Thursday, October 29, 2009

Feeling heard

I have long believed that not feeling heard is traumatic. It renders you hungry for more. More love, more approval, more acceptance. But it's never enough.

We feel heard when we or someone else is fully present. It is the greatest gift we can give to our self and to others. We know or can sense when someone is not listening. What we're really feeling is that they are not present with us. We make all sorts of interpretations as a result; we're not important, we don't matter, we're not worthy of their attention and therefore, their love and acceptance.

Do you hear you? Are you present to you? Plug your self in to the present by meditating and hearing what you have to say.

Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit ~ Jeremy Taylor

Monday, October 26, 2009

The Discovery Statement of EFT

By revolution we become more ourselves, not less ~ George Orwell

This discovery statement is from EFT founder Gary Craig. However, I don't believe there is such a thing as a negative emotion, but certain emotions can feel difficult or frightening for various reasons. I really like Karla Mc Laren's work on emotions, read her post on the myth of negative emotions.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Watch your language


Consider describing your life with different language. Substitute your description of a 'problem' into one that makes you feel powerful, a description that gives you a choice about what path to take. The words we use will usually reflect our thoughts. What do the words you use say about your thinking? Are they helpful? Are they helping? Our perception of something will determine our entire approach to it. Seeing more than one possibility gives you back your power. Choosing different words, just like using a thesaurus instead of repeating ourselves, helps you see things differently. If you consider an issue to be too big, consider the possibility that it has to 'scream' at you because you're not listening. If we always do the same thing we'll always get the same results. We have to do different to have different.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Are you ready for release?

A guided meditation for releasing uncomfortable emotions and clearing our perception to see more possibilities in our current situation.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Feeling out of control

Control is never achieved when sought after directly. It is the surprising outcome of letting go ~ James Arthur Ray


Many people react to not feeling in control with fear. Fear is often defined as false expectations appearing real. How does fear show up in your life? A knot in your stomach, anxiety, or panic attacks? The mind will resist letting go or surrendering as it does not feel in control. When you recognise this, it will lessen your fear and resistance to accepting what is.

As Eckhart Tolle writes in The Power of Now :

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honour and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering----and free of the egoic mind.

Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.

In energetic terms, the more you resist what is, the more intensely you will experience and feel an energetic disturbance. Emotionally this can manifest as fear, terror, guilt or anger and it may also manifest physically and mentally. You can correct this energetic short circuit with EFT so your energy will flow as it is supposed to. Accepting what is helps keep your energy moving. And paradoxically, acceptance is needed for change to occur. Flow and movement are the opposite to resistance.

As your faith is strengthened you will find that there is no longer the need to have a sense of control, that things will flow as they will, and that you will flow with them, to your great delight and benefit ~ Emmanuel Teney

Diagram of tapping points

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Monday, October 12, 2009

Music, Smell and EFT

We sometimes forget how evocative music and smells can be at recalling long forgotten memories. What smells of home? Freshly baked bread? Or something else? What smells do you remember from school? These two senses can really help you to tune in to your feelings which makes EFT so much more effective at correcting any energetic disturbances. Have you ever caught a whiff of something that immediately transported you back to when you were 5 years of age?

Listening to music can be helpful when you find it difficult to tune in to how you feel. Smells or odours can be more difficult to control! They can pop up when you least expect them and take you by surprise. Both smells and sounds can be aspects or features of an issue you may be having difficulty clearing. Remember, anything at all can be an aspect or feature of an event. The more you do EFT the more you will experience this for your self. If so, ask yourself what smells or sounds you can remember about a particular event. If something comes up, tap on it, if you find your self overwhelmed or even taken aback (this often happens when we remember or smell a smell) keep tapping until the intensity subsides. You don't need to say anything as you're already tuned in. EFT shortcut diagram and procedure

Friday, October 09, 2009

Letting go

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning ~ Lao Tzu

If you're feeling overwhelmed, full, stuck, exhausted or ready to burst, it is time to consider letting go. If even considering this elicits an emotional charge, you know you have definitely hit on something. What or who do you find difficult or even impossible to consider letting go of? Life is a process of ingesting, assimilating and eliminating. We often get stuck, literally and metaphorically, on the last two. We find events or people hard to digest. We often feel very justified in hanging and holding on to something, particularly if the event was traumatic. In fact we could say they are directly proportional! What we don't eliminate or let go of, accumulates, accumulates and accumulates. We start to feel under the weather, heavy, lethargic ... the full barrel effect. Little things start to REALLY bother us and we can't cope. And the pile just keeps on growing. 

Choose one thing a day to let go of. Start small, be gentle and kind to yourself. Observe how much lighter you start to feel with each passing day. Remember if it gets difficult you are doing this for you. This is a gift you are giving to your self.

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward ~ Author Unknown


Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Feeling trapped, stuck and overwhelmed

Emotions are energy. And energy follows the laws of nature. Energy likes and needs to move. For various reasons energy can become trapped, frozen or stuck. Very often we experience this trapped energy as severe anxiety, depression and complete overwhelm. We need to find a way to let some of that 'steam' out and tapping can help us do that. If we don't feel safe letting something go, or letting that energy move, the energy will become more dense over time and this is what very often leads to feelings of complete overwhelm. Our emotions are the feedback from our energy system, so if energy is very dense, it feels very very uncomfortable and how our energy system lets us know that it needs help in releasing that energy, is by how we feel. When we don't fully feel or allow the experience to move in, through and out of our system, we are overriding our natural release mechanisms and as a result we cannot discharge energy from our nervous system. This usually builds up over time until we feel bad enough to do something about it.

Tapping on the thymus and collar bone area will almost immediately return some sense of calm in the moment. When you feel calmer you can then perform EFT on the specific reasons behind the anxiety and depression.

A few set up statements that you could use to help you when you feel stuck or overwhelmed are:

Even though this energy is not moving and that is making me feel ... I acknowledge that it is stuck


Even though some part of me might not want this energy to move for whatever reason, I acknowledge that possibility


Even though it's just not safe to let this energy of anger (fear, guilt, disloyalty, sadness, grief, shame) to move through my system and feel it, I absolutely have to resist it, I acknowledge my fear


Even though I'm really afraid of feeling ... which is keeping it stuck, trapped and frozen, I accept myself, I'm doing the best I can  EFT Short cut diagram and procedure

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Movement

Life is movement. Everything is in the act or process of moving and changing all the time. When we resist moving, we stagnate. When we resist our emotions, which are energy in motion or energy in movement, we hinder those energies from following their natural course, or when we allow a thought not in alignment with our true nature.


Allowing ourselves to feel our emotions allows the energy to flow freely. We don't allow ourselves to feel for various reasons, it is not our natural state but a conditioned and learned state. Sometimes it's not safe to feel or express how we feel or it's not acceptable to feel a certain way. It's 'bad' to feel angry, envious and all the other emotions and feelings on the 'bad' list. And we all have a 'bad' list. What do we do? When these energies arise, we deny them, we repress them with all our might because we are ashamed or feel guilty for feeling that way. Tap and breathe the next time uncomfortable feelings and emotions arise. Allow them to flow and move through you and dissolve ... naturally.

Diagram of tapping points