Hello everyone
I’ve been having some major technical difficulties that have been preventing me from updating the Self Healing Portal, so this month’s newsletter is just on the blog, and will be added to the website in the future if I can resolve the problems. There are therefore no hotlinks from the titles of the articles or between the articles, so you will need to scroll down to read them. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.
The process of emotional freedom
This article was originally published on EFTfree.net and is included here for those who haven’t yet subscribed to the excellent article feed at EFTfree.net. The article details an example from our own life that powerfully shows the process of using a tool such as EFT to gain emotional freedom.
It’s NOT about the story!
This article details a recent AHA that I had that came as a real surprise to me, after using EFT effectively for so long. If you are stuck in any issues that just aren’t clearing, this may be of real use to you.
PTSD – Could it be affecting you?
This is a look at PTSD and how it can go unnoticed and still have a huge influence on someone’s life.
Book Review: The One Thing Holding You Back by Raphael Cushnir
This is a brief review of a book I’ve recently read that I think would be of use to anyone wanting to understand more about emotions and the healing journey.
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The process of emotional freedom
We were excited to move onto our new property, where we plan to grow the bulk of our own food and restore some areas to native forest, two months ago. Just before we found and bought the property I had an accident that resulted in damage to a disc in my back and to my left shoulder. The accident has meant that in the last two months I have not been able to garden at all on our new property, instead having to ask my partner and our guests (we belong to an organic hosting scheme and have guests from overseas who work and learn with us in the garden) to implement all of my plans for the garden. In addition, the accident has meant I can’t do yoga and a whole bunch of other things I love to do. Yesterday morning this situation resulted in a great example of how tools like EFT can lead us to emotional freedom in our daily lives.
We had some new guests through the organic scheme and I had designed a new kitchen garden, and my partner and our guests were keen to implement it. We started with laying it out and as my partner and I discussed how to do that, I felt my frustration building. My partner made a couple of comments to me which I accused him of being defensive and blaming and I stormed into the house saying that I wasn’t adding any value and he didn’t want my input anyway so they would be better off doing it all without me!
I headed for my bedroom and started tapping:
• Even though he gets defensive whenever I suggest another way, and that makes me so angry, I deeply and completely love and accept myself
• Even though he doesn’t want me to be involved, he always thinks he knows best…
• Even though I’m fed up with him not listening to me…
A couple of rounds of tapping led to the inevitable shift from focusing on it being “all his fault” to what I was actually feeling. Beneath what was presenting was an incredibly strong feeling of frustration:
• ET I’m so frustrated that I couldn’t just take the sticks and string and show them what I wanted to do, instead I had to try to explain everything in the limited container of words which is all I can use these days since I can’t bend, and it’s just sooooo frustrating…
• ET it’s driving me nuts being in the garden and not being able to do anything but stand and watch…
• ET I feel so useless because I can’t do a single thing in the garden…
A few rounds of tapping through the feelings of frustration, and the frustration gave way to sobs and an enormous pool of grief. I cried and cried and tapped on the feelings of grief, not being able to be the physical part of the garden we are creating, not being able to be a part of the team, all the things I can’t do at the moment because of the physical limitations I have while not being able to bend to allow the disc to heal etc.
Half an hour after my little tantrum, I was back in the garden. Having accepted and truly acknowledged the deep well of grief (aided by my partner and our guests also compassionately witnessing and accepting my deep emotions), I was able to realise that I am a part of the team. I had done the whole design for the garden and was key in coming up with the whole concept and communicating what we want to achieve to our guests. I spent the rest of the day enjoying simply being in the garden with the others as they turned my plans on paper into a reality on the ground. Nothing had changed on the outer – I still couldn’t bend over or do anything to create the garden physically, but I had accepted my role in it and could enjoy the others creating it. That’s emotional freedom!
I am so very thankful EFT, which allows me to turn towards my emotions, instead of pushing them down without even realising that I’m doing it. Here’s to us all finding our way towards true emotional freedom.
It’s NOT about the story!
I’ve been doing EFT since early 2007, and it’s completely changed my life. I’ve healed from a chronic long-term illness and found that EFT has given me freedom in other areas of my life as I become more relaxed and able to let go of things. However there are some areas of my life where I am still not finding the freedom I want to, so I continue to work with different issues and the aspects that periodically arise. In doing so, I recently realised something that now seems so obvious, I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before! As it was a major AHA moment for me, I thought I’d share it in case it’s of help to anyone else.
One of the great ways to tune into an issue with EFT is the Tell the Story Technique. This is Gary Craig’s technique where you start to tell a story about what happened, and as soon as you get any emotional intensity, you stop telling the story and start tapping. The telling of the story is then used to test along the way, and you keep going until you can tell the whole story without any emotional intensity. With a technique called the Tell the Story Technique being a core technique of EFT, it can be easy to fall into the trap I did of thinking that the story has more importance than it does. Working with a practitioner recently, I realised that her real skill was in keeping me out of the story and in the emotions and physical sensations, and it struck me that many times in the past I’ve unwittingly been wallowing in the story to the detriment of tuning into the emotions. I realised that the story is used simply to help us to tune into the emotions and the physical sensations. This may seem a subtle difference at first glance, but to me it’s been a quantum leap.
Gary Craig often says that EFT is simply about tuning into the problem while tapping. Looking back I’ve realised that over and over I’ve fallen into the trap of getting so far into the story of what happened, that I am no longer tuned into the issue. This came as a real surprise to me, I assumed that if I was telling the story I was tuned into the issue, but I can now see that instead I was retreating from the intensity of the emotions into the safer-feeling world of thought as a way of protecting myself. So while I was getting heavily into the story, I actually wasn’t tuned into the emotions and physical sensations accompanying them at all. I can now see that the concepts I learnt from Raphael Cushnir’s excellent book The One Thing Holding You Back has helped me to see this in myself. Prior to reading Raphael’s book, I didn’t realise that thought was such a seductive productive mechanism (if you are interested in finding out more about this, see the review of this book below.)
So if there is some area in your life where you don’t have the emotional freedom you desire, consider looking at how you are working with this issue and whether you are perhaps retreating into the world of thought every time you get near tuning into the issue. If you are unable to do this yourself, you might find that like me, you would benefit from working with a practitioner skilled at assisting with this. I have discovered that in my own life my tendency to retreat into thought is very much a protective mechanism as a result of early trauma, if you suspect this might be the case for you, you might want to read the article about PTSD below.
PTSD – Could it be affecting you?
PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome – is more commonly thought of in cases where someone has experienced a traumatic event that continues to haunt them long after, with nightmares or flashbacks. However there can be a far more subtle form of PTSD that often goes unnoticed and that makes tuning into our issues to heal them quite difficult.
I had always thought of PTSD as something that war veterans or people who had been raped experienced and had never considered that it could be relevant for me. However when I watched Gary Craig’s excellent 20 minute video on working with EFT with war veterans, I realised that I displayed quite a few of the symptoms that they were talking about on the video. I have an extremely heightened startle response, I can’t concentrate to read or write if there is a conversation going on in the room, I can’t sleep if there is any noise, if we go out to eat I’m aware of all the conversations going on around me… Until I watched that video, I’d always just considered these things to be a part of who I was. I now realise that we only have these symptoms if something has happened in our life that was too big for us to cope with at the time, so a part of us decides to protect us by staying vigilant to danger all the time. This form of PTSD can be quite insidious, because we can consider ourselves to just be weak or pathetic leading to us being very hard on ourselves, instead of approaching these symptoms with the compassion that they need in order to heal.
PTSD is a complex area and often people need some assistance to work their way through it. There are some individuals, usually those who know what caused their symptoms, who are able to work consistently with EFT to clear all the emotions and beliefs and heal without the support of someone else. In other cases, whether the person knows what caused the PTSD or not, some assistance from a trained practitioner is essential to unravel their reactions and protective mechanisms. For many it’s crucial to find someone with whom they feel safe, who can help them to heal whether or not they ever discover the story behind their symptoms.
While speaking with an experienced EFT practitioner recently, I realised that it is possible to heal without ever knowing the story of what happened. While our conscious mind often wants to know the story, I’ve realised that can get in the road of the healing we need to do (for more on this see It’s NOT about the Story! above) All sorts of things that can happen to us very early in our life, even while in utero, that we may never remember, but on a subconscious level still affect us. The key is to tune into the emotions and accompanying physical sensations, and when we do this magic happens and we find ourselves releasing all sorts of stuck emotions that we’ve been holding in our bodies for years and years.
If you consistently find yourself stuck with clearing issues, there may be something in your past that part of you is protecting you from being aware of on a conscious level, but that is still exerting a lot of influence on your thoughts and your behaviours. If this is the case for you, consider finding a practitioner experienced with dealing with PTSD and ask them to support you on your healing journey. If you think you should be able to resolve it all yourself, stop and consider for a moment what you would do if you became aware of a traumatised child who was being ever so brave but was still haunted by what had happened to him or her. Would you expect them to sort it out themselves? I would imagine that in most cases people would be unlikely to expect that, so remember that there may be a traumatised child inside you who needs some help. Sometimes someone from inside the family can help, but often it requires some support from someone more objective who can hold the child’s hand and support them through the aftermath of the ordeal. This is where the help of an experienced practitioner can be invaluable.
If you are working with a practitioner, here are a couple of things to ask yourself to help determine whether you are working with the best practitioner for you:
• Do you feel safe working with this practitioner? Are you able to share whatever you are feeling and what is coming up for you?
• Are you moving beyond the story, to the emotions and their accompanying physical sensations, or are you staying mired in the story?
If the answer to either of these questions is no, it might be worth exploring working with someone else, as it’s crucial to find the right practitioner for you.
We need not continue to be affected by the traumatic things that happened to us early in our lives. With the wonderful methods that we have available to us now, we are able to let go of all the stuck emotions that have been stored in our body for so long, and move to emotional freedom. As we learn to get past the story, and instead tune into the emotions and their accompanying physical sensations in our body, we are able to move on from whatever it was that happened, whether we are consciously aware of the story or not.
Book Review: The One Thing Holding You Back by Raphael Cushnir
This little book is absolutely packed with gems of information and understanding that are so important on our healing journey. So many of the concepts I’ve been introduced to over the years are included in this book - it gives such a clear understanding of the purpose of emotions, the importance of us allowing them to do their thing, and the traps we can fall into along the way. Raphael has some great analogies (like surfing the wave of our emotions) that really help to explain the process, and he uses lots of examples from his own and his clients’ lives to demonstrate these concepts in action.
One of the key AHAs I had while reading this book was that retreating into thought is one of our protective mechanisms. I had never before seen how quickly I shifted into thought when I was feeling uncomfortable, instead of simply staying with the emotions that were arising. Reading The One Thing Holding You Back has really helped me to spot in real time when I retreat into thought instead of allowing myself to stay tuned into the emotions that need to flow in order for me to heal and return to balance.
The only caution I would offer with this book is that the process is very difficult to do if you are dissociated or have PTSD symptoms, and it is important to realise that you may need to work to heal what is causing the need to dissociate from your feelings first, before you are able to use this process. However even if this is the case, the understandings that come from reading this book are still invaluable.
Very best wishes to everyone,
Jo
www.selfheal4me.com
