Here at One Mind Live we begin each week’s meditation journey with about ten minutes of EFT Tapping, led by co-host Naomi Janzen, our resident EFT Universe Expert Certified practitioner & trainer. The purpose of this is to transition you from whatever you were doing to an energetic space of protected receiving, openness and calm – so you can be ready as soon as the meditation begins. Since our goal is to give you a deeply satisfying experience in a manageable half hour timeframe, we use this Tapping to shorten the time it takes to quiet our minds and go within.
[content_toggle style=”1″ label=”So, what is EFT? Click here…” hide_label=”Hide” font_size=”24″ font_font=”Gill Sans” font_style=”normal” font_spacing=”1″ font_shadow=”none”]EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques. It was developed about 25 years ago by a man named Gary Craig. It’s most easily described as a combination of acupuncture without needles and talk therapy.
When it was first introduced to the world, little was known about how it worked, although it was clear that you didn’t seem to have to “believe in it” for it to be effective for you.
In recent years, advances in fields of medicine such as epigenetics and brain research have finally shed light on why EFT, also known as Tapping, works and works so well.
It comes down to STRESS. Stress, we’ve long known, is uncomfortable and unpleasant but now doctors are telling us it’s a lot worse for us than we realized. Stress has been discovered to cause a range of “bad genes” to express, or activate, in the body. These bad genes account for everything from weight gain to heart disease to insomnia to cancer. It does this by encouraging the body to flood with cortisol and adrenaline.
On the other hand, when our bodies are producing chemicals that feel good, like endorphins and serotonin, a bunch of “good genes” come to the party – like the genes that give us youthfulness (yes there is a way to turn back the biological clock by firing up your body’s production of certain beneficial hormones!) and a strengthened immune system.
Where does Tapping come in? By tapping lightly with your fingers on your body’s energy meridian end points (the ones identified by ancient Chinese medicine 3 centuries ago) you are stimulating your body’s production of the feel good chemicals. And the feel good chemicals counteract the feel bad ones!
When you focus your conscious attention on something stressing you (and any negative emotion is stressful, whether it’s fear, anger, sadness, overwhelm, worry, anxiety or guilt to name a few), while tapping on the points, you are combating that stress by sending out endorphins and serotonin and confusing the body. The body says “wait – I don’t get it. I thought that pain (or anger or craving…) was stressful but here I am flooded with feelgood chemicals!” and then it relaxes. Not so much that it now thinks pain is pleasure. Just enough that it lets go of the stress. Now you can think clearly, with the smart part of your brain because the fight/flight/freeze response in your midbrain is deactivated and no longer making noise. Peace!
Of course, there’s way more detail I could go into but I just wanted to give you enough so you’d know why we start each meditation with a short Tapping session. Drop by my page and leave a comment if you want me to give you specific info. Otherwise, I’ll just keep adding to this page, and mine, as we go along.
Looking forward to Tapping with you!
Highest and best
Naomi
[/content_toggle] [content_toggle style=”1″ label=”Why does Tapping focus on the negative??…” hide_label=”Hide” font_size=”24″ font_font=”Gill Sans” font_style=”normal” font_spacing=”1″ font_shadow=”none”]Oh my goodness! SO GLAD you are reading this so I can explain. For people new to EFT, it may seem VERY STRANGE that we repeat all these NEGATIVE-SOUNDING phrases. I mean, aren’t we supposed to be focusing on the positive when we do affirmations?
Affirmations? YES. Tapping…well. It’s a little more complicated than that. Tapping is about focusing our conscious attention on the PROBLEM while tapping to send positive brain responses to that problem. The tapping, itself, is the positive part because it causes our bodies to produce feel-good chemicals like serotonin and endorphins. So, we ARE being positive – just not verbally. With our words we focus on the negative: The stuff we want to DISSOLVE and CLEAR (and often the stuff we’ve been shoving down into our bodies, trying to distance ourselves from it, to the detriment of our health and psychological wellbeing). So, with Tapping, we’re saying aloud Here’s what I want to work on” while sending the positive “vibes” straight at it with the physical act of tapping our acupoints.
Without going into the neuropsychology of it, it’s basically using the positive (tapping) to cancel out the negative (what we say aloud).
Once we have neutralized the negative enough, we can start adding in positive affirmations – and they’ll be accepted by our unconscious minds because there won’t be all this negative “gunk” in there causing us to REJECT the positive.
Have you ever tried saying an affirmation, for example “Every cell in my body is alive with health, vitality and youth”…only to hear the faint echo from deep within you of “Yeah RIGHT. Not if you factor in that wart and the cold I think is coming on and this extra weight I’m carting around!”.
You know what? You end up AFFIRMING that NEGATIVE unconscious message!!No wonder affirmations can fail to produce the results we want sometimes.
Think of it like a glass of muddy water. Going straight to positive affirmations is like trying to clear up that water by adding clear water. Hmmm. Tapping, on the other hand, is like EMPTYING out the muddy water – and THEN pouring in the clear water.
So, I hope that helps you understand the role of the negative statements. It’s really a very positive thing!
But if you have more questions, bring them on! Please comment below or email me and I will be more than happy to explain
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Now watch this short video which shows you how to do it, so that you can follow along with us as we tap and get the benefits of this amazingly useful technique…
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The Tapping Points
