tapping, so how do you know what you should work on today? As long as you don’t choose anything that seems too big or scary, there’s really no wrong answer, but here are a few ways you can land on something that will feel fulfilling to make some progress on right away:
Ask yourself what has been bothering you lately. If we give ourselves a moment, most of us can pretty easily rattle off the things we’re worried, scared, annoyed, angry, or frustrated about at any given time. This does fluctuate, sometimes based on identifiable triggers, and sometimes in ways that are more unconscious and mysterious. Your answer today may be quite different than it was last week. If it’s one big thing, you can Tap on that. If it’s a lot of things, you might want to try the Tap and Rant technique, in which you just Tap through all the points and just vent all of it and how you feel about it.
If you’re focusing on one thing, you can just notice the emotion that bothers you and how it affects your body as you Tap, being as specific as you can about all the sensations you feel. As you Tap, the intensity should come down. You may need to be patient depending on how intense it is, and do multiple rounds of Tapping to get results.
You can also work through an event using the Tell the Story technique, in which you narrate the story of something unpleasant that happened, starting from a neutral place before anything really bothered you, and as soon as you feel any emotion or physical discomfort whatsoever, you pause telling the story and Tap. If you can reduce those feelings to a low number (two or lower on a zero-to-ten scale), then you can resume telling the story and pause to Tap whenever you start to feel anything again at a later point in the story. Once you can tell the story start to finish without feeling much of anything, you’re done with that event!
You can simply scan your body for any discomfort. If you find anything that stands out, you can try Tapping as you voice the sensations. Often what happens as you do this is that the sensation will move and change. After each Tapping round, you can reassess and notice what you feel now. This is called the “Chasing the Pain” technique, and it’s considered one of the Gentle Techniques in EFT. You don’t have to know why you’re feeling the sensation, you just Tap and describe it and how it transforms until hopefully you no longer feel discomfort. How this can be pretty surprising and defy all logic, but often it really helps.
You can also use the Personal Peace Procedure, in which you make notes on a whole bunch of things that bother you, and just pick one each time you Tap to work on. Over time, you can work through them one by one, and you’ll find that even a few minutes a day helps you erase your emotional reactiveness to them and cross things off your list. Eventually you should notice that you feel better and have more energy. Some people like to brainstorm a long list, but that can be overwhelming. You might prefer to just make a short list, and then brainstorm a new one when you finish with those initial items. Trust me, there will always be more to work on!
Remember that as you go, it’s important to be honest about what you feel and not try to force it to change, particularly when it’s at the high end of the intensity scale. If you try to immediately talk yourself out of your feelings as you Tap so you can avoid them, you won’t get good results. It’s necessary to just admit to what’s true and let the Tapping organically change how you feel. Most of the time, it will start to do that naturally within a few rounds.
You may sometimes get stuck at a plateau with something you’re working on. If the intensity came down at all, feel free to call this a win and give yourself a break. You can always come back to it later for another attempt, and sometimes your system needs time to adjust and reveal all the benefits you created.
You may also find that if you’ve worked on something multiple times and you’re not getting anywhere, it’s time for some help. Some things are just tricky to work on, and getting an outside perspective from a practitioner can help you solve the mystery of what’s going on with the right questions and the use of some more advanced techniques.
I hope this helps you venture into more frequent Tapping that will help you survive and thrive in challenging times. What’s better than something you can do anytime, for free, that feels good and supports your short- and long-term balance? Not much in my book!
For Your Health
“The key to success is to keep growing in all areas of life - mental, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical.”
This week I’m keeping it short and sweet, sharing an article about why repressing emotion is not the way to go. Think on this quote from the article: “…a 2013 study by the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Rochester showed people who bottled up their emotions increased their chance of premature death from all causes by more than 30%, with their risk of being diagnosed with cancer increasing by 70%.” Yikes! While I believe that practicing and supporting your own happiness is an incredibly important goal, if you’re not setting aside time for it, maybe this insight will spur your interest in actually making time to work on your emotional health. If you’ve been reading for any length of time, you know that I’m a big fan of Tapping (Emotional Freedom Techniques, in my case), but there are many helpful ways to address how you feel on a daily basis. Whatever allows you to express what’s true for you and hopefully have some fun in the process, get out there and do it this week! It’s important not just for your happiness, but for your long-term health.
Making Peace with Mistakes
“A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.”
Hate making mistakes? Hard on yourself for every little thing you drop, forget, or struggle with? Well, join the club! Despite the fact that making mistakes is an inevitable part of the human condition, prevailing cultures often tell us in a variety of ways that they are unacceptable (as are we when we make them). Right from when we’re born, we may get yelled at or disciplined by overwhelmed, sleep-deprived parents for crying, which is our only method of communicating at this point. Or for any behavior that’s difficult for the parent to handle, even if it’s totally normal. In school, we may get in trouble for mistakes, as well as any non-conformist behavior. Anyone outside our family may have very different expectations of children, and make nasty comments or give us the stink eye in an attempt to dominate and control us when they see us as unruly. Parents struggling to make ends meet may communicate in many small ways that the stakes are high across the board, and the family can’t afford to make any missteps. Even if adults think their actions reflect valid concerns, and are intended for our own good, we get the message over and over that stepping out of line is a mistake—and making mistakes puts us in danger by removing the good will of those who feed and protect us. This perceived danger can feel terrifyingly real.
The obvious fly in the ointment is that no one can avoid making mistakes—it’s just not possible! Setting up expectations of perfection creates an awful, impossible standard. When we’re too young to think for ourselves, we blindly take on this expectation of ourselves as it’s fed to us. This sets up a poisonous relationship with our self-image that festers in the subconscious, where this tension remains as an invisible, unconsidered habit. The consequences to our happiness and success can be devastating until we are able to consciously see this dichotomy for what it is, and decide to reject it. We then have to do the hard work of unmaking the old habit and forging new ones.
Unfortunately, though, we aren’t likely to get a whole lot of support in this. Most people have been taught patterns of self-shaming, which makes them unsympathetic to anyone who is trying to break free. Considered or not, their reaction may be, “Everyone tries to make me feel bad about myself. Why should you get off scot free? You think you’re so much better than I am?” Some people will try to shame us for their own ends, as a way to grab power and manipulate us. From a practical standpoint, this actually isn’t surprising—it’s one of the most effective tactics out there for those unscrupulous enough to use it deliberately. It’s also what they’ve been taught to do through observation of others. If you want to break the old habit of reflexive self-shaming, you’ll need to be willing to stand up to a firestorm of resistance from yourself and others, all of which may tempt you to think you’re a bad person because you’re not perfect. But you never have been and never will be perfect while you’re alive, because again, this is what it is to be human. “Perfection” is impossible, and while we’re at it, thoroughly subjective! You know, just in case this isn’t all confusing enough.
In the process of working through your tendency to be reflexively, immediately horrified and deeply frightened by making a mistake, you will be confronting a depth of feeling that is uncomfortable to say the least. To get yourself through this process, I recommend that you do a lot of Tapping! Whenever you make even a small mistake, let yourself notice how you feel instead of trying to ignore it, and Tap down the worst of your upset. When you do this repeatedly, the idea that you don’t have to be perfect to be good and to deserve happiness will start to sound more true, more normal. Yes, plan to atone for ways in which your mistakes have affected others, but know that this too becomes easier when you Tap. When you’re not being crushed under the weight of your own emotions, it’s possible to empathize with someone else even when you’re the one causing them difficulty. It becomes less tempting for you to remain defensive. You may create a greater capacity for compassion and listening, and more willingness to stop trying to hold others in your life to impossible standards as well. Note that as always, if you get hung up at any point, you may want to find instruction to get beyond a plateau, or consult a professional if you need assistance with anything traumatic.
Beyond improving your tendency toward overreaction, and despite the fact that this may seem out of reach at the moment, you may also find that you can come to value some opportunities that mistakes may afford, such as:
This drives parents nuts, but some things we only truly learn through experience. Sometimes you can dole out advice you’re blue in the face, but it won’t do anyone any good! People may need to see a situation play out in real time with an emotional punch to understand what it all means. Some things will only sink in on a deep level when we make a mistake. Then, we’ll never forget the lesson because it was so vivid.
Sometimes creative ideas come to us in the process of trial and error. By getting into the game even when we’re nowhere near perfection, we start up an engine of feedback that can spark all manner of new perspectives and surprising solutions that we would not have produced through thought experiments alone
Through mistakes, we can learn humility by being reminded of our imperfections and the validity of others’ viewpoints. We sometimes need to be slowed down and shaken out of our ruts in order to see and absorb the wisdom of them.
Despite a learned tendency to be hard on yourself, you can learn to accept your imperfection and find peace with human errors. Maybe you’ve never credited all the ways in which mistakes have saved you from experiencing far worse things because of past experience. Take a moment now and think about this: In what ways have you learned from your mistakes throughout your life, what have they saved you from, and how can you remember to appreciate what you’ve learned? By changing the stories you tell to include this appreciation, you can build the habit of seeing mistakes as broadening experiences that may hold greater blessings than you would ever have thought in the first flush of realization. When you’re less afraid of your own harsh judgment, you’re less afraid of a messy existence in which you can try, fail, learn, and succeed—then rinse and repeat.
Remembering to Tap
“All the things that are worth doing take time. ”
Do you “forget” to Tap? I have noticed that, even when someone has become aware of the usefulness of a tool such as Tapping, s/he is likely to remain resistant to using it consistently. While there may be many reasons for this (the pace of modern life, which makes it hard to find time for new endeavors; the fact that new habits take time to take hold; a societal notion that devoting time to self-care is profoundly selfish; etc.), I think one of the most limiting reasons is the human tendency to resist anything unpleasant—and emotions are often initially unpleasant. In fact, that’s part of their most basic value! They pack a punch! They have the power to get our attention, flagging us down when our own values are being violated to an unacceptable extent. We could be using them as an early warning signal that some action is appropriate, decide what needs to be done, and do it. It’s so simple, really. Instead, we’ve been miseducated to revile, deny and stuff down any hint of normal emotion until it builds up and explodes, or slowly, silently contributes to the development of long-term illness. Not exactly the stuff of genius.
It’s true that in order to work with your emotions, it’s necessary to become conscious of them. You don’t have to dive in and wallow, but you do need to allow awareness of your emotions to rise to the level of your conscious mind. In doing so, you will experience some discomfort. But you experience emotional discomfort anyway in the course of a normal day—you just don’t normally make room to address emotions when they arise within a constructive framework. When you intentionally open a path for your emotions to communicate with you, and then Tap through what shows up, you relieve any building pressure, free up previously trapped energy for more useful purposes, and gain clarity on what you want and how you might create it.
Back to the initial discomfort of actually allowing yourself to feel your emotions, then. When you start your Tapping process, you may need to just acknowledge that you’re not enjoying yourself. It’s ok to start with something like, “I hate this,” or “I feel selfish,” or “I feel ridiculous.” Once you get going, you should find that the emotions you’re working on reduce in intensity until it’s more of a relief to Tap on them. Instead of waiting until they’re debilitating, you’ll find yourself more drawn to early intervention. With practice, you’ll build confidence that when you take a little time for Tapping, the initial rush of emotion you uncover will soon become a source of helpful insights, and wane to more manageable levels.
When you know that you’re not powerless in the face of your more difficult emotions, working with them becomes, if not a pleasure, at least a far more fulfilling part of your life. Even if I know that I’m about to choose an experience in which I’m going to need to rant and rave, or cry, or realize my own misdeeds while I Tap, I would prefer to regularly do that than to bottle everything up to avoid these moments. I’ve learned to look forward to the catharsis and the calm I experience afterward, as well as the physical relaxation that replaces the stress and tension of avoidance. Not to mention my evolution toward a calmer, more resourceful resting state, which allows me to live my daily life without such wild swings of unnecessarily loud emotion.
If you’ve been reading for a while, and you still avoid Tapping, ask yourself why. Whatever your reason, I promise that it’s Tappable! Start with that, and when you’ve reduced it, pick something else that’s bothering you and Tap away. So much more calmness and peace await you!
A Ton of Great Free Info!
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
This week we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for a special announcement. Every year, those who run one of the largest Web sites dedicated to Tapping, The Tapping Solution, run a tele-summit dedicated to showcasing experts using this amazing set of tools in various, interesting, and sometimes creative ways. It’s a great way to hear about what others are doing with it and get inspiration on techniques you might try in areas where you might not have thought to apply it. This year’s event starts today! I have no specific connection with this event, but I do participate every year because there’s always something to learn from the people who are interviewed. You can listen to the whole thing for free if you can make time to do so on their timeline. You can also choose to purchase the recordings if you prefer. Even if you you only end up catching one or two, I think you’ll find it to be a good use of your time.
If you want to sign up to receive all the information, you can do that here. Because this is my thing, I look forward to this every year and I totally geek out on the little turns of phrase and technique refinements the interviewees share. Maybe you can listen to every shred of content. Maybe you just want to check out one lecture with title that interests you. In any case, I hope you enjoy taking a look at the free content and come away with something that gets you a little more excited about making Tapping a part of your daily life. Thanks for reading, and for being someone who is willing to do the work to grow and improve your life. You make the world a better place!
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!
The Gentlest Approach
“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and one of the most loving things you can do is to take care of yourself and how you feel if this is not your favorite holiday. If you’re at all dreading it, you might just want to do some Tapping around that this week to get yourself through what can be a tough time for a lot of people. It sometimes brings up feelings of discontent, disappointment, envy, or even heartbreak, and this can all be quite overwhelming in contrast with the romantic demonstrations that abound at this time of year. If you’re feeling any of these, your mission is just to give yourself some comfort around them, and that’s plenty. If you feel like you can take on more, or if some of those feelings are generated by a specific bad experience, then read on, as the below suggestions may help.
This week I’d like to take a look at a technique that is built for a very specific kind of situation. Before I do so, I want to caution you that you should never work on anything with Tapping/EFT that feels too big or scary without help, because you don’t have to. The whole point of using EFT is to save yourself pain and suffering! It’s not something you “power through,” it’s specifically built to to alleviate discomfort, but you need to know how to use it correctly in order to get the best results. Sometimes what you really need is the support of someone else who can guide you.
That said, this technique is great for working at a distance on something that feels very intense. It’s called the Tearless Trauma Technique. To use it, we start by selecting the thing that happened that you still have strong feelings about. Note that in Tapping, we always want a specific experience we’re working on to be something that only took a few minutes to happen in real life. No more than 10 minutes is a good guideline, and shorter is better. If you feel that your event encompasses a longer time frame, it’s best to break it up in smaller pieces, each with its own emotional spike. Once you’ve selected your event, you very studiously DO NOT think about it deeply, DO NOT try to re-experience it, DO NOT close your eyes and feel around in it, etc. You just stay in the here and now and just refer to the fact that it’s in there somewhere.
Next, with your eyes open, you just guess how intense your feelings around this would be IF you were to replay the “movie” of the event for yourself in your mind (which, again, you will not do right now) using a subjective scale of 0-10 where 0 is nothing and 10 is the most emotional charge you could possibly feel. Remember, this is a subjective scale, and it’s just for giving you a road map of where you’re starting out so that later you’ll know if you’ve made any progress. There’s no right answer, and no need to overthink it, just go with whatever pops into your mind.
Finally, you will go around the Tapping points repeating a phrase like, “This thing that happened.” In this case, unlike in most Tapping techniques, you actually DO NOT want to be more specific, you do not want to tune further into any emotions associated with the experience, and you don’t want to actually think about any of the details. Just make some reference to the thing that happened and Tap.
You may need to do several rounds of this kind of Tapping, stopping after each to see what your new guess for the intensity is. You should notice that eventually, when you guess again what the number might be IF you remembered some or all of the details of the event, your best guess goes down. You never want to try to force anything in Tapping, so if your number isn’t budging, that’s fine. Sometimes this very simple approach quickly helps. If not, you may need to try a different approach. Often, just switching to different language like, “This event has had a huge impact on my life and I’m scared to even think about it” as you Tap around the points will help, as you are understandably feeling something that needs to be acknowledged outright before your system will relax and you’ll start to feel safer to move forward.
If you’ve tried both of these linguistic approaches and given each one several rounds of Tapping to work but your best guess is still very high, then go no further. This is probably an experience you need help in addressing. However, if your guessed number is now between 1 and 3, you might want to allow yourself to just start imagining the very beginning of the scene and see what happens, giving yourself total license to stop and immediately open your eyes if you become uncomfortable. If your intensity is higher than you thought it would be, go back to the previous steps. However if the intensity really is manageable, now you can use another technique to work on resolving every little piece of it, and we’ll discuss how to do that next week.
Good luck with all of your Tapping efforts this week, and remember, if you ever come across anything that you’re too uncomfortable about, stop and take a break and come back to it later, work in smaller pieces, or just wait on that subject until you can get some help.
Ready, Set, Tap!
“When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.”
Clients often ask me how long is the right amount of time to Tap when they’re on their own, and how they should approach it when they’re just getting started. As for the amount of time, I usually say, “However much time you have!” There’s really no wrong amount of time, unless your intent is to work on something with a big emotional charge—in that case, it’s best to give yourself plenty of time so you don’t feel rushed (and you may even want to get help with the process). But if you’re just looking to get some daily stress relief and manage emotions that come up over the course of your daily routine, then even a few minutes of Tapping can help you calm your body and your emotional state noticeably, so it never hurts to just do a round or two in the time you have.
One of the easiest techniques to use when you’re getting started with Tapping is the “Tap and rant” approach, in which there are really no rules, so you can just have fun with it. It works like this: You Tap your way around the points and vent everything that’s bothering you in no particular order. It really is that simple! I recommend that you pretend you’re talking to a sympathetic best friend who will relate to and be supportive of how you feel, and even enjoy the humor in any situation you’re describing. Initially what comes out of your mouth might sound very negative, with you complaining up, down, and sideways about any number of things, people, situations, etc. Usually we hold all of this in, and Tapping is a safe way to let it out without reinforcing the negativity; it’s designed to help you get those stuck feelings up and out so you can allow their intensity to dissipate. Note that this happens organically, and it cannot be forced, so it’s super important that as we Tap, we only say what really feels true. If we stick with it for a little while, generally the intensity just begins to subside on its own and our perspectives shift so that we can see things in a new light. Even if we only get a small amount of relief, it’s still a helpful way to spend a few minutes. Often when we have time to think about what’s bothering us, we tend to get upset about it all over again. With Tapping, we’re at least inching in the other direction!
As with all Tapping, it’s good to ask yourself before you start how intense what you’re about to work on feels. If it’s a general sense of stress and overwhelm, for instance, that’s fine. Give it a subjective number on a scale of zero to ten, where zero is no intensity and ten is the worst you could possibly imagine feeling. This way, after each round, you can take a deep breath, let it out, and ask yourself if the number has changed. When it does, you’ll get to feel how you made progress, and your confidence around Tapping will build. Sometimes, starting with a rant helps you to walk the perimeter of everything that’s on your mind, and map out what specific thing you might want to work on when you have more time. The best results through EFT generally happen when we’re getting specific and working patiently on that one specific thing until the intensity comes way down. However, in today’s busy world in this Information Age, many of us need a way to calm the too many thoughts that are rattling around in our heads all the livelong day before we can even focus enough to get specific about anything. That’s where a good rant comes in as a perfect place to start.
For many people, ranting and Tapping feels great once you’ve given yourself permission to actually voice the negative feelings you’ve been holding in. This becomes a whole lot of fun, and a huge relief. But every once in a while, I run across someone who finds it depressing rather than freeing to focus on the negative for too long. Remember how we don’t want to say anything that doesn’t feel true while Tapping? If this is you, you don’t have to dwell on the negative to the point where you don’t enjoy it; go ahead and acknowledge the negative, and then move to statements about how you’d like to feel differently. Even if you don’t know how or it doesn’t seem possible, just express willingness for these feelings to subside and Tap. That willingness puts you in a more receptive state, which helps the Tapping to work all the better.
There are lots of other more specific techniques under the umbrella of EFT, but for just a quick few rounds of Tapping, the rant can be a simple, easy way to go, especially when you’re first starting out and getting used to the whole idea of Tapping. Next time you have a few minutes where you won’t be overheard, and would like to bring a little more calm and sanity to your day, give it a try and see how it goes! Don’t be afraid to use colorful language and enjoy the process. You just might find that it becomes one of your favorite parts of your day!
Energy Psychology
“We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal.”
This week, I want to simply recommend an article that covers a history of "energy psychology," (which is a broad umbrella that includes Tapping as well as many other modalities) and how various types of such interventions have been shown effective in trials: Fighting the Fire: Emotions, Evolution, and the Future of Psychology. One of the most interesting takeaways for me is the link between emotional trauma and major diseases, but there are many interesting points made that I thought my readers would find interesting. Take a look and let me know what was most interesting to you!
How Do I Work This Thing?
“The goal of spiritual practice is full recovery, and the only thing you need to recover from is a fractured sense of self.”
I'm often asked by clients, and those just starting to use EFT/Tapping, how they should Tap at home. You might know that it helps, and want to do more of it, but feel awkward about starting to use it more regularly. (This is normal when we're starting almost anything new—most things feel unnatural until we've logged some hours of practice.) Here's my advice, and I hope you use it to get more out of the time you have to rest and recharge each day.
First of all, a quick disclaimer! Keep in mind that you should never tackle anything that feels too scary or overwhelming without assistance. Trust your judgment and intuition. If you become uncomfortable while Tapping, stop, breathe, and get help. Otherwise, you can't do it "wrong," so just do some when you have free moments, and you'll grow more comfortable with the process.
One of the easiest ways to start is with a simple "tap and rant" approach. When I first started Tapping, I did pretty much only this, and it felt great! The vast majority of us have been taught in so many ways and for so long to hide, disregard, and denigrate our emotions that we're used to shoving them down and doing our best to ignore them. This takes a ton of energy! When you start to let some of that built-up pressure vent using this technique, you'll likely find that it's pretty fun. All you have to do is tap on the points in the sequence for EFT and say whatever comes to mind, like "OMG I can't believe he said that to me! And how dare she behave like that? Who does she think she is? I'm so tired of all this. I just want to go back to bed and stay there for a week. And politicians, don't even get me started," etc. Really let it all out (and you should always do this where you won't be heard--whisper if you have to. You don't want to be editing yourself because someone else might hear you, and you also don't want to be causing stress to your relationships because someone heard something that wasn't meant for their ears when you were just blowing off steam).
There may need to be a lot of complaining mixed into your stream of thought, and that's perfectly fine; in fact, it's necessary to start with a statement of "what is" for you in order to get the best results. Often people are reticent to really indulge this, as it seems so negative, but if you go ahead, how you feel will usually quickly change. You may find surprising bolts of insight occurring to you, seemingly out of nowhere, that help you to change your perspective. But even if Tapping only seems to help a little, I'm always happy to take small gains too! Sometimes a small change is the difference between feeling completely overwhelmed and being able to move ahead with something or other that will create some positive momentum in your day. Baby steps are better than no steps!
Another simple technique is Tapping on body sensations. Say you've had a stressful day and you feel like there's a knot in your stomach. You can just describe the sensation as you Tap on the points, and allow yourself to notice if there's a particular emotion that seems to be associated with the physical sensation. If there is, you can describe that along with the physical feelings. Be as specific as you can, and feel free to throw in your observations of any images, colors, shapes, textures, or sounds that help to describe the feeling. If you observe addition aspects of how you feel that seem separate from the first thing you noticed, you can put those aside for further Tapping after you get relief on the first item. Keep in mind that when we Tap, we enter a space where the subconscious has a chance to speak to us, and not everything that comes up will make sense. Even if what you observe doesn't seem logical, try to go with it and follow where it leads. Sometimes within a few minutes of doing this, the feelings will change, and that's good. Just keep describing what you sense and Tapping, and before long you'll probably feel a lot better.
These two methods are the easiest ones to start with, but they're also just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much more to learn! Sometimes these bring you great relief; at others, you may plateau and feel stuck while using them. Usually this happens because there's a deeper issue underlying your current symptoms whose resolution needs a more nuanced approach. Sometimes you're just tired or dehydrated and need to take a break so you can come back to this later with more energy and patience. Resolve to keep practicing and learning, because facility with EFT can bring such transformational power to your life. Check out EmpowermentStrategies.net if you'd like further information.
Exploring the Emotional Jungle
“If you don’t think your anxiety, depression, sadness and stress impact your physical health, think again. All of these emotions trigger chemical reactions in your body, which can lead to inflammation and a weakened immune system. Learn how to cope, sweet friend. There will always be dark days.”
One of the things I've learned about working with emotions is that they exist in a complex, ever-changing ecosystem, and interrelate with many elements of the self and dimensions of one's outer environment. This may seem to be a fairly obvious statement, but I find the degree of complexity of these interactions to be well beyond what most people have had occasion to deeply consider and fully realize. In a culture that tends to sweep emotional experiences under the rug as unimportant and even sometimes shameful, we are not taught how to value the emotional realm and healthfully integrate it into our daily experiences. Beginning to do a better job of this requires that we respect the complexity and the mysterious non-logic that governs emotions, as well as become open to adventures of a new an unfamiliar kind as we learn to effectively navigate this jungle.
In the subconscious, where the vast majority of resistance to change and progress originates, the coin of the realm is emotion; the subconscious speaks in symbol and color, in the way our bodies feel, and in the way our emotions mysteriously interact with all of this. A truth that can be maddening to the logical mind and the ego is that it takes openness to a more feminine-energy process than the analytical mind can comprehend to make progress in these shiftings sands. We're all familiar with the concepts of structured goals and linear processes to get to them, because these are all we've been offered. In fact, we've been so entrained by millennia of masculine-energy, logical-mind-and-discipline glorification that we think to enter the mysterious waters of the subconscious and to let a helpful process evolve organically (which, for some goals, is absolutely the most useful process) is folly, weakness, wishful thinking of the most ridiculous kind. After all, this period of history has given us some excellent understanding about how to use logic and discipline effectively, and there are many great success stories that have resulted from these methods. And yet, when you invest some time in getting to know the vicissitudes of your emotions, you find that there are actually discernible patterns that can guide your journey through them into greater wisdom and effectiveness on a whole different level than can be accomplished only with the accoutrements of the conscious mind.
No matter how much you "understand" where your resistance comes from, as my partner Andrew likes to say, "the mind is not the right tool for every job." You can't "think" yourself out of the physical and emotional effects of trauma, for instance. No amount of pure logic will dislodge entrenched emotional patterns that you learned before you were old enough to notice what was happening. This is what cellular biologist Candice Pert was getting at when she said, "The body is the subconscious mind." Bruce Lipton, another cellular biologist, writes about how the subconscious mind is like a tape recorder. Yelling at the recording won't accomplish anything. If you want to change the recording, you have to overwrite it, and that can happen only at the level of the subconscious mind, which is very much connected to the physical body.
To make things more confusing, though, emotions can be influenced by thoughts, experiences, and words we've encountered at any point in our lives, whether or not they were even ours. When we're children, we pick up a great deal of our learning through observation, and we don't yet have the awareness and intellect to discard the rubbish that gets thrown into our paths. The untold number of chemical reactions and communications going on in the physical body at any given moment influence emotion in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, some of which we can influence with factors like food and exercise. Our emotional habits draw us in certain directions. What's going on around us, including the macro of world events all the way down to the micro of how those closest to us are feeling, influences us. How energy is moving through our body's meridians affects emotion. All of these together form the basis of interactions so complex as to be nearly inscrutable. It can seem as though our emotions behave like wave forms as random as crashing surf on an uneven coastline.
If you want to master the art of working with your emotions, as with any worthwhile goal, it does take some time and commitment. It also takes familiarity with tools designed for this purpose. There's a lot of great information out there on ideas for accepting and working with this essential part of yourself, and I encourage you to seek methods that appeal to and work well for you, realizing that learning anything complex may require trial and error. For me, the use of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) has been revolutionary because it elegantly incorporates so many essential pieces of the emotional puzzle, surpassing the utility of anything else I know:
- It calms both the body's physical fight/flight/freeze response and the amygdala, the limbic center of the brain (which deals with emotion)
- It helps energy to flow more evenly through the body's energy meridians, which Traditional Chinese Medicine and other systems have recognized as key to the maintenance of human health for thousands of years
- It gives you a strong, calming focus for your mind, acting like a moving meditation with extra benefits
- It facilitates the opening of a conversation with your subconscious mind, allowing game-changing bolts of insight to surface about the origins of your habits/patterns, and your resistance to the changes you want to make in your life
- Overall, it helps you to quiet noise on all levels and get back to feeling a sense of clarity about yourself and your situation, as well as build confidence that you can accomplish the goals you seek
Wherever you are currently on the scale of comfort and facility with your emotions, I hope you find ways to move forward in your exploration, as no one can be whole without greater-than-average skill in this historically neglected area. If you befriend your emotions and learn to value them for the valuable guidance they can offer you, you actually open up new abilities to blaze trails more quickly and with less resistance and confusion and mess than ever before.
Fun for the Whole Family
“A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.”
This week in the U.S., a lot of people will be spending time with family and friends they may not see very often, cooking up a storm in a time-sensitive sprint toward serving up dinner for the Thanksgiving holiday, and eating and drinking way too much. What could go wrong?
Often people feel a lot of pressure around holidays to act as family members expect them to, keeping the peace even though there are old, unresolved tensions underneath the surface that cause everyone a lot of stress. We try to have a good time even if we're not being treated the way we'd like to be in hopes of helping everyone to stay happy, or at least civil. Any perceived deficiencies in the experience can bring into stark relief the gap between what we currently have and what we wish we'd had in the past, as well as between what we'd like and what currently is. It's a triggering time for many people, especially when we add in the extra demands on everyone's time, gift shopping (or making) for those whose holidays include a tradition of giving, a hectic round of parties, financial year-end activities at work, extra traffic on the roads, etc. This time of year can be a real powder keg. Not to scare anyone, but it's the time of year when the most heart attacks occur, probably because of the soup created by boiling all the above reasons in a pressure cooker.
As I wrote last week, there are times when you're going to be busier than normal, and that's ok. The trick is, when you're busy and stressed, you need to be taking countermeasures to keep yourself sane. Believe it or not, there are some fast, free, simple things you can do to maintain your stability (go back and read last week's blog for more on that), but chief among them that I'll recommend this week is good old EFT. If you haven't yet learned the points to Tap on and the basics of how to do it, now's your chance! I know it may seem like a small, unimportant addition to your life when there's so much going on that's bigger, louder, and more dramatic than the call to pour a foundation of calm underneath it all, but this is something that is easy to learn and that can pay off every day of your life once you do. Imagine being able to help all of your body's systems to relax measurably in just a few minutes, and being able to calm uncomfortable emotions quickly as well. Life becomes so much better when your emotions and even how your body feels are not at the mercy of everyone and everything that crosses your path. The power of having a tool this effective that's gentle and always available has been life changing for me and many of my clients. I know it works from deep personal experience, and my mission is to help others to have access to all of these benefits as well. That means I'm going to challenge you to go learn it now. If not now, then when? What are you waiting for?
There are many helpful actions you can take to boost your happiness and your sense of well being, but there aren't many that can deliver on so many levels all at the same time—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritua—-as EFT does. To really "get" this in your bones, to see it in brilliant technicolor, you need to commit to using it consistently until you have an "aha" moment or three. I suggest practicing for a few minutes daily for at least two weeks, which should allow you to start feeling comfortable with the routine and notice some real benefits if you don't right away. Then, when you're confronted by something shocking, insulting, annoying, or whatever, you can disappear for a few minutes and Tap yourself back to feeling more like yourself again.
Family members will often have very different ways of looking at life than you do, and those may not be open to change. Sometimes the best thing you can do is learn to accept your differences, but that's generally not something that can be accomplished with only the conscious mind. When there are old memories and patterns that trip up our experience of the present, those need to be addressed at the level where they're held: In the subconscious mind and the body itself. EFT does an amazing job of helping us to gently access and lighten the load of stored experiences so that we can become more free from the automatic reactions that arise before we're even aware of what's happening. You don't have to agree with everyone you're related to on every subject, but clearing out the causes of your knee-jerk reactions allows you to decide how you will behave instead of running on autopilot when an old, annoying subject comes up. You'll gain skill with EFT over time, but even the most basic routine can really help you to stay calm when you feel triggered and trapped. Give it a try, and I think you'll be surprised at how a little can go a long way.
Oh %&*#!
“We all wish to be brave and strong in the face of disaster. We all wish to be looked up to for our endurance and efforts to help others.”
When it seems like the world is falling apart around you, whether it's events in your personal life or in the world at large that are leading to this impression, what will you do? We all go through periods like this, and while they may never fully make sense to you, even in distant hindsight, we all want to get back to having a sense of balance, purpose and momentum. In my opinion, the worst thing we can do in this situation is retreat from thought and emotion and deny what's happening (except to the extent that we may be in shock and need some time to recover). The best things in life come from using our conscious awareness.
In most cultures, we are not taught to handle discomfort and stay functional while in periods of intense difficulty. We're definitely not taught to be open, even with ourselves, about our emotions, and techniques for handling them artfully. Both of these skills have an important place in dealing with particularly difficult, even tragic times.
I'll be honest, the first skill is not easy to build if you're an empathetic person, and if you are, it may never be your greatest strength. Focusing in on the moment at hand and allowing yourself to think only of what you can do to help yourself and others in this particular situation takes strong intention, concentration, courage, and a willingness to reach deep into your reserves of confidence for belief in your ability to serve yourself and others. This is more difficult to do if you feel deeply for others who are in pain. But working on finding these qualities in yourself makes you massively useful when the going gets tough or even horrible. One of the most important things you can do if you want to grow your capacity in this regard, perhaps counterintuitively, is to meditate regularly. There are many styles of meditation, so if you do some research, hopefully you'll find one that appeals to you. You cannot function well under duress if you don't have access to a quiet place within that feels familiar and clear when you need it most. On the outward, action-oriented side of things, it also helps to challenge yourself regularly to stay calm while outside of your comfort zone. Knowing that you can experience discomfort without sustaining long-term harm is an important foundation for getting through tough times. You gain confidence by proving this to yourself through experience. You also gain faith in your own creativity and resourcefulness as you figure out steps to succeed on the fly when you're not sure what to do. Even if you fail, at the very least, you'll gain data on how to do better next time. And that is priceless.
Knowing how to be open about your emotions and handle them, the second skill set, is more about picking up the pieces when you've made it through the worst of your challenge, because it's far easier to process emotion in the relative quiet and safety of the "after" picture. If you're dealing with severe trauma, it will be best to work with a professional who can guide you appropriately so that you can avoid being retraumatized as you work back toward a calmer baseline. If what you have work with is more manageable, you can work through it in small chunks using EFT's numerous techniques and often reach a truly gratifying level of insight and peace. There are many ways you can make progress in processing emotion—this is by no means the only way—but I have found it to be the most empowering because EFT is a self-help set of tools that you can use free of charge whenever you need them. Because EFT brings the body (which stores many aspects of difficult experiences until we find a way to release them) into the equation along with your private store of experiences and impressions, it brings about permanent change in ways that just talking about an experience, or turning it over to a practitioner of some sort, can't do.
As you become more accustomed to the process of admitting how you feel while taking simple steps to tap down the intensity of your stored emotions, you find that suddenly big emotions are not as frightening. Releasing them, and allowing in the perspective changes and resulting healing, starts to feel like a natural and even enjoyable sequence. The feeling of freedom that results in knowing that you can thoroughly let go of old "stuff" and feel lighter, as well as get back the energy it took for the body to hold onto that stuff, is a natural "high." Churning through the backlog of old emotion you've stored over the course of decades takes some doing, but as soon as you experience what it's like to get a taste of this freedom, I think you'll begin to understand its value.
Functioning well no matter how crazy life gets can be a pretty tall order. Building your ability to do this takes time and effort, true, but it also gives you powerful options for creating the life you want despite what's going on around and inside you. Using tools that support this goal but don't require you to pretend or ignore your real needs is a revolutionary act, and I highly recommend it! The best time to lay the foundation for sailing through challenge with the highest degree of functionality, and to repair damage you've sustained afterward, is always when you're not in the thick of it. Start now. As soon as things get hairy, you'll be grateful that you did.
Below the Surface
“Honestly, sometimes I get really fed up of my subconscious—it’s like it’s got a mind of its own.”
Now that you're clear about the beliefs you'd like to change, and have done some mental work (see last week's blog if you don't know what I'm talking about), what's the next step...? Now, I recommend working on the emotional side of things. Modern culture heavily emphasizes the mind in problem solving, so that's what many of us think is the alpha and the omega of making progress in anything, but your belief work won't hold if you don't address your emotional realities. These are deeply seated in your psyche and your body, and they will block your progress past a certain point. The great thing is that with effective tools like hypnosis or EFT, you can reach and work with the subconscious realm of old, ingrained emotions and patterns, which is where these blocks, and the power to create lasting change, reside.
You can do this work alongside the mental work (affirmations, for example). Ideally, all of your efforts will coordinate with and support each other. Assuming that you wrote out all the reasons you have the undesirable belief you're working on, the next step is to address each reason. There are other ways to do this, but since my favorite method is EFT, we'll be using that as the framework here. Using the same example as last week, if you believe you're too old to get in shape, one of your reasons might be that you think you have bad genes. In that case, you can do some Tapping for "I have bad genes"; this is a good start, but it's general, and the best results in EFT come from getting as specific as you can. Ask yourself: Why is this reason true, and what makes you sure? Look for your proof in specific events that have happened to you, like someone in your family having a traumatic experience that illustrates this, or someone important to you telling you this with a lot of conviction and emotion at a key moment for you. When you use EFT on these specific experiences, you are dismantling the support for your limiting belief one reason at a time. If you don't take on this work, all the mental work in the world won't usually get you permanent results, because you have these powerful emotional realities hanging on in the world of the subconscious. You may have to work on multiple supporting events in turn in order to start feeling different about each reason, but you may not have to work on everything similar that's ever happened because of the Generalization Effect, in EFT terms. Translation: To some extent, working on one event in a series tends to bring down the intensity of all of them.
As always, if anything feels too big or too confusing for you to handle alone, get help. There are numerous ways to do this, and so many great resources available to you. If you really want to make progress toward your goals, you will need to break the cycle of avoidance that tempts us all and do at least some of this work. You might as well figure out whether you're more likely to tackle it on your own or with others, and get started. Doing something new will always engender some feelings of awkwardness and discomfort, but in this case, the payoff can make the discomfort you endure worth every second in the long term.
I do want to be realistic and tell you that the process of working through all the reasons that support your belief can take some time. Depending on how much time and energy you devote to this, you will move forward if you use EFT faithfully, but you may not see instant results. Try not to quit before you see any. Sometimes you just need to keep at it. How much work will be needed varies widely from person to person and from subject to subject for each person. I also want to mention that sometimes, we hold onto a limiting belief because we get overwhelmed when we consider moving forward without it, and we use the belief as a shield against change. You may be frustrated by your difficulty with making progress in the past, but keep in mind that this behavior is designed to protect us. Humans evolved to be highly risk averse out of self-preservation, one of the strongest drives there is. Sure, you can try to fight this if you want, but you'll make yourself miserable and waste a lot of energy if you go that route. You can't discipline or shame yourself into confidence—I find that partnering up with the side of you that's afraid and trying to keep you alive (even if that's an overreaction) is the smarter and simpler way to go. Often you'll learn something new about what's been motivating you underneath the surface of things when you allow yourself to be open to it. Try asking yourself, "What's the worst thing that could happen if I no longer had this belief?" Once you have an answer, or several, treat each one as its own separate reason using the process outlined above.
This is the basics of working on the emotional glue that keeps old, outdated beliefs in place. If you don't have a good grasp on how to do the Tapping, review that before you attempt it, and always use common sense, pay attention to the signs your body is giving you, and don't overdo it. Otherwise, give it a try and see how including emotional work can help your beliefs to quickly evolve in the most positive way!
The Constructive Rant
“Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive - the risk to be alive and express what we really are.”
Since last week I mentioned the usefulness of EFT/Tapping in maintaining positive momentum, this week I wanted to share a tip from my own experience about getting started with it. While working on something specific is where all the long-term benefits are really at, in the beginning, for me personally, the best thing ever was the "tap and rant" approach. To do this, all you need is the points for EFT's Basic Recipe, the Shortcut version. Your setup statement can be something simple, like "Even though I'm stressed out, I deeply and completely accept myself." As you move around the points, you just talk about everything that's bothering you in no particular order. I recommend really enjoying the drama of it all, as you would with a sympathetic best friend; also, I find that it's best to actually speak out loud, even if you're not in the habit of talking to yourself! It's easier to stay focused on how you feel when you do that, and being in touch with your emotions while you tap, rather than off in your head, will tend to give you the best results. It's best to do this alone where you will not be heard, because then you'll be free to admit exactly how you feel without worrying that anyone else will take what you say personally. This is not about being reasonable or logical. It's about not sweeping your thoughts, opinions, and emotions under the rug as you've probably been taught to do when they're not so cute, and instead getting them off your chest in a timely manner.
While it's often helpful to express yourself in words either in writing or verbally to another person, this is not only about that. Studies have shown that using EFT significantly reduces cortisol, a stress hormone, and generally de-escalates the body's fight-flight-freeze response. In practical terms, that means that when you use it as you express what's weighing you down, you may soon find yourself much more relaxed physically, and able to regain helpful perspective. This often translates into better sleep, the ability to stay more calm and productive over time, and an increased ability to be restored by rest and recreation.
Allowing yourself the time to do this has the added benefit of helping you to get better at identifying how you feel and why. When your emotions are experienced only as a background haze and a confused jumble, bailing out your moods seems like a lost cause, effective methods for doing so an unsolvable mystery. When you start to gain clarity about what's going on in there, only then can you address issues in ways that actually solve problems. When you can access clarity quickly and easily, which is a skill you gain over time with Tapping, you waste a lot less time. You can make better decisions and take appropriate action without delay. Everything in your life becomes more efficient. You start to feel more empowered to change your life for the better, whether anyone else changes around you or not. What may once have seemed a somewhat self-indulgent leap of faith proves itself to be a powerful tool for supporting happiness and productivity.
After getting relief through the Tap-and-rant process, eventually the specific things that are bothering you will tend to stand out more starkly. That's when working on each one in turn will tend to produce better progress for you. A wider range of techniques may be required if you really want to make lasting change in specific areas. You can learn these online or in books, or you may prefer to take classes or work with a practitioner who can guide you. This can be a very comforting option, and is also a more appropriate option when what you want to change seems too big, too confusing, or too scary to confront on your own.
However you choose to do it, I hope you'll get started with Tapping and start to leverage its many benefits for yourself. If you're someone who is already perfectly happy with your life as it is, well, good for you! If not, Tapping is a simple, free way to start improving it. As with meditation, you can get noticeable benefits from spending just minutes per day on it; unlike with most meditation, though, you're doing something active rather than struggling to quiet your mind in stillness, so it's easier for many stressed-out modern people to begin. Plus, the benefits are often easy to notice immediately, which helps you want to keep it up. Once you understand what it can do, you'll probably only wish you'd had access to it sooner!