So Much Happier Blog
Feeling Reeeeeally Tired?
“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
Photo by Ethan Brooke
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this year has felt like an endless Groundhog Day-style slog for a lot of people. We’ve all had to adapt to major changes nearly overnight, and these changes have involved confusion and sacrifice. Much has been uncomfortable, frustrating, contentious, and challenging. Living in times when everyone is feeling these things has led to drops in efficiency across all of our activities, and interactions with other people that are increasingly strained by the pressures everyone is facing. We’re being called to think and function in new ways, and many people have been pushed over the edge past where they can find any sense of balance.
Times of intense challenge require innovation, as the “old way” of doing things will often no longer be effective or even tenable. Unfortunately, humans don’t seem to like change very much! Throughout history, there are endless examples of blind resistance to change that was doomed, yet the trend was to dig in and refuse to reckon with change anyway. It takes work to change our thinking, our habits, and to change our own sense of identity—which, because of the endless antics of the ego, can actually feel like a kind of death. Fun!
To cope with all of this challenge, we need tools to foster internal adaptation and resilience. Unfortunately, most of us have been told that the answer to everything related to mind and emotions is willpower, a.k.a. stubbornness. You’re “supposed to” be able to muscle through whatever comes up, and if not, well, you’re weak and useless. This thinking paints people into corners where they think they need to suffer in silence in order to be valuable. In fact, if we want to be the most effective (not to mention happy) people we can be, just the opposite is true! We need to acknowledge where we’re struggling, find ways to vent off and transform our emotions into useful knowledge, and take action to create healthier balance in our lives.
You probably know by now that I find Tapping to be one of the most effective tools in existence for helping us to do all of these things. It’s simple, direct, and it works on all levels, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. And it’s free to learn and use as a self-help tool whenever you need it. It does encompass a lot of techniques that take time to master, but just the simplest version can make all the difference in how you experience your every day. If you haven’t yet started to practice using it, I strongly recommend that now is the time to put in a few minutes here and there to remind yourself of the steps and practice.
One of the things I like best about Tapping is that we don’t need to try to force anything to happen in this medium. We just express the reality of what’s going on in our inner world, and allow change to happen organically while we Tap. How we feel is not just ok, but important, and allowing it can lead to illuminating understandings and change that naturally occurs in right timing for our capacity. Symptoms of stress may melt away, sleep may improve, and you may find yourself feeling a lot less resistance to appropriate change with continued use. (Those are side effects we can all live with!) The name for the specific version of meridian tapping in which I am trained is called EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques, for good reason!
I also want to share an article this week that makes some excellent points about how much the sheer uncertainty of the current environment can wear on us. Of course life always involves uncertainty, but these are unusual times to be sure. I hope you find it a useful reminder that you are not alone, and that it’s ok to be feeling on edge right now. Just don’t forget that you have the power to help yourself feel better about whatever stresses are on your plate, maybe after just a few minutes of Tapping.
Acupressure Points that May Help with Anxiousness
“Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.”
This week I came across an article on some acupressure points that can be helpful for anxiety, and I wanted to share it with you. As you well know by now, my absolute favorite method for emotional management is Tapping, but anything accessible that can help us all dial down stress right now is crucial. If you want to try what this article suggests, you can apply pressure at a level that feels good to you, or you could tap on these if you prefer, and see if you get extra relief. Sometimes, you’ll find that a particular point feels amazing and really seems to get you extra-great results. At other times, you might want to spend a minute or two on each and see how that goes. Just be sure to heed the warnings about not using some of these if you’re pregnant. I also want to mention that the one on the back of the hand near the thumb has been known to induce nausea in my experience, so you might want to tread lightly with that one as well.
Here’s the link to the article. Note that natural health methodologies tend to be poorly funded because they don’t have huge, powerful industries behind them like drugs do, but Tapping can now claim a growing number of well-constructed studies showing that it works across a range of issues. Acupressure is derived from the same knowledge base, Traditional Chinese Medicine, some of the principles of which are echoed in a number of other traditional health systems established long before the Western version of scientific inquiry was born. When treated with respect and common sense, and pursued with appropriate education or consultation with experts, many of these natural approaches can be gentle and helpful.
As always, I wish you and yours health and peace, and the ability to keep working to make the world a better place even through the most challenging of times.
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!
Some Research on Positive Results of Tapping
“If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn’t ask me, I’d still have to say it.”
This week, I know many of us are dealing with changes to our everyday routines due to public health imperatives, so I’ll keep it short and sweet. At times like this when we’re under all kinds of stress due to global events and distressing local realities, we really need to be managing our inner lives in order to stay healthy (in addition to following the guidance of public health experts, of course). In case you still haven’t gotten up and running with Tapping, below are some links that show evidence of how much it can help our bodies to adapt positively in a variety of situations. If you know someone else who is on the fence about it because it seems strange at first glance, you might want to pass along these links to them. Even if you do Tap regularly, you still might want to check out some of this information, as it’s always interesting to see how others are succeeding with Tapping. Now’s the time for all of us to be using these amazing, free techniques to keep ourselves in the game.
EFT International's Research Page
EFT Universe Science and Research Page
The Tapping Solution's Research Page
I hope you find these links helpful, and I wish you peace and health as we all navigate these strange times in which we find ourselves. Have a safe and sane week!
The Way, Way Back
“We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.”
Last week we looked at how much we tend to avoid how we actually feel at any point in time, how this tends to create a life of stress and panic, and what we can start doing to turn that around. It’s true that learning to notice the signals from our bodies and emotions, and building nuanced language skills to describe them specifically, are building blocks in creating a happier, more peaceful experience. And these skills will serve us well for a lifetime in dealing with what’s happening in our internal worlds. This week, I want to add a dimension to the discussion that makes things more complicated, but also increases our chances of success in getting to that happier place.
Being able to tune into how you feel and work with it is tremendously helpful in empowering you to live a better day-to-day experience. On the other hand, Gary Craig, the founder of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), used to say, “The problem is never the problem.” In other words, the reason we react the way we do to current events in our lives usually goes back much farther than the event we’re dealing with now, usually to old patterns and traumas, sometimes from the very distant past. Being able to do something about those, then, is like finding the map to where all the treasure is buried!
Lucky for us, Tapping has been shown through both extensive use and scientific studies to be effective in dealing with old traumas as well as beliefs that result from patterns of experience. These are two areas in which it is generally most difficult for people to create lasting change. Before I mention some ideas on how to work at this deeper level, please note that big traumas are not generally something you should tackle on your own. Though Tapping can be used as a self-help tool in many cases, if something feels too big or scary for you to confront on your own, then don’t! Get help, and you’ll get faster, more comfortable results, feel supported, and deepen your skills with Tapping as you go.
If you find that you’re Tapping on something that isn’t reducing past a certain point, or that you seem to be working on very similar things over and over, chances are that you need to look to previous events for the foundation of your current problem. Here are some approaches that may help:
When you’re clear on your current issue, and you’ve gotten specific about the associated emotions you’re experiencing and how your body feels in response to those, ask yourself one of these questions:
What does this remind me of?
Who does this remind me of?
When have I felt this specific mix of emotions and sensations before? (If it’s all very familiar, when was the first time you can remember feeling like this, or the worst time?)
What does this seem like a metaphor for (as in, if your neck hurts, what in your life is a pain in the neck?)
In asking these questions, you may find more layers of your issue becoming clear to you. If you do realize new connections, your next step will be to Tap on the original event/cause and all the little pieces of your memory that bother you. These might be sounds, images, smells, words that were said, decisions you made about life as a result, or beliefs you took away from the event, as well as many other aspects. Try working on each aspect of what comes up for you one at a time until how you feel about it plummets in intensity, and when it doesn’t bother you much anymore, move on to the next. By targeting the root causes of your current issues this way with patience and attention to detail, you have a much better chance of feeling better about where you are in the present.
As you go about this kind of work, remember that we all have many, many distressing memories of varying intensity left over from past experiences, so you’re not going to clean them all up in a day! Even if what you’re working on feels thoroughly manageable, don’t go overboard and push yourself to take on too much all at once. We all have at least hundreds of unpleasant recollections that would probably benefit from Tapping. With the time you have, work with whatever seems most appropriate in the moment, celebrate whatever gains you’ve made in how you feel about the past, including any helpful realizations you’ve had, and come back to the rest at a later date. Any progress you can get to is valuable. If you get a sense that you’ve done enough for the day, or that today is not the right time to work on something specific, honor that intuition and make a note to come back to it later. It’s also helpful to keep notes on what you’ve worked on, since it’s easy to forget, and having a record is a way to be able to look back and appreciate yourself for all the good work you’ve done.
The more you address older patterns and root causes of why you feel and react the way you do, the more you’ll find that you can maintain a sense of calm as you go through your life, which will always include daily ups and downs. It’s hard to communicate just how much of a difference doing this kind of work can make over time, but if you give it a try, you’ll quickly start to see what I mean. Having the courage to get real about how you really feel and do something about it can be a challenge at first, but you will also find that as you practice, it becomes a tremendous relief to know that you have the opportunity to bring improvement to your emotional world, and to feel that happening every time you spend a few minutes Tapping.
Living Your Best Life
“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.”
One of the reasons why sometimes people new to Tapping have trouble getting results is that they have trouble identifying their emotions and noticing what’s going on with their bodies. For numerous reasons, in many cultures, we’re taught to deny the importance of signals from our bodies just as we’re taught that emotions are mostly useless and best ignored; often we’re encouraged to place the value of intellectual learning and displays of mental ability above all else. The body may be seen as just a sensory apparatus and a vehicle for moving the brain around in space. Only athletes are generally exhorted to pay more attention to their bodies because this is necessary to gain competitive advantage. Even then, they’re often told that they should push through pain without considering any more sophisticated methods for understanding an unthinkably complex body-mind system. The upshot is that most of us have no experience with tuning in receptively to what the body might be trying to tell us, particularly when doing so means feeling discomfort. Not only are most of us profoundly uncomfortable with feeling discomfort, but we also may not even have the language to describe physical sensations, because we’ve spent a lifetime running from them. Add in the very common knee-jerk fear reaction so many of us have about what pain might MEAN to us and our lives, and we have a tangled, heavy ball of obstructive habits that can be hard to contend with. It can also prevent our learning to build bridges to understanding our bodies’ signals in ways that only we can, and then taking appropriate action.
If you want to enjoy the best possible experience of life, here are some ideas on how to unwind this unfortunate tangle and free up energy for the creation of more synergy with your body and its innate intelligence:
Consider what an incredible thing your body is, and how much it does for you every day. It allows you to perceive the vast and varied world around you with your senses; it processes all the air and fuel you feed it and turns that into energy; it allows you to think, feel, and move around at will, and it maintains a million delicately balanced processes that allow you to all of this at all times, throughout thousands of changing internal and external conditions both seen and unseen. Do you think, just maybe, it might be possible for it to communicate something of value to you here and there if you were willing to listen?
Last week we looked at a few ways to get started with meditation. One of the reasons why it can be such an advantage to learn to work constructively with your mind rather than just letting it run wild is that when your mind is not always screaming like a banshee, you have some space to notice what’s actually happening—including with your body—at any given moment. Until you can create such space, you are at the mercy of a mind that will always try to distract you from anything it’s not creating, such as the other parts of your self, as well as opportunities being offered to you by others and the world around you
Practice challenging yourself so that you can become more comfortable with remaining calm in the face of discomfort. Just to make things interesting, we live in a world that offers endless distractions from outside of us, in addition to those that our busy minds create. It’s so easy to seek comfort constantly through food, entertainment, other sensory pleasures, and busy-ness of all kinds that many of us convince ourselves that we’re keeping our discomfort at bay. Unfortunately, suppressed thoughts and emotions have a tendency to build pressure until they cause an explosion we can’t ignore. If you become used to the fact that some discomfort won’t kill you, it’s easier to make small choices every day that are better for your life in the long term. You build confidence in your ability to grow and make progress through small challenges, which then lead naturally to larger ones. If you’re afraid to feel anything unpleasant, you’ll probably always stay stuck right where you are. Conversely, a little courage put into action will multiply until you’re hard to stop
Work on handling your fearful reactions to noticing how you actually feel. Feeling, naming, and being willing to work with what’s true for you leads to awesome power, but it takes work to build these skills, and as you do so, you’ll discover a bunch of stuff that it’s not fun for you to look at. This is ok and completely normal! Trust me, everyone experiences stress and panic when faced with the idea of injury, illness, uncomfortable emotions, restrictions, and eventual death, but all of these are a normal part of the human experience, and finding peace with them is both possible and healthy. Too many of us live our lives in an almost-constant state of stress and panic about this, that, or the other thing, and this takes a major toll on our physical and mental resourcefulness, our capacity for enjoying life, and our long-term health. States of high stress can be useful when your life is at immediate risk, but if that’s not the case right now, that stress is killing you. When you have a high-stress reaction to something that is not life-threatening, in other words, an overreaction, it’s time to lovingly dial it down, and I know of no faster, easier, or simpler way to do this than through Tapping. Lots of other tools can help, like deep breathing, exercise/movement, talking or journaling, etc., but as you probably know, Tapping’s my favorite!
With practice, you become more able to patiently and receptively confront what’s going on in your internal world, identify it descriptively, and endure the initial discomfort of doing this until the Tapping begins to bring you relief. If you can’t allow yourself to notice your emotions and how they express themselves through your bodily sensations, you may not be able to get the results (the on-demand relief and clarity) you want, and that’s waiting for you once you create the space for it to emerge.
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.
"Stuff" That's Not Yours
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.”
Unless you’re a hermit on a mountaintop, you have to deal with the ups and downs of the other people in your life, and surrounding you on this planet. Doing so is one of the biggest long-term challenges we face. I mean, imagine if everyone else in the world was completely at peace, and all you had to worry about was your own thoughts, emotions, and projects! Life would surely be a lot simpler! Come to think of it, that’s a pretty nice fantasy that might rank up there with an endless beach vacation. But it sure isn’t the life we live.
In reality, all the people around us are striving and often struggling with plenty of their own challenges. They’ve built up a lifetime of experiences that influence them in the present. They are working through confusion and old, unprocessed emotions just as we are. Even if they’re all doing their utter best, being around them won’t always be easy. You know how sometimes you can walk into a room and just feel immediately that there’s a dangerous charge in the air? Or take one look at someone’s face and realize that you’ve landed in the middle of a whole situation not of your making? Uh oh. Now what do you do?
There are, of course, many ways to react to someone else’s outpouring of emotion. Many of them are not terribly helpful, and you’ve probably tried and failed enough in this arena to know exactly what I mean. Sometimes it seems like you just can’t win around others’ big emotions! The good news is that, the more you do your own work on how you feel about your own old stuff, the easier it is not to be inappropriately drawn into other people’s emotions about theirs. It’s not that you’ll lose your ability to be compassionate, and offer that person empathy regarding their situation, but you won’t be automatically dragged down by what they’re experiencing. This is much better for everyone. You won’t be exhausted by reflexively getting upset whenever someone around you is; you’ll also stay more resourceful when someone else is in need. They can go through their own experiences while having someone more stable in the room, who can better support them for not having metaphorically jumped into the hole with them. Everything becomes a bit easier when you can be calmer. When you don’t immediately get upset around someone emotional, you have a lot more leeway to find better options for responding.
The best way I’ve ever found to de-fang our knee-jerk responses to others’ emotional overwhelm is to use Tapping to work on past events from our lives that still rankle and form the stuff of our greatest regrets and resentments. We all make mistakes, and so do the people who have come into contact with us at every point in our lives. Even someone who has lived the tamest possible life will have collected some unfortunate, hurtful experiences. Some people will have many more. Tapping doesn’t erase bad memories, but it does make them a lot less painful, and it also helps us to put them into healthier context. This, in turn, makes it easier to understand and forgive the others involved so that we can feel free of limitations that came into being as a direct result of those experiences.
You’re always going to be aware of other people’s emotional stuff, but you can build your ability not to be too distressed by someone else’s emotional state when it has little or nothing to do with you. People who are addicted to drama might not like your new, calmer demeanor, but only you get to decide what level of emotional involvement is right and balanced for you in any situation. As long as you’re still able to offer sympathy and caring, most people will appreciate your ability to remain grounded and open rather than reactive around their emotions. This frees them to feel as they do without worrying that you are very negatively impacted, and outbursts become easier for everyone to deal with and recover from. When we fear emotions less, they can become the useful signposts they are meant to be, and we can all live more balanced lives together.
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!
Ripples from Within
“To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.”
Sometimes, life happens. Despite best-laid plans, things come up and prevent the smooth flow of achievement we hoped for. Sometimes, disruptions come in packs, so that we feel like there’s an onslaught of resistance to our progress. This kind of confluence happens to all of us, as frustrating as that is.
More maddening still can be a similar kind of experience arising from the workings of internal factors. When what stops you is external, at least what’s happening is concrete and reasonably easy to explain to others! When it’s all happening inside you, it can be a lot harder to understand and deal with, in part because most of us have been brought up to think that we should be in control of the internal stuff—thoughts, emotions, even our bodily functions. And while we do have a lot of opportunity to optimize these through our daily choices, many aspects of the internal landscape are not necessarily within our conscious control. That’s why there’s a term for the subconscious, that which is not available to our conscious mind—and this portion of us is vast!
It’s therefore unreasonable to assume that our internal world will hold no surprises. And yet, as soon as many of us have an internal experience we don’t understand, we freak out, judge ourselves as weak or borderline crazy, and spiral down into further unnecessary stress about something that’s actually quite normal. Only if one is dead set on seeing oneself as mind only is it upsetting to deal with these other factors. Unfortunately, Western culture has emphasized the importance of mental functioning over all else for millennia, and has simultaneously vilified our more mysterious aspects. In doing so, it has discouraged our connection with our own underground stores of wisdom and intuition, and made us into an often shallow, ego-aligned culture that arrogantly insists that everything important happens in, and can be solved with, the mind.
There’s a lot of emerging scientific evidence in the field of epigenetics inviting us to acknowledge the influence of environment on gene expression and bodily function, and our thoughts and emotions are acknowledged to be a part of that environment. Given what we know about stress and its long-term corrosive effect on the body, I find this to be a pretty common-sense concept, and it seems obvious, then, that it would be smart to do what we can to see management of internal factors like thoughts and emotions as a necessary and logical aspect of managing our health and wellness.
One reason why many people never begin this venture is that, once you turn your attention inward, the amount of stored-up stuff can begin to seem overwhelming, like the lair of a lifelong hoarder! Make no mistake, it takes real courage to confront this backlog and not immediately run screaming. And yet, using a brilliant tool like Tapping can help us to take things a little, manageable bit at a time, and even enjoy and celebrate the process as we would with any other project. Things hidden in the subconscious can rise in helpful ways to the levels of your daily comprehension, allowing you to make better sense of yourself and your life. As you begin to manage your inner world habitually, you gain comfort, confidence, and skills that, like riding a bike, can serve you for a lifetime even if you take a break from them for a while now and then.
How about if we just start to notice when things seem out of balance in our internal world, and just give ourselves a little time to lovingly listen to the rumblings and express rather than repress? If you just allow yourself to Tap, breathe, and acknowledge how you feel, you might find that relief is easier than you thought possible. Everyone has to deal with challenging or confusing thoughts and emotions sometimes, but the more you make space for them and offer them some attention, the more you’ll find the value in this process and in the helpful information that accessing them will produce. When you feel unsettled, try doing just a couple of round of Tapping and see if it helps! Sometimes it really is that simple.
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!