All Entries in the "Tapping Techniques" Category

EFT For The Small Stuff

Tapping is amazing for eliminating intense problems and chronic issues. It’s just remarkable, isn’t it? OK – that’s the big stuff. Are you remembering to use it for the little stuff, too? I’d hate for you to miss out on the smooth flow EFT can create in your everyday life.

No Drama Required

It doesn’t have to be a big deal to qualify for EFT. Any time your day is headed in a direction you don’t like, just start tapping. That’s how simple it is. For example, these scenarios are perfect for quick release with EFT:

• You feel a headache starting up.
• A work situation is frustrating you.
• You’re feeling pressured by a deadline.
• An issue at home is distracting you.
• You’re feeling a little overwhelmed.

Why Bother?

Maybe you’re figuring it’s too much trouble to tap, or you don’t have the time. But check your thinking here. Are you basing your decision on time it takes to clear a big issue. Think again… We’re talking about a matter of maybe five minutes max! That’s a pretty small investment for immediate peace of mind, isn’t it?

I Just Won’t Let It Get To Me

Or maybe this is your objection: I shouldn’t HAVE to tap on this. I should just buck up and get over it. Aren’t I more spiritually developed than to let this get to me? I’ll just blow it off.

I have news for you: bucking up usually involves pushing down. So the matter hasn’t gone away. It’s just gone underground to interfere in a more hidden way, and possibly mushroom into a larger issue.

Nobody’s looking…just use some EFT to get rid of it!

I’ll Do It Later

If you’re thinking you’ll deal with the problem later, that’s fine. Just be aware that a couple of things will probably happen. First, the concern will sap your energy in the meantime as you’re pushing it aside (and holding it there). AND the problem will likely take more time to clear because you’ll have to bring it back into consciousness again.

On The Plus Side

Beyond the obvious benefit of feeling better, here’s why doing EFT on the little stuff is a great option:

• It only takes a minute or two, with no need for doing the setup. You’re completely tuned in to the problem right now.
• You have no time to build up resistance to letting it go. So the release will go quickly.
• Your focus and overall energy will improve by releasing it.
• With the emotional charge gone, you can find a solution to the actual problem much more easily.

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You Should Be Done By Now

You should be done with that by now! Ever tell yourself that? Most of us do at one time or another. Sometimes it’s because we’ve been procrastinating. Or maybe we started something without the skills or information we really need to get it done.

How It Shows Up

I hear different versions of this from clients all the time. See if you recognize any of these real life scenarios as something you might do:

• a coach was mad at himself for missing a networking event for the third month in a row
• a consultant was annoyed because she hadn’t resolved details of her mother’s estate
• a healing practitioner scolded herself for stalling on creating a separate business phone line
• a teacher ridiculed himself for still being interested in his ex-wife’s dating activities

So here’s what happens when you have something like this going on. You can see a logical solution to the problem. Right? Something you can DO. And you keep trying to get yourself to do that thing. That’s what logic tells you is the answer.

Wrong! The root of the problem is an emotional one – not a logical one. So it needs to be addressed with an emotional tool. And EFT is perfect for that. Great! There’s hope for a solution.

Tapping Slow-Down

Once you’re tapping, this self-blame can slow you down. I know I’ve written about this anger at yourself before. But this “shouldn’t I be done” anger is in a special zone all its own. I see it again and again. It can create big resistance to releasing the core issue.

Sometimes the release is slow right from the beginning. But often, clients get off to a good start — their emotional intensity is dropping at a good rate. Then they stall out about halfway through the session. The culprit? This special flavor of self-blame.

Here are some subconscious forms it can take:

• If I could get over this, I would have by now. I obviously can’t get over it, so I’m not going to release it.
• I should be punished because this has gone on for so long, so hanging onto this issue is my punishment.
• I put off getting help for this when I knew I needed it, so this is the price I have to pay – holding onto my problem.
• I know logically what I should have done a long time ago. I didn’t do it, so I need to suffer.

What To Do

You can tap directly on the issue of blaming yourself for not being done yet. Or just work the phrasing into your setup statements. For example:

• Even though I’m reluctant to let go of this divorce grief because I should be over it by now, I want to love myself anyway.
• Even though I’m resistant to clearing any more of this networking fear because I should have taken care of it 3 months ago, I want to respect myself and accept my feelings.
• Even though it feels impossible to clear this issue, and maybe I’ve gone as far as I deserve to because I’m a procrastinator, I want to love all parts of me anyway.

Let us know how this works for you — leave a comment below.

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EFT To Help Stick With It

Do you find yourself having problems sticking with what you’re doing? Is it hard to just keep at it until you get the task done? It happens to everyone sooner or later, and to some of us a lot! If this is a problem that’s messing with your peace of mind, try using EFT to help yourself.

First Things First

Before you get started, it’s really important to let go of blame and anger about it. That means blaming yourself, blaming circumstances, and blaming other people. If that seems like a huge deal, then just set the blame aside for the time being. You can always come back to it!

The reason you need to do this first is that this blame can anchor the problem. It can prevent the easy release of your concern with EFT. So that’s the first step.

Find Your Tapping Focus

Next, just ask yourself what’s happening here so you have a direction for your tapping. See if your problem with sticking to it fits with one of these:

• feeling fuzzy and unfocused
• feeling distracted
• feeling bored or aggravated
• feeling anxious

Use EFT To Help Yourself

Now you’ve got a starting point for your tapping. Acknowledge and accept your situation in the setup. Then affirm a new direction for yourself so you can move on. Of course, if there is a large issue that needs attention, you should use regular EFT to release that first.

But often, it can just take a few minutes of positive tapping to get you on the right road. Here are some suggestions to get you started.

Feeling Distracted

Even though I’m feeling distracted, I love and accept myself anyway.
Even though my mind keeps wandering, I forgive myself and know it can be different.
Even though distraction has kept me from sticking with this, I’m ready for a new direction.

Feeling Fuzzy And Unfocused

Even though I’ve felt unfocused and can’t keep at this, I love and accept myself anyway.
Even though I can’t stay clear enough to stick with this project, I know I’m doing the best I can.
Even though my mind’s been fuzzy, I’m willing to let the fog fall away.

Feeling Bored/Aggravated

Even though I feel too bored/aggravated to stick with this, I love and accept myself anyway.
Even though I wish this boring/aggravating thing would just finish itself, I respect my feelings.
Even though I’d rather do anything else, I want to allow myself to complete this quickly.

Feeling Anxious

Even though I’m feeling anxious and too uncomfortable to stick with this, I love and accept myself anyway.
Even though I don’t like feeling anxious, so it’s taking a long time to finish this, I respect myself and know I’m doing the best I can.
Even though I’m not sure I can do this, I love myself anyway.

Affirm New Possibilities

Try a combination of some of these affirmations to get you moving in the right direction. If you feel yourself wandering off track, take a breathing break and tap in a few more.

• It feels great to be focused.
• I’m looking forward to finishing this in record time.
• I’m open to forming a new habit.
• I can picture this project completed. That feels so good.
• I trust my inner resources to work on my behalf.
• Circumstances are conspiring in my favor.
• I am calm, confident and courageous, and it’s really paying off.
• I’m glowing with pride at my accomplishment.
• I’m setting a new record for myself. I’m getting through this in no time!
• I’m grateful for my skills and abilities that make this possible.
• I amaze myself with my willingness to persevere!

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Leave a comment below and let us know how this works for you.

If follow-through is a big problem for you, you may need outside help to get to the heart of it. To explore options to work with Janet on your issues, call 520-327-1695 or contact me here.

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EFT For Pets (Or How To Save On Vet Bills)

Did you know that you can use EFT to help your pets? It’s very effective and fast and can bring great relief to your animals AND your checkbook.

Essential: First Calm Yourself

Unless it’s such an emergency that there’s no time to do this, take a minute to use EFT on yourself first. Clear (or at least reduce) your issues about your pet’s problem. These might include:

• Worry or anxiety about your pet’s injury or condition
• Anger at a person or circumstance contributing to the problem
• Guilt that you contributed to it or didn’t notice it sooner
• Doubt that tapping can help

In my experience, if you’re too upset, that negative energy can block the success of EFT healing for your pet.

NOTE: If there’s no time to do EFT on yourself, at least take a deep breath and visualize setting your own concerns on a shelf until later. It works!

If Your Pet Lets You Tap

Some animals have no resistance to your tapping on them. If that’s the case, do it! Some people tap on points equivalent to our own points. That’s not always possible, however. Most pets respond to gentle tapping up and down their spine, so you can try that. The top of the head is another place that’s generally easy to get to and is effective.

When You Can’t Tap On Them

There are reasons why it won’t work to tap on your pet. For example:

• You can’t dive into the fish tank.
• Your pet is too upset (or stuck in a tree).
• You’re already at the vet and can’t physically tap on your pet.

Now What?

Now you can tap on yourself on behalf of your pet. It’s called surrogate tapping or proxy tapping. You just pretend you’re the animal and tap on yourself, saying what the animal might say.

Here’s a sample of how I helped my cat who was hiding in a corner with a large cactus thorn in his mouth, and a piece of cactus stuck to his inner thigh. I skipped the setup.
Then I just tapped around the points on my own face and body, saying:

This really hurts and I don’t know what’s going on. Mom loves me and she’s helping me now. I can trust Mom to help me. I’m feeling calm now and my breathing is slowing down. It’s safe for me to let Mom help me. I know she loves me. I can feel all the love right now. It’s OK for me to let Mom come close [he can be very stand-offish}. I can relax now and let Mom help me. It’s OK for Mom to tap on my head. It will feel really good to let Mom tap on my back.

He calmed down and let me remove the cactus without resisting — amazing for his personality! And he allowed me to tap a little bit up and down his spine. Then he walked away, breathing much more slowly than before and appearing normal.

I went back to tapping on myself as if I were him, saying:
I ask my body to heal itself quickly. I don’t need any reaction, so I let go of any swelling. I ask my body to easily let go of any thorns that might be left. I feel like my old self, and I’m ready to enjoy life again. I love being tapped on and I love Mom to help me if I’m hurt. I’ll remember this next time I get myself into trouble.

Who knows? Maybe he will!

Other Animal Examples

Some other ways I’ve used it are:

• To help a cat heal from a coyote bite wound on his leg
• To calm an old dog who freaks out when her owner leaves the house
• To clear some unknown obstruction in the throat of a coughing cat
• To calm a lizard down so I could catch it to put it outside
• To get a yellow jacket to leave our picnic table!

Animal EFT Experts

There are tapping practitioners that specialize in working with animals, who go far beyond these simple guidelines. You can easily find them online through Google or at emofree.com.

In the meantime, this is a great way to help your pets when they’re in trouble — and to enjoy your picnics more. Just trust yourself, knowing you have the animal’s best interest at heart. Say whatever comes to mind. Give it a try and let us know how it goes by posting a comment below.

To read about surrogate tapping for other people, check out Tapping For Others – What’s The Deal?

Keeping Your Edge While Keeping Calm

With EFT, it’s totally possible to stay sharp and stay cool simultaneously. Is this hard for you to believe? If so, you’re surely not alone. Many people are concerned that they’ll lose their edge if they tap away tension.

What’s Your Version?

This misconception shows up over and over again in several ways. Maybe one of these has a ring of familiarity:

• If I release this tension, I’ll lose my competitive drive.
• If I let go of this tension, my dancing/singing/acting performance will be flat.
• If I don’t have this tension, I’ll lose my motivation to work/sell/whatever.
• I need this tension to make my speaking presentation really lively.

The Real Truth

Tension is constrictive and driven by anxiety or fear at some level. It’s separate from performance energy. Many people believe that losing the tension means losing that good energy, so they hang onto both. This myth is reinforced by teachers in the performing arts, athletic coaches, speech coaches, sales trainers…the list goes on. They just have never experienced anything else.

If you’re in that group of believers, I hope you’ll consider another possibility. With tapping it’s completely possible to release the constricting impact of the fear while maintaining that energetic charge of positive performing or motivational energy.

How You Do It

You can easily split your tapping up into three parts:

1. Tap away your concern or limiting belief that you’ll lose your edge if you release your fears.
2. Tap away your fears regarding the performance or event or speech or sale.
3. Tap in affirmations to strengthen your positive energy – that performance electricity that other people connect with.

Powerful Combination

Calm + performance energy = powerful magnetism. Once you’ve tapped away tension resulting from fears and anxiety, you’re left with a foundational state of calm. There’s no energy drain for you from the adrenaline of fear charging around your body.

The excitement energy that propels you forward in any type of performance is pure and strong. People just gravitate towards it. And your energy is strengthened because it’s all coming from a positive center.

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What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Resentment and hurt and love are often tangled up together. So when you tap on an issue with these ingredients, you might struggle. Sometimes it’s a challenge to release old pain and anger. Examining the love connection can bring the solution.

The Irony Of It All

When you love someone, their actions and words have a bigger impact on you. So it’s easier to feel hurt or angry with a loved one than with someone you don’t care about. Right? It’s much simpler to just blow off a difficult interaction with a person who doesn’t mean much to you.

But when your heart is connected to someone, hurt and anger can result more often. And they can hang around longer, too. That’s why you’re tapping on them – because you’re still carrying them around. So it’s a little ironic that the people you care about the most can contribute heavily to your list of tapping issues.

Hard To Release

Over and over again, clients show resistance to letting go of old issues with loved ones. It can be a spouse, a kid, a parent, a sibling, a close friend – the kind of love doesn’t matter. Let me be clear – the resistance is not a conscious thing. You can be eager to let go of an old grudge. You can be excited at the prospect of healing some old wound. And STILL have a hard time releasing it.

It’s The Love

Love is the reason for the hidden resistance. A fear of losing that love, or losing your connection to someone can slow EFT down. Some part of you can be afraid that to let the problem go is to let your whole connection go. And you’re not about to do that!

Even if it’s always been a rocky relationship. Even if your brother was always mean to you. Even if a parent was abusive to you. Your heart doesn’t want to lose the core love you have for them, underneath all the negative junk. So your mind-body-energy system can say, “Forget about releasing anything. I don’t want to take a chance. I’m not gonna rock this boat.”

What To Do

It’s so easy to address this when you’re tapping. Just acknowledge it in your setup phrase. For example:

• Even though I’m afraid to let go of this anger because I don’t want to lose my love for Bob, I love and accept myself anyway.
• Even though I’m concerned that if I release this pain, I’ll lose my connection with my mom, and it’s a shaky connection to begin with…..
• Even though it feels risky to let go of this old grudge, I want to trust myself to hold onto the good parts of our relationship.

Secret Tapping Weapon

Just assume there’s some resistance like this lurking in any old issue with a loved one. Make it a habit. Build in a setup phrase like one of the above examples– right from the beginning of your session. It can save you a lot of tapping time and frustration.

Try this yourself and report back to us on how it goes. Just leave a comment below.

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Tapping On Treasures

A treasure hunt — that’s what I call time I spend talking before we begin tapping. A client looked at me like I was really nuts when I called it that. So I thought I’d share my explanation with you below.

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How do you approach your tapping sessions? You probably have some positive outlook to motivate you in the first place — some certainty (or at least hope) that life will improve from tapping. Great! Starting with optimistic expectation is a good place to begin.

How Do You Look At Your Issues?

OK – Your outlook on the issue itself can be a little trickier to keep in the positive realm. Viewpoints I hear from clients include:

• Oh, no — not another one. It’s ridiculous for that to bother me.
• I hate to even go there. I’m an idiot to still be affected by that.
• The details shouldn’t matter. Let’s just get this over with.

Respect Your “Problems”

The tapping concern you bring to your practitioner, or that you tap on yourself, has real value. Yes – really! At one time, it served you well. Recognizing that can actually speed up the tapping process. We’ll get to that in a minute.

But first, look at some examples:

• That fear you’ve brought forward from childhood made perfect sense when you were little. It served as a reminder to keep you safe from some undesired consequence.
• That old resentment protected your heart from feeling the pain of hurt. You didn’t want to feel that hurt, so the anger of the resentment was a good tool at the time.
• That unhelpful old belief was learned from people you loved and looked up to. Holding that belief was a part of belonging and sharing. It made sense to hold it.

Honor These Treasures

Recognizing the former value of feelings and beliefs you want to tap away is helpful for these reasons:

1. You now have one less reason to be critical of yourself. You didn’t just grab your issues for no good reason! They are all responses to something. Your wisest self came up with a good tool to help you best cope with your world.
2. Honoring the concerns as you get ready to tap on them can help you relax. This always decreases subconscious resistance to releasing what you’re tapping on.
3. This more positive perspective raises your energy level, your vibration, or however you want to think of it. And it can actually lower your emotional intensity level.

All of these things can reduce the amount of time it takes to clear your issue. So consider a different point of view when you think of your issues.

Real Gems

So you’ve seen that your issues had value in the past — that’s one way that they’re real gems. Another way is that each is a crystallized focus point for healing. If you know what the issue is, you know that releasing it will create good change. Now that’s a gem!

What do you think? Leave a comment below and let us all know.

Untangle The Knot Of Feeling And Facts

Sometimes tapping issues can be a little tricky to sort out. There are the feelings you have and the plain old truthful facts about it. If your emotions on the topic are strong, the separation between facts and feelings can be hard to find. Or you may think it’s ALL feelings, or even ALL facts.

Maybe you’re thinking, “So what? I’ll just start tapping and it will all sort itself out.” That is one approach, and it may be successful. But it can help to at least be aware of the facts versus feelings components of your issue.

In The Beginning

Tangling up facts and feelings can cause resistance to tapping on the issue in the first place. Let me give you an example. A client (“Ben”) was extremely uncomfortable at networking events. He mumbled, avoided people and felt nauseous. He felt ashamed that he didn’t know how to clearly describe his coaching practice.

Ben saw no point to tapping on this issue because he was sure he just needed to come up with his perfect 30-second intro speech. But the fact was that his dread of networking came up any time he thought of writing his speech. And that fear stifled his ability to think creatively to write a good intro speech. With this tangled knot, there was no way out of his dilemma.

What’s The Answer?

Here’s what we did: We acknowledged that it is a fact that he could benefit from writing a good intro speech. We acknowledged that he had strong feelings of fear and shame when networking.

We tapped away the fears and shame and limiting beliefs and here’s what happened: He went to a networking event the next day and had fun! He still didn’t have a good intro speech, but he wasn’t concerned about it. He was able to connect with people anyway, which is the whole point of networking.

So the fact that he needed a good speech didn’t change. But we untangled it from the feelings. Now Ben has the confidence that with some focused effort, he can craft a good speech. And it’s still a fact that when he does, his networking will probably produce better results.

Don’t Forget To Check

Self-blame about an issue can be easily overlooked. But it can anchor other emotions so that they’re hard to clear. So when you untangle your own knots of facts and feelings, be sure to check for that. In Ben’s case, the self-blame was strong related to his unwritten intro speech. We cleared the other feelings and beliefs more quickly by starting off with eliminating that blame.