All Entries Tagged With: "meridian tapping"

Tapping For Trust Problems

Do you have a hard time trusting other people? Do you think being distrustful means you’re wise? I worked with a small business owner the other day who approaches his world in that way.

Here’s the problem with that outlook: Being distrustful makes YOU harder to trust. And that’s really tough on your business. Folks do business with people they trust, right? So where does that leave you?

Take A Look At Trust

If you’re not trusting other people, you’re on guard – protective and defended against possible problems. So a part of you is closed off (that part that you’re protecting). This affects your body language, your facial expressions, what you say, and your whole vibe.

People pick up on that whether you think they do or not — even if only on a subconscious level. They sense that you’re hiding something (which is really that closed-off part). And they don’t know what that something is. This creates more uncertainty – more of their inner red flags go up.

Now YOU are not to be trusted! Isn’t that ironic? Then you pick up that distrusting vibe from them and the reactions just bounce back and forth, helping nobody!

Using EFT To Help

Tapping to shift your trust level begins with you. It’s not really about other people at all. It’s about your perspective. And sometimes about habit, too. If you’ve been distrustful for a long time, that can be a familiar place to go when you feel uncertain.

So here are some ways that tapping can improve the whole trust thing:

1. Use EFT to clear the emotional charge on major past events that fostered distrust – especially the EARLY ones.

2. Examine your beliefs about who can be trusted and who can’t. You may have whole groups of people (certain professions, ethnicities, a whole gender, age groups) that you distrust. Use EFT to unhook the influence of these old beliefs that no longer serve you.

3. Tap on the habit of not trusting people. And if you learned that habit from a parent, include letting go of that learning in your EFT. Just reassure your inner self that you’re not letting go of your connection to your parent so you don’t fire up resistance.

4. Tap to gain confidence in your own choices and judgment – in other words, trusting yourself. This is a BIGGIE! Often the main problem is that you don’t trust yourself and your interactions with the world. Use EFT on a regular basis to tap in affirmations to help you with this. Here are some examples:

• My intuition is strong and clear. I listen and respond quickly.
• I make excellent choices and educated decisions.
• I honor my experience and use it in constructive ways.
• I’m grateful for my confidence and self-assurance.
• My judgment is sound. I appreciate my clear thinking.
• I use my inner resources to know my best course of action.
• I’m grateful for my wisdom.
• I look forward to new opportunities with new people.
• The Universe is conspiring in my favor!

Notice Your New Outlook

As you shift towards trusting people, you’ll be amazed at how people are drawn to you. Your interactions will be very different. It’s really fun to notice all the little changes. And in your business, it’s great to see new opportunities open up as people trust YOU more.

If experienced outside help with your trust issues is what you need, contact me to set up your complimentary 15-minute consultation. We’ll discuss the best way to get you moving!

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Tapping When You Don’t Remember

Sometimes clients say, “I just know something happened that’s connected to this current issue, but I can’t remember what it was.” Has that ever happened to you? I know it can be frustrating. But you can still use EFT to help yourself — whether you remember or not.

Why Don’t You Remember?

You can really drive yourself nuts with this question. The best answer is, “For some very good reason.” Just let go of scolding yourself or hammering at yourself to remember. That doesn’t help. Apparently,  some part of you thinks it’s best to keep the “something” a mystery for now. So honor that part of yourself and move on.

Some possibilities for the reason you don’t remember are:

• It was so painful when it happened that you suppressed it right away, and still can’t access the memory now. That’s OK – you don’t have to!
• It was not a single incident, so no wonder you can’t remember it. It may have been a series of small events that added up to a big impact. Good thing you decided to stop looking for it…could have been a long wait.
• Some part of you knows it would overwhelm you to bring the event to the forefront of your mind right now. So it is protecting you and keeping that connection out of your consciousness.

The First Step

Trust your intuition. Ask yourself if not remembering is a red flag for you. Just get quiet, go inside and check to see if proceeding with EFT on your own is the best thing to do for yourself. You can meditate on it, pray about it or do some journaling. Then trust your answer. If working with a practitioner feels like the better choice, do that for yourself. Sometimes working alone on an issue is not the wisest choice.

Clearing Resistance

If you DO decide to tap on your own, you need to let go of frustration, self-blame or impatience about not remembering. Those forms of anger can really slow down your tapping efforts. It’s as if that anger acts as an anchor to hold the issue right where it’s been all these years. EFT will be slow going.

So just let it go if you can. Or if you need to tap away that aggravation, take the time to do that now.

Moving Ahead With EFT

First, assess your emotional intensity on a scale of 1 to 10. Write that number down.

To clear the un-remembered issue, start with a setup that goes something like this:

• Even though something bad happened when I was six — I can just feel it — I love and accept myself anyway.
• Even though I don’t know what happened but it takes my breath away to remember that time, I deeply love myself and I respect my feelings.
• Even though I can’t remember anything specific but life was different after that summer, I still appreciate and accept myself.
• Even though this mystery incident has my stomach in knots, and I feel crazy because I can’t remember it, I love and accept myself anyway.

Move On To Tapping

Tap a few rounds on the “mystery event” or the “unknown cause,” or even “whatever happened in 1982.”  Then tap a few rounds on how it makes you feel — emotionally or physically or both.

Stop every few rounds to reassess your intensity. Then stay with it,  and tap the issue down to zero.

You May Be Surprised

At some point during your tapping, you may suddenly remember the incident. This can happen after the emotional intensity has decreased. It’s as if your subconscious says, “It’s not so ugly now, so I’ll show you what’s up.”  Then you’ll have more specifics that you can use EFT on.

Or you may never remember, but get massive relief anyway. For one client, the troubling incident never revealed itself. But she could suddenly remember all the GOOD things that happened during that school year. Before we tapped, she couldn’t remember fifth grade at all.

Here’s wishing you the best on clearing out those foggy incidents. Let us know how this technique works for you by posting a comment below.

And if you’d like some experienced help with your EFT, contact me at 520-327-1695 and we’ll discuss clearing those issues together.

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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?

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.

Bottom Line – Tap Down To Zero

Have you ever heard the phrase “the good is the enemy of the best”? It means that by settling for something good, you could be denying yourself something grand – the best! With tapping, it can be easy to let this happen. But tapping down to zero guarantees you the best – best possible results from tapping on your particular issue.

Isn’t Measuring A Waste of Time?

Some people think that measuring your intensity level or “S.U.D.S.” level is a waste of time. Or they think it’s too much trouble to try to get a number. So they don’t bother. They believe that they can “just tell” when the issue is gone. So they tap until they feel good, and then they stop.

Reasons To Measure

Taking the time to assess emotional intensity can really pay off. Here’s why:

1. It’s a guideline that tells you if you’re releasing the issue or not, and how quickly. If it’s not moving or moving slowly, you can investigate where the snag is.
2. It’s encouragement that you’re getting somewhere – especially important with painful issues.
3. A sudden increase can alert you that a related issue has popped up.
4. And most important – it can signal that you’re really finished with the issue.

Why Is Zero Important?

In my experience, if the intensity level doesn’t get down to zero, the issue is not completely gone. Furthermore, the intensity level can creep back up – not to its previous level, but it can still climb again. On the other hand, if that number DOES get to zero, that issue does not return. It’s done. Through! Personally, I vote for that result.

If I ask a client what her number is and she says, “I think it’s a zero,” we tap another round or do the 9-gamut procedure. If it’s really at a zero, they’ll be very quickly certain it’s a zero – none of the “I think” stuff even enters into it.

Do Yourself A Favor

So go ahead and measure your intensity of feeling or strength of belief. Write the number down. Then tap it down – all the way to zero. Be sure next to test yourself. If anything shows up, tap THAT down to zero. Then celebrate your freedom from that issue!

Tapping Overwhelm – No More Issues, Please!

Do you ever feel like you’ve opened a Pandora’s box by starting to tap on your issues? Do you get discouraged when a new issue pops up? Here you were – excited to get rid of some old inner junk, only to uncover another layer or a related problem. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming – like this is going to go on forever. Like, what’s the point of clearing one thing if it’s just going to stir up something new?

Not Really New

In reality, your challenge isn’t new. Maybe it hasn’t been in the forefront of your consciousness for awhile, but it’s not new. It’s just that its priority in your psyche and energy system has shifted so now it has come to your attention.

The healing and clearing from tapping is a marvelous phenomenon. And sometimes that clearing reveals some issue that’s been hidden from view – maybe not forever, but for awhile anyway.

There were excellent reasons for that “new” issue to remain out of sight up til now. Here are some possibilities:

• Maybe you didn’t have the inner strength to face it before.
• Maybe you didn’t have the certainty that you could do anything about it. But now that you’ve had some tapping success, you know that healing is possible.
• Maybe it’s too big to deal with on your own and until now you hadn’t found anyone to help you with it.

You can be sure of this: Your highest, wisest self takes really good care of you at all times. What’s the point of allowing an issue to surface if you aren’t able to do something about it? It makes sense that the issue would stay out of view, doesn’t it? So honor your self-protective skills for taking good care of your heart and spirit by revealing things to you in a sensible, timely way.

It’s Good News

Your “new” issue shows up now because it’s time for it to be healed. That’s GOOD news. It’s been my experience that problems reveal themselves at the perfect time on your healing path:

• Time when you’ve already released other issues that could cause resistance to releasing this one.
• Time when you’ve built a solid enough foundation to trust the process of tapping – you KNOW it works for you.
• Time when you have inner strength enough to be the new person you’ll be without that problem.

By the time an issue shows up, it’s ready to go! It is SO ready to be released. Often these issues are eliminated really quickly once you start tapping on them. I hope you’ll start seeing new issues in a different and hopeful light. Maybe you could even welcome them – imagine the possibilities on the other side of letting them go!

And let us all know how it goes by leaving a comment here.

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.

Tapping On Specifics

Being specific is a cardinal rule of effective tapping. If you’ve studied EFT, you’ve sure heard that before. So what exactly does that mean?

Choose Your Issue

The first place where it’s important to be specific is in choosing your issue to tap on. For instance, “worthiness” is a very broad topic. Tapping on that probably won’t change it much. You need to narrow it down.

Listen To The Voices

An easy place to start is to listen to your self talk about it. Chances are that the old voices in your head aren’t using the term “worthiness.” What phrases do you hear? OK – I know they’re not too pleasant, which is why some people don’t want to go there. They feel safer with more generic terms or therapy terms. Or maybe with spiritual phrases or metaphysical terms.

But those likely aren’t YOUR terms. That’s not the language your subconscious has linked to the unwanted feelings you’re seeking to change with EFT. In my experience, tapping goes much more quickly when you use your own words and phrases. So take a listen. What’s the old tape that’s playing?

No Need To Suffer

While you’re preparing to tap and investigating the details of your issue, you don’t have to hurt. In fact, you can get more useful details by keeping a little distance. Having the crummy feelings while trying to clarify your issue can create resistance to seeing what’s going on.

So just back off! Pretend you’re a reporter asking yourself questions. Or close your eyes and picture yourself literally stepping back a few steps from the issue — still close enough to see things clearly, but stepping out of the middle of it.

How Specific Language Helps

There are a couple of ways getting to your own words can help:

1. The way you conceptualize the issue gets clear. Maybe the worthiness-related words you hear in your head are “You can’t do anything right. You’ll never amount to anything.” That’s not exactly the same issue as someone else who hears, “Be grateful for what you’ve got. You’re never satisfied, are you?” Can you see how those are distinctly different? So the way you’ll tap on them will be different.
2. The second way your own words can help is that they can be roadsigns for your tapping map. They can point you to the origins of the limiting beliefs and crummy feelings associated with low self-worth. Ask yourself, “Where did I hear those words?” The answer will give you some real specifics to tap on. Now you can pinpoint a person and/or incidents connected to those words. Now you’ve got an effectively tappable issue!

Being specific in these ways can reduce your time, energy and frustration when you tap. Give them a try and let us know how it goes by posting a comment.