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Change - One Tap at a Time

"I've been cheated in my life so I deserve to eat what I want!"

June spoke these words through her tears. Her doctor had told her that her blood glucose level was unusually high.

"I don't want to alarm you ," the doctor had said, "but you need to come back in three months for another fasting blood test. We don't want to diagnose diabetes yet. We need several readings. But with the history of diabetes in your family, with your being overweight by about 50 pounds, and all your chronic pain and bone issues, diabetes could seriously affect your already compromised lifestyle...and maybe your life."

June's doctor explained the reasons why diabetes as a lifestyle could be particularly dangerous. For an older adult it could lead to blindness, it contributes to heart disease, and can lead to diabetic neuropathy—losing the sensation of touch in feet, for example. If June developed a sore, or picked up a splinter the wound could fester and she might not be aware of it until the infection was serious and her foot might even have to be amputated.

"You already have a number of medical problems, " June's doctor said, "Diabetes affects so many parts of the body. We would have a difficult time treating you, and diabetes will make you sicker."

I asked June what she would have to do to not get diabetes. The best thing for her, she said, would be to lose weight. But—exercise was difficult for her because of chronic pain issues. Weight loss had been an issue that she has dealt with for a long time with various programs, all of which work at first and then don't.

"If you remember, Weight Watchers doesn't work for me, " she said.

"Umm." I replied. "If you remember, Weight Watchers actually worked fine, but you sabotaged the program. It was you that didn't work!" June chuckled and sighed. "Yeah, you are right."

I have worked with June for a long time for chronic pain. (She is "Sally" in my book The 8 Master Keys to Healing What Hurts). Over and over again she has had the revelation during tapping sessions that she has an active inner band of saboteurs who are determined to make up for what she didn't get as a child.

June repeatedly realizes that she has held on to her chronic pain in order to have an excuse to say no to what she doesn't want to do, and to get attention. Food has been her primary caregiver.

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When Healing "Doesn't Work"

This article isn't about EFT specifically, but it may be worth reading anyway.

- You will get some ideas about how to bring in your imagination to advance a session.
- It raises some important questions:
How do we know when healing has taken place?

What is healing, anyway?

When Chloe came with a pain in her leg, it was my initial intention that we tap for the pain. Tappable issues did come up, but in this session the information-gathering process took on a life of its own. I have learned to go with what is happening when we tap, if what is happening feels right in the moment. As the "Story People" card on my desk says, "If you hold on to the handle...it is easier to maintain the illusion of being in control. But it's more fun if you just let the wind carry you."

Chloe's leg pain hadn't been responding to chiropractic or massage or physical therapy. She described her leg in pretty vivid terms, as "dead meat," cold, achy, and oddly better when she was on hikes. The feeling was intense, a 7 or 8. She had no idea, however, why her leg was hurting.

Casting about for the cause, we couldn't find any link to experiences that would suggest the physical or emotional source of this pain. Because I am really interested in the ancestral themes that we live out in our families over the generations, I asked Chloe about her family. Was there anyone else who had had "leg stuff?" Thinking about it, she was surprised to realize that everyone in her immediate family had had some leg issues: her father had been in a World War II trench and had developed a severe leg infection, her brother had trouble with his hip and ankle, her sister had broken her hip, and her grandmother had had gangrene in her leg from diabetes.

I got to wondering if there was somehow an ancestral "leg story" being played out here in her leg and her life. She had no idea, so I asked her a question that often serves to "start" a person's imagination. The imagination needs material to work with, even if we are "just making it up," and it draws from our own experience, even if the information comes from below our conscious awareness. I believe that what we call imagination is a living presence of deep truth in us.

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Love and Money

This week I heard several stories from people about their relationship to money. There was a deep seated unconscious belief that was holding up their experience.

One woman began our session by saying, "I am afraid I am going to run out of money." Having come from a very restricted life, she is now making huge brave changes - selling her house, moving to a new city, going back to school in a graduate program, buying a new house. She was aware that her family's belief culture around money had a powerful effect on her, but she didn't know quite how to change it.

A man I talked with has a very good job, which used to be fun and interesting, but now is weighty with demands and restrictions. He is feeling trapped and stuck. In his heart he wants to quit, "But," he said, "money has to come from my job. Nothing comes for free. You have to work hard to get it. You gotta bust your butt."

This man had had a carefully crafted plan in place that was going to lead to scaling back in his job and eventually gaining his freedom, but his plan seemed to be foiled now by the economy. He was feeling helpless to make things better.

He too comes from a family with scarcity in its map of the world.
As I tapped with both of these good people, I had an insight into something I have thought a lot about but hadn't put together in just this way.

What beliefs or presuppositions hold scarcity in place?

Both of these people are smart and honorable. They have good intentions. There must be some way that holding on to a scarcity model of the world was serving them.

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Letters from You: Reframing Sensitivity

I hope that many of you got a chance to hear the tapping sessions and interviews in the EFT World Summit. There were well over 40,000 people registered, and many of them were new to EFT - that is very good for the world, and for EFT! For those of you who signed up for this newsletter during the Summit, a warm welcome.

I received such wonderful letters from people about my presentation on the highly sensitive temperament. Many wrote to say that they had never understood themselves until they heard this talk, and they were so moved that they cried and tapped through the whole interview, happy and grateful to be seen and heard.

Here are some comments:

I've heard of the Highly Sensitive Person idea and was fairly sure I fit the category (although I haven't read any books on the subject). What I really appreciated was your idea of turning the qualities around and praising them! That thought just never ever crossed my mind. What a great way to counter-balance and let go of the critical remarks made over the years about "over-sensitivity."

My name is Christine and I have been listening to the EFT World Summit and I just listened to you last night and had the biggest ah-ha moment ever! Everything you said about Highly Sensitive People is me! Literally everything you said I have said to myself or felt or my family has said to me my whole life! I finally felt like someone understood me and now understand why my acting/writing career has not taken off. I have core issues of Highly Sensitive People so whenever I would audition and get rejected I feel it so deeply, and also the need to be seen and heard - but underneath, obviously, being so scared of being made fun of or ridiculed has totally made my career go nowhere and now I see why!

I normally don't write e-mails to people I dont know but I felt compelled to because I literally learned so much from your talk and want to thank you for making me aware of being highly sensitive and that it's not a negative.

I also want to include nearly the whole of a long letter that I got, not because of her nice words about me—though of course they are wonderfully gratifying to hear—but because the real tribute goes to the writer who demonstrates here how deeply she is blessing herself, and her sensitivity, with transformation using the tool of EFT.

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Free to be Me

It often happens that I find a similar pattern recurring among several of the people I work with. This is a theme I hear frequently:

All my life I have been trying to be someone I am not: an extrovert trying to do things that don’t feel right but that apparently make money.

I have fibromyalgia, so I have had to reduce my work hours. I really want to be an EFT practitioner—I am very good at it—but I don’t know how to present myself. I should do a website, but it scares me—I don’t know how to put myself out there. I think I should be on Twitter all the time, I should have a Facebook page. Why am I so scared? What is wrong with me? Sometimes I even feel that I would rather not be a physical being in this world. It is too hard. I am too sensitive, too different.

Nancy Selfridge, a physician who healed herself from fibromyalgia, has said, ”Doctors don’t know what to do with their fibro patients. Physicians hate to be unsuccessful, and they are almost always unsuccessful when they try to heal fibromyalgia with conventional medicine.”

If fibromyalgia is puzzling to medical science, it makes perfect energetic, vibrational and spiritual sense.

There is a quality of energy or presence that each of us carries with us throughout our day. That energy, as it expresses through us in ways unique to each of us, has the capacity to form empowering, nourishing, co-creative, and liberating connections.

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Spiritual Freedom Techniques

Walking the dogs along the creek path behind our house recently, we came upon a little girl, who was about five, and her mother. They were gathering moss, sticks, bits of bark and leaves into a basket that the child was carrying. When she saw us she looked up and said, “We’re looking for pretty things to build a fairy house with!”

Then she threw her arms open wide, her face alight and her whole being filled with the magic of nature and humanity, and she said, “SO THAT THE FAIRIES CAN LIVE IN OUR BACK YARD!!” (She didn’t shout, but feeling the radiant power in her makes me put that in caps!)

Bless her mother for standing smiling in the background, and not rolling her eyes or diminishing the importance of her daughter’s work. How many of us started life with this love of the earth, and our own capacity to invite and shape its magic, and the certainty that if we create a holding space for spirit it will flow in as surely as water flows downhill —only to have that spirit constricted in us by shaming or neglect?

This encounter with this little girl, a fairy herself, has been held suspended and twinkling in me ever since. I want my work in the world to restore, support and foster the creative confidence in all of us that I saw and felt in her.

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An Idea for Where to Start with EFT

I tell people that in some ways it doesn’t matter where we start on an issue. Each aspect of the issue is like a corner of a net. It doesn’t matter where on the net you pick it up. When you start hauling it in from that point, the whole rest of the net comes, along with whatever is caught in it. In some way all of it is connected.

However, sometimes the client doesn’t know what is wrong, or what is causing the way they feel, and so being more general might be a way of beginning in this case. If you are alert you will pick up all the cues and clues you need to begin to narrow the focus of the work. Often during the tapping something will pop into the person’s head, to their surprise and maybe astonishment – buried memories, insights, beliefs, as if some inner part has relaxed enough to offer up something that is caught in the web.

An imaginative way to begin when the client doesn’t know where to start is to ask him or her to make up a story about a little boy/girl who had a similar sort of problem/feeling, and just let the story tell itself with whatever comes into their mind. The story usually has some relevance to the person’s life and the issue. It can be a good source of EFT tapping phrases.

Another way of beginning generally that elicits specifics that I like to use is a template that I have adapted from NLP trainer Michael Banks. I call it “Creating a Map of the History of Your Future.”

It involves beginning with listing a general array of concerns. Then I ask the question, “Imagine that we have been working together for three months or so. Put yourself into that time frame and notice: what are you doing, what are you saying to yourself, how are you holding your body, etc. that lets you know that you are changing in ways that feel good to you?”

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Home is Where the Heart Is

“Home… hard to know what it is if you’ve never had one
Home… I can’t say where it is but I know I'm going home
That's where the hurt is

Walk on, walk on
What you got they can't steal it
No they can't even feel it
Walk on, walk on...
Stay safe tonight

Walk on, walk on
What you've got they can't deny it
Can't sell it, can't buy it
Walk on, walk on
Stay safe tonight

I know it aches
How your heart it breaks
And you can only take so much
Walk on, walk on

Leave it behind
You've got to leave it behind
All that you fashion
All that you make
All that you build
All that you break
All that you measure
All that you steal
All this you can leave behind
All that you reason
All that you sense
All that you speak
All you dress up
All that you scheme..."

From "Walk On" by the band U2
Dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar (Burma), Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1991 for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.

"I am feeling a resident sadness in my heart"
There is a lot that is weighing heavy on our hearts these days. One woman said to me, "It is scary to move forward into the world from my heart. Inside me there is a young girl wanting to make the world a better place. But how do you do that in this world? I am feeling a 'resident sadness' in my heart."

These comments come directly from a highly sensitive temperament finding it painful to be so open, and yet still deeply committed to making the world a better place.

Listen for a metaphor
I was captured by her phrase, "a resident sadness in my heart." I love to listen carefully to peoples' language, and I always assume that some part of them is speaking literally through a metaphor. So this meant to me that there was a presence in her heart that was somehow "not her" - heavier, more painful, and only living there temporarily, not at home there in her heart.

It is interesting to use the metaphors that people speak in to develop tapping phrases. My thoughts and intuition here were going toward imagining what would entice this resident to transform itself or leave, and I also wanted to learn what aspect of her was truly at home in her heart. Then we would do our co-creative work together to make a place for happiness and peace in her heart.

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Healing the Future

I have worked with a number of people , especially recently, who have said something like: "Every time I start to get happy or things are going right, I do or say something that sabotages my happiness, and life comes crashing down around me again. It is as if some part of me is afraid to be happy and it thinks that my feeling good is a signal that something bad is about to happen. Maybe it is trying to protect me?"

What makes us sabotage our happiness?
For some people the trigger was a traumatic event. "Everything was good in my life and then I got hit by a truck. Literally. Nothing seemed to work for me after that." "I was a happy go lucky kid, not a care in the world. My mom caught me swearing, sent me to my room, and my dad died that night. I thought it must be my fault. I've been unconsciously punishing myself ever since." For lots of people it is a family belief—"Don't let things get too good, better to be a pessimist and then you won't be disappointed." For others it is constantly being told as a child that you are too loud, too smart, too energetic, too much—the implication was "be less and we will like you better." The consequences are that we live in fear, hyper-vigilant, accepting less rather than seeking more.

Whatever the cause, sabotage in us seems to stem from a conflict between inner parts of us. Both sides want to keep us safe from our fears, but they have very different strategies. The most common strategy is to curl up, close down, back off, shut the door, tighten up, preserve what we have, constrict, lower expectations, hunker down, soldier on, circle the wagons, put up the fists...those are just the first phrases that come to my mind. You know how that feels in your body.

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Tapping for the Highly Sensitive Person

Being highly sensitive has its blessings and its drawbacks, sometimes both, simultaneously. Much of my work has been about how to use EFT to heal the wounds of the sensitive nature so that we are empowered to use our gifts in the service of ourselves, our families, our communities and the world itself.

Here are some ways to gather information for tapping with a sensitive person. A highly sensitive person might want to learn more about their trait, and perhaps even tap for the feelings that being "so sensitive" have brought up in them. But help them to keep in mind that everything for them will be more vivid, more intense, a deeper experience of pain or a richer experience of joy.

One place to begin is by defining what it means to be highly sensitive.

*Tap on the Definitions

Does this describe you, or anyone you know?

You feel emotions deeply, and you can't hide what you feel.

You are always aware of what people around you are feeling.

Your feelings are easily hurt by criticism or even a look, and you keep thinking about what happened, and what you might have done wrong, and what you should have done instead.

You feel deeply for other peoples' suffering. It is difficult to watch the news, or to see sad movies.

Sometimes you can slip easily into feeling anxious or depressed, and once caught in the feeling it is hard for you to move out of it.

You are not comfortable in large crowds, hectic environments, or around loud music. You get easily overwhelmed when there is a lot going on.

You are a perfectionist, and you want to be helpful - so much so that you put other peoples' needs ahead of your own.

You do your best to avoid conflicts.

You might feel like an alien in your own family. They are practical, industrious, social, while you are quiet, imaginative, thoughtful and creative.

You have a mission to bring peace to the world. You want to save the world from itself. You can see how good things could be, if only...

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It's the Story of my Life

My client Renee brought me a card she had made for me. It was designed around Mahatma Gandhi's wise and evocative statement:

Your Beliefs become your Thoughts
Your Thoughts become your Words
Your Words become your Actions
Your Actions become your Habits
Your Habits become your Values
Your Values become your Destiny

She had created an EFT tapping routine around this quote. I want to share her words with you, and then tell you how we took Ghandhi's brilliant general statements and Renee's creativity and made them into a tapping routine that you could put to use right now, or any time, on something that is troubling you.

This is Renee's Gandhi / EFT routine:

Even though most times my beliefs are negative, even though negative beliefs beget negative thoughts, I wholeheartedly accept myself the way I am, and I know there is a possibility for positive change.

Even though negative thoughts fill my head, even though the words I use are negative, I wholeheartedly accept the way I am and I choose to believe that there is a possibility to change my thoughts and words for the better.

Even though my negative words become physical neglect, and even though my words are mentally harmful, I wholeheartedly accept myself the way I am, I know there is the possibility for positive change.

Even though my self-harm behavior becomes habit, and even though my harmful habits feel impossible to break, I wholeheartedly accept myself the way I am. I choose to believe that there is a possibility of changing my self harm habits.

Even though my harmful and negative habits are valuable, and even though harmful and negative habits shape my values, I wholeheartedly accept myself the way I am, and I know there is possibility for positive change.

Even though my negative values lead to my destiny in life, and even though my destiny may not be what I want it to be, I wholeheartedly accept myself the way I am and I choose to believe that there is a possibility for me to change my destiny for my highest purpose in life.

I loved Renee's resourcefulness. There is great value in understanding how we stitch together our lives from the fabric of the stories that we tell ourselves about what is true and possible for us. However, I thought her statements had a touch of resignation to them, as if she was saying, "Even though I know things can be different, I accept that I am a person who thinks negatively, and that is that."

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Good As Gold

"I deeply and completely accept myself"

What happens in you when you say this phrase? People who have done a lot of EFT can glibly let these words roll off our tongues without a second thought, and go right on to the next "Even though..." statement. But as a practitioner, if I am paying attention, often I find there is a kind of hesitation when someone says these words. It seems like a sort of dullness comes over them, and they are speaking mechanically without inhabiting the words.

Why is it easier to get emotionally involved in describing our problems in the "Even though" statement, while our attention seems to kind of drift off when we are stating our acceptance for ourselves?

I have heard people say that when they repeat the words over and over in EFT sessions and on their own, eventually they find less resistance to saying it, and it begins to feel more true. So there is value in repeating this statement, even if we may not totally believe it.

This is what EFT is all about - being able to believe ourselves when we say "I love and accept myself." When someone admits to having a hard time with that set-up phrase I would ask, "What can you say about yourself that is believable to you?" I am willing for them to back off from the standard set up phrase as far as they need to go to find something to say. It may be "I am OK," or "I am a good person inside." Even those statements may be too much. I might try "I want to like myself," or even "I want to want to like myself."

So many of us grew up thinking, "Nothing I do can be good enough. I must not be good enough." We probably came from parents who felt that way about themselves. Our grandparents may have had a version of the same belief. In fact, at least in the West, this belief is rampant. The Dalai Lama has expressed surprise at how widespread this self doubt is in our culture. But on the grand scale of things it just doesn't make sense that we are here to prove to ourselves or anyone else that we are good and worthy.

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Why Does Tapping on the Side of the Hand Work?

This question was posed to me by a participant in my EFT Circle class recently , and as a question-loving person myself, it sent me off on a research project. I knew that the side of the hand is the place in EFT that we tap for what is called Psychological Reversal. What captured me in the question was the "Why." I realized that I had some knowledge but not enough for a complete answer.

Even though it is a little scary to be asked a question that I can't automatically shine at answering, especially when there are lots of people listening, I actually like the experience. I reframe it to mean an opportunity to learn something, and then share what I have learned. And I love learning and sharing.

I will give you the direct answer, first. Then later I will probably offer some more articles on Psychological Reversal, a term first introduced by Roger Callahan. When EFT "doesn't work," it is often a sign that there is a paralyzing conflict held deep within.

The direct answer to the question is about the energy meridian at the side of the hand, the Karate Chop point in EFT, which is the small intestine meridian. Each energy meridian is part of a network that is related to a body organ or function, and each one embodies a way of thinking, a story about what is happening inside us, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, our way of responding to life.

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Tapping Into Your Ancestral History

I recently returned from an EFT conference in England, where I taught a class on the highly sensitive temperament.

First I talked about the trait of sensitivity. It is INFP in the Meyers-Briggs temperament types, and the Idealist-Healer in the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. Here is one list of aspects of this trait (sound like anyone you know?):

Abstract in thought and speech
Cooperative
Introverted
Appear reserved and shy
Diplomatic
Empathic
Hunger for deep and meaningful relationships
Value personal growth, authenticity and integrity

Internally deeply caring
Deeply committed to the positive and the good
A mission to bring peace to the world
Strong personal morality
Often make extraordinary sacrifices for someone / something they believe in
Imagination and evolution are the goal.

Seek unity, feel divided inside
Often had an unhappy childhood
May have been raised in a practical, industrious, social family
Didn’t conform to parental expectations
Often feel isolated, “like an alien”
See themselves as ugly ducklings

Rich fantasy world as a child, may have been discouraged or punished for this by parents
Wish to please, try to hide their differences
Believe and are told that their sensitivity is bad

Drawn toward purity but continuously on the lookout for the wickedness they think lurks in them
Self-sacrificing to an extreme, in atonement for their failings
Keep this inner struggle hidden from others

(Resources: David Kiersey, Please Understand Me II; Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator; The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine Aron)

I asked people to share what they most liked and most disliked about being so sensitive. The answers ranged widely and thoughtfully. On the "like" side, they shared about being grateful for their deep sense of empathy and compassion, their appreciation of beauty, a strong sense of justice, their ability to sense what is going on in another person.

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Open Your Intuition with EFT

Someone asked me recently, "What IS intuition?" What I said at the time, while first allowing that we don't really know what intuition is - we can only speculate, is that it is a kind of inner knowing that by-passes our thinking process. It is a teaching from within. In-tuition.

Later I looked up the word "intuition" in my etymological dictionary - the history of the origin and changing meaning of words. This hefty book is one of my favorite sources of wisdom. To my delight, I found that the meaning of "intuition" lies in the origin of "tuition," which carries the sense of "protection, custody, looking after, taking care of." The word didn't take on the meaning of teaching or instruction or teaching until the mid-1800's.

So my answer now to the question, "What is intuition?" would be this: It is our inner knowing about how to honor our own truth and take care of ourselves

I believe that we are embodied intuition.

On the other hand, I notice that people tend to believe that intuition comes from "out there somewhere." We think of it as an external presence speaking to us: God, angels, a channeled source, our "Higher Self," a guide.

I do support the possibility of gaining wisdom and other perspectives from other realms of beingness. But I think that we have an innate wisdom within our own embodied spiritual presence. We are like lighthouses, showing ourselves the way. But we block our knowing with beliefs and critical judgments carried into our lives from the emotional inheritance of our ancestors.

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Good Results with EFT for Everyone but Me

Dave offered himself as a tapping volunteer for the weekly EFT Circle teleclass. He began with a belief that is probably familiar to all of us: "EFT doesn't work for me." Dave acknowledged that he had been able to help lots of other people, but was help-less when it came to "fixing" himself.

This is what he had written to me before the class:

I have only been practicing as a recent EFT-ADV for a few weeks, but to my wonder and immense gratification have had a dozen or so clients all of whom have had dramatic, lasting results. 30 years of clinical depression lifted; 3+ year chronic sides-of-the-head pain to zero in one round, etc.

Then there’s me. Using the very same protocols, procedures, “detective work”, etc., I am FAR from a one-minute wonder. It is not just disappointing, it is frustrating. DRAT! Why doesn’t it work for me? It sometimes makes me wonder “what’s wrong with me”? and I get discouraged. Even though I know that the driving issues for problems I want to ease are subconscious, and that my conscious flashlight won’t penetrate the basement door of the unconscious, so is everyone else’s, yet THEY get results.

I understand from Rue and other EFT practitioners that I’m not alone with this phenomenon—it is pretty typical. But still it's frustrating.

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Healing the "Were-ies" of the Past

I have a deep interest in how we hold the story of our personal and our ancestral past in our bodies and our lives.

Also, I have questions. What leads us to make the choices we do? And especially: as ancestors ourselves, how can we change the story of the future?

I watched the PBS documentary "African American Lives," initiated and hosted by Harvard professor Louis Gates. It is about "the poetry of history, the magic of science and the allure of the family trees" as one reviewer put it, of Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Tina Turner, Don Cheadle, Tom Joyner, Maya Angelou and several other well known African Americans. I was moved again and again as each person discovered their roots through genealogical and DNA research.

Comedian Chris Rock was teary eyed to learn that his great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, served in the South Carolina Legislature, and died owning dozens of acres of land. He had never known any of that history. He talked about growing up in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood and being bussed to a white school, where he was bullied.

He said, “Until I lucked into a comedy club at, you know, age 20, just on a whim, I assumed I would pick up things for white people for the rest of my life. If I’d known this about my family's history, it would have taken away the inevitability that I was going to be nothing.”

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How to Have a Happy New Year (Start Today)

Every January we so earnestly resolve to "be better." Lose weight. Stop smoking. Be a nicer person. We tell a well worn story about ourselves that is full of our flaws and failures, and we make New Year's resolutions. Again.

The problem with New Year's resolutions is that we always start with wanting to be different. By "different" we probably mean "less bad."

We may not stop to think about how it makes us feel to tell ourselves how bad we are. In fact, isn't that negative self talk possibly what drove us to smoking or over-eating or workaholism in the first place? Trying to cover up and numb out those old painful feelings?

I want us to use EFT to help ourselves to be better at being more of who we already are - that is, more of the evolving goodness inside us, right here in each moment.

I loved how Liz Gilbert, in her recent book "Eat, Pray, Love," described finding help. She was lying on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night, yet again in the depths of despair about her failed life, asking for inner help, maybe for the first time.

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EFT for WOE is ME

My own words in this issue will be limited by the fact that I am typing with one finger of my non-dominant hand. A few days ago I slipped on the ice here in the frozen north of Wisconsin, fell hard, and broke my wrist.

I began tapping within seconds of falling. I lay on the path in shock and pain under the falling snow in the deserted park, alone except for my two dogs that were milling helpfully around. Once I could tell that at least I hadn't broken a leg or a hip, and that my arm that wasn't holding the dog leash could move, I just tapped and tapped through the most basic points on my face and on top of my head.  I was using the tip of the thumb of the glove on my only available hand, the hurt hand.  (The other hand had to hold the dog leash, which fortunately is one leash with an attachment for each dog.  It was new - I was so glad I had it!
 http://www.extremeleash.com/  if you are interested)

I was in shock and not too coherent, so I didn't bother with setup phrases. I just repeated whatever words came to me, mostly what I was feeling. Over and over as I tapped, I said, "this pain,"" I fell,"  "in shock," "hurt my hand,"  "don't know if I can get up," "please help, (generic prayer)," "please help,"  this pain," "glad I didn't hit my head," "everything hurts," body in shock," "please help..." 

I tapped like this until I was ready to try sitting up, and tapped some more until I was ready to try standing, and tapped some more as I tried to take small shuffling steps. I wasn't close to home, so I kept up this patter of saying the tapping phrases mentally, cradling my hurting free hand at my chest, shuffling along gingerly through the snow while restraining excited dogs.

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It Wasn't Safe to be Happy

In the EFT Circle teleclass we regularly experience remarkable deep work, as members of the group take on and transform deep seated beliefs which have caused ongoing physical and emotional pain. This was the case recently for Christine, a 40 year old woman of Chinese ancestry.

Christine worked gracefully with a constricting belief from her ancient cultural tradition about the role of women in maintaining family harmony and (therefore) national harmony. With EFT she found a way to step in a new healing direction as an individual woman, while maintaining honor and respect for her group heritage.

Tap along as you read, and borrow her benefits like the rest of us did during the class!  This is almost the transcript of the whole session, so you can see how it evolved.  It is long for a newsletter article, but full of useful ideas for the practitioner and for anyone who has a limiting belief.  (Know anybody like that??)

In this session, we used the Take a Stand process. I have developed this powerful and innovative protocol for using EFT to help people to transform old, no longer useful beliefs that are in conflict with other, expanding parts of us.

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Healing the Heart of the World

The word trauma means  “wound.” It is only in the last 115 years or so that “trauma” has been used in the sense of psychic wound.  Psychic wound – a wounding of the soul.  In healing the wounds of our beliefs about our sensitivity, we heal our souls, we heal the soul of the earth. 

What a blessing we have in EFT, and the other Energy Psychology techniques.  In the use of this blessing for ourselves and others, we can touch the space in each of us where we become a blessing, just by being.  No expectations to meet, nothing we have to do to become worthy. 

I believe that each of us is called to the earth, by the earth itself, to offer the blessing of our personal transformation.  I have heard so many people lament that their lives have been wasted, trying in vain to deal with all the pain.  But I truly believe that what is asked of us is our actual healing process.  It is not that we “get healed” and then we go out into the world to “save it” or do “good works.” 

It is our very healing process itself that is the blessing.  All we have to do is intend it. When we live the questions, as the German poet Rilke said, rather than struggle to find answers, we find ourselves living into the answers.  And there, in that flow, lies the healing.   Every one of our moments counts.

Jennifer Anderson, a charter boat dive leader in Maui, describes her magic breathtaking moment in the ocean off  Maui with a wounded giant 15 foot Manta ray ~ which touched her heart forever.  She gave me generous permission to reprint it.  Her story lives in my heart as an example of healing the heart of the world, just by being where you are, being who you are, doing what is given to you to do in the moment.

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EFT and a Neurobiological Model for Fibromyalgia

Presently, the conventional medical model frames fibromyalgia as a syndrome diagnosis.   As such, it is simply a name applied to a set of symptoms, primarily pain, and the finding of tender spots on examination occurring in a patient for whom no other explanation exists for this state of being.   

In many ways, fibromyalgia is like so many other diseases in our Western medical history.  Our understanding of the pathophysiology of this disorder is reliant on an exquisite understanding of the physiology of pain and pain perception, the effects of trauma and stress on the brain, and the ways the emotions are translated into the physiology of symptoms.

In fact, we are still in the infancy of exploration of these complex processes and, therefore, a complete understanding of how someone with FM gets sick and stays sick eludes us.

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Breaking the Cycle of Self-Created Stress

I recently worked with a young friend who just opened her first acupuncture clinic with another young woman.  When they were setting up their business bank account, and the personal banker found out that yes, in fact, acupuncture was useful for headaches, she became a good referral source for them. 

Now she has invited Joan to a bank-sponsored golf outing for small businesses.  Joan is feeling terrified!  For one thing, she is not a golfer.  And, she hates going to a group of people where she knows no one.  Plus, her mind is throwing up all the self doubts she has ever collected about self-worth and inadequacy.

She said, "When I was in acupuncture school I felt competent and I did a good job (except when I froze on exams!). Now, with my business, I have a hard time putting myself out there.  I have trouble initiating conversations about what I do.  I find myself assuming that people aren't interested in listening to me.  I feel like they are just humoring me when I talk. 

I feel so inexperienced, and it brings up all my feelings of not being as good as other people.  My mind disconnects from my mouth and I begin to feel like I am talking gibberish.  And then I start thinking, how can I feel justified in even asking for money for what I do?  It is one thing to work with family and friends for free, but I fall into doubting that my services are worth what I am charging. 

Help!  How can I truly believe  in the value of what I have to offer?  And I don't even know how to play golf!!"

I am sure that at least one or two of you reading this have had similar feelings...

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I Thought I Had to Tough It Out and Soldier On

This was the theme for the most recent Complimentary EFT Circle class, and it was very popular!  It seemed to touch a nerve for lots of people. 

I have heard a version of this phrase so often. We are all so good at being the strong one, the competent one, the dependable and reliable one.  We have had to learn how to do that because in the past, it may not have been possible or safe or appropriate to express what we were actually feeling.  Or maybe being the "go to" person seemed like the only way to get some approval.  We try so hard.

So many of us have just learned to swallow what was really inside us, stuffing down the words or the tears or maybe even the joy and excitement.  It was all too much. We locked up whatever we wanted for ourselves. We taught ourselves not to want. We taught ourselves to think that what we wanted was what They wanted us to want.

Now we are stuck in a grey world of "should" and "have to" and "better not" and "I am all alone here."  We think we have no choices.

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Dark Angel

No matter what issues we are dealing with, learning to elicit the positive intention in a person or a situation is about the most powerful, heartening spiritual practice I can think of.

You  probably have heard about "psychological reversals," or "emotional saboteurs."  Maybe you know that the beginning set-up statement in EFT is designed to treat these reversals.  They tend to show up disguised as the problems in our lives.

At some point in our personal history, a particular behavior, symptom, or belief system appeared to be the best or safest or maybe the only option available to us. It may still be operating in us now. It feels like who we are now, our identity.  We don't question it.  We soldier on with it. Maybe we got so used to doing/seeing/feeling that way that we didn't even notice when the saboteur began to cause more trouble than it solved.

But deep inside this behavior or thought or pain, there still glows the need and desire and deserving of the safety and fostering that we are still trying to get for ourselves.  It is showing up distorted into a problem now, but there is goodness at its center.

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What Did You Want to Say that You Couldn't Say?

Recently I have found myself in EFT sessions asking people the question, "What did you want to say that you couldn't?"  Here are five examples of tapping sessions that dealt with this question.

#1
I was listening as someone was telling me how much better she was doing since our last session.  The pain and cramping that had made her hands "stuck closed" had loosened up now.  But then she began to describe how the pain seemed to be "moving up my arms into my neck, where it used to be, a sharp, burning pain."  (I always ask, "Pain like what?")

I asked her when she first started noticing pain like this, and she began talking about thirty years earlier when she had such terrible tension in her jaw.

I imagined her jaw clenched closed... and the question popped out.  "What did you want to say back then, or even earlier in your childhood, but couldn't?"

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Mend Your Broken Heart

In several recent issues of this newsletter I have asked this question:

As a sensitive person what concerns and issues do you want help with resolving?

Thank you to the hundreds of people who have responded!  Here is what one person said:

Oh Lord, this is where I need the help.   I have all of the characteristics of Emotional Sensitivity—to the extreme. 

I would like to know how to deal with my extreme emotional sensitivity.  My mother always says, "don't cry, it doesn't do any good; I could be crying all of the time...."  I have been unemployed since August (due mostly to my sensitivity of one particular person's comments and actions and things she did behind my back...I would complain to the interim CEO and ended up being terminated.) 

I easily attach to people—especially men—and have a hard time letting go.

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Old Story: Scold Story. New Story? True Story!

We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.

Alexis de Tocqueville

This quote made me stop and think when I read it recently. How could it be true? The first part made sense, but how could our defects lead us toward excellence?

I got to thinking about some recent EFT sessions I have had, and found this quote a useful way to think about them.

When I first began working with Don, he told me the litany of his woes, which were many.  His life has definitely been challenging, and he now experiences many chronic physical ailments and debilitating emotional states of being.  Don has spent the last 20 or so years seeking healing from every possible source, traditional to non traditional.  I remember thinking several times that he sounded very practiced at telling his story.

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Listen to Yourself

Often I will hear, “You are so intuitive! You said just the right words to me.” Yes, I use my intuition, but what I am really doing is paying close attention to what people say, and then reflecting their own words back to them so they can hear them.

We are constantly telling ourselves the old stories about who we are and what is possible for us. Those stories are so old that we think they are the truth about us, and we have stopped questioning it. We have stopped even hearing it.

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Step off the Beaten Path of Pain

I like to use the fishing net approach for problems like this. The idea is that you can pick up any little corner or part of the net, and start hauling it in, and eventually everything that is caught in it comes too. So you can start with some small incident that left you grumbling, or anxious, or sad.

Whatever it is, whatever happened that day, it is connected to your inner life and your entire history by a fine web of associations that lead right back into your childhood, and beyond. In fact, you could say that this little incident is the latest manifestation of a story that has been repeated in the lives of your ancestors in some way for many generations.

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Too Big for Your Britches?

How many times have we heard the equivalent of "You are getting too big for your own britches! Who do you think you are?  You’ll get the big head! Don’t make waves!  Don’t stand out!”

Someone said in an email:
“I realize that I am afraid to take my Power because I would alienate ‘Them’ and ‘They’ would be afraid of me.  I would be too big for my britches.  There can only be one Cook, one Chief and how dare I think it should be me. 

‘They’ are thinking that if I take charge, what will happen to them?  It would kill them to have to answer to me.  Besides, I may become as tyrannical, bossy, uncaring, bitchy, and controlling as ‘Them.’  I don’t want to be as using, and manipulative as ‘Them’.

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Is Your Heart the Right Size?

I got a wonderful email recently that set me thinking. It was from a New Zealander named Jo, who is living in France, talking about her Christmas plans with her friend in Canada, sent here to me in the US — we are so global!

The theme is global too. It’s not really about Christmas, but about the spirit of love and appreciation and giving.  These are human attributes that we all share and want to deepen in our lives.  So fill in any references to Christmas with your own version of how you celebrate the human spirit.

Here is her email:

Inspired by some of the things I’ve learnt this year, I’ve decided to transform my usual Christmas Grinch spirit into a spirit of giving thanks.  After reading a fabulous book this year, I realised that grumping about the effect of Christmas on the environment is being part of the problem, rather than the solution. So this year, when my friend in Canada and I were planning our Christmas together, we decided to do something really different.

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Great Expectations

I am powerfully fascinated by the emotional inheritance from our ancestors, and how that determines who we think we are and what we whink we can expect of life.

Haven't we all heard: 'You get what you expect!' And “Who do you think you are!”

What if we are even addicted to our expectations? There is increasing speculation and even scientific evidence that this is true.

Well, if we are going to be addicted, we might as well choose some good expectations to be stuck to, right? So why don't we just start out with a positive life view? Why do so many of us remember being sad as children, and now are sad—or angry—adults?

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Rue Anne Hass, M.A. •  rue@intuitivementoring.com

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